anybody ever shoot a 44.40 in a 45 long colt revolver by mistake?

[Chemoman]

i admit i did by mistake. i though now whats wrong with my gun now? cant hit anything with it. then i saw what i had done. feel dumb about it.

[Cast_outlaw]

Haven’t done it but would like to here what happened ad see some pictures as today’s mantra goes “pictures or it didn’t happen”

[smkummer]

Not yet. But I did take both a colt saa in 45 colt and 44 special to the range one day. Then I notice funny sounding ammo and stopped shooting only to eject swelled 44 special cases from my 45 colt. No damage and I even resized the 44 special cases back down. Now I’ll mix 38/357 with either 44 or 45. But I don’t take 44 and 45 together. Often my shooting range time includes a few friends and fellow range members and much shooting.

[DougGuy]

One of our members here shoots a 44 caliber SBH with a 45 Colt cylinder, says it shoots exceptionally well..

[smkummer]

I have often thought this may have happened in the frontier days. I suppose at very close range, that 44 bullet would still be lethal.

[Walks]

None of my .45Colt guns will accept a .44-40 cartridge.
Wider case head stops before rim contacts the edge of the chamber recess.

[Eddie Southgate]

I did the .44 special in the .45 Colt once to see how it worked . Cases swelled up and the bullets hit the ground about 20 feet in front of the target set at 25 yards .

[Texas by God]

An old friend of mine was active in CAS and he showed me a handful of brass picked up after a match. Yep, 44-40's blown out to .45 LC. He said that he had seen it a couple of times. I've fired CCI .44 Special/magnum shot loads in my break open 44-40 - and then throw the guppied aluminum Berdan primed hulls away.....

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[Lloyd Smale]

had some idiot i actually met on here that was from Sweden. He came all the way here to pick up a 500 max he had John Linebaugh built for him. Had him at the range a couple days before it came and i had many guns with me. Couple 500s and a 475 that he shot one shot each out of and put down and walked away. Shook my head right there and knew he bought that max just to impress everyone back home. I was shooting my 500 and he was on a bench a few yards away blazing away with my 4 5/8s super. I noticed he wasnt even hitting the 25 yard target and notched it up to the fact he was flinching so bad. I just chuckled and kept shooting. He came over a few minutes later and said theres something wrong with your gun. He showed me a hand full of brass that were all split the whole lenght. i looked and he had grabbed a box of 41 mag ammo and was shooting it in my 44. He had shot probably 30 rounds by then and waited that long to tell me about it. Thats when i lost patients with him and packed up and drove him back to his motel. I didnt answer the phone till the day his gun showed up and called him and told him it would be on the porch. pick it up and be gone. He was kind of a sickly pale weak guy. Sure not the type that would even buy a 44 mag let alone a 500max. He told me sweden had free medical and he got some medical monthly payment from the goverment but would never say what was wrong. My buddy hit it on the head when he met him. He said the sob probably had aids. Id about bet my life he was right. Never heard from him again and he disappeared from this fourm when he went home. Dont know if he was so embarrassed or he died.

[nicholst55]

That's why I only put one box of ammo, in one caliber (the correct one), on the bench at once. We had one of our Gunners force a round of 7.62X54R into a Winchester M70 in .308 once, at Yuma Proving Ground. He couldn't get the bolt closed, of course, but he certainly tried.

[Froogal]

After one CAS event, I ended up with a couple of 44-40 shells in the bag, mixed in with all of my .45 Colts. Didn't even know it until I tried to resize and deprime, and those 44-40 shells would not fit in the shell holder. Kind of had me doing a little head scratching for awhile.

[15meter]

Watched a buddy shoot a couple of 6.5x54's out of a 275 Rigby--a real Rigby rifle, not a lowly 7x57 like the rest of us shoot.

He's a bit of a Rigby nut.....

Well, they sounded a bit on the puny side but the boolits hit the dinger, figured out the puny sound when we picked up blown out and split brass.

We've paid more attention since then to what ammo is on the bench with which gun.

[Wayne Dobbs]

I've seen 9mm shot from .40 S&W pistols during police training/qual sessions. As soon as you hear it, you know what happened. It's a really flat report. I noted that it usually happened in low light quals and that the shooter's mags had been loaded by a fellow officer.

Also read that some reconstruction work on the Custer battlefields (there were several that day) indicated that the Indians were putting any cartridge they could get to close and fire in their guns. Apparently there were lots of misformed cases found on the sites that showed they did that.

[nelsonted1]

I found 243 brass fired out of .308 scattered around a shooting bench one day. I wondered if he tried to adjust his scope

[John Boy]

No but one dumb time I found out that 25-20’s don’t group when shot in a 32-20 rifle

[JoeJames]

My uncle said that in WW2 in Europe some claimed you could shoot 30-06 rounds in an 8mm Mauser. He did not say whether he had tried it or not. I reckon there might be a headspace problem there, and accuracy might be wanting.

[Silver Jack Hammer]

I’ve accidentally fired .44 Special in a .45 Colt.

One time I showed up at a cowboy match after a 3 hour drive only to find I had my .44-40 cylinder in my SAA instead of the .44 Special cylinder.

[Green Frog]

Just as a FYI, ammo manufacturers used to make “Five-in-One” blanks that could be fired in rifles or revolvers chambered in 38-40 and 44-40 rifles as well as those calibers of revolvers and the 45 Colt too. Very handy in the heyday of cheaply made Westerns!

Froggie

[one-eyed fat man]

Just as a FYI, ammo manufacturers used to make “Five-in-One” blanks that could be fired in rifles or revolvers chambered in 38-40 and 44-40 rifles as well as those calibers of revolvers and the 45 Colt too. Very handy in the heyday of cheaply made Westerns!

Froggie

[smkummer]

Yep, the 5-1 blanks show that the rim and base of those 3 cartridges are very close. While those cases were not intended to be reloaded, I do. If fired in a 44-40 or 45 colt, the case neck will expand enough so it won’t fit back into a 38-40 without some sizing. Starline sells empty 5 in 1 cases.
I reload with 700X powder, packing foam and sometimes card wads. Magnum primers sometime help with a good bang.