Big Bore Shooting and My First Wildcat
I loaded the .458 mostly with 405 grain Winchester .45-70 bullets. These were factory seconds and my uncle’s buddy at Olin sold them to me for $30 a thousand and sometimes gave them to me for free. They REALLY blew up groundhogs at 2550 FPS. When John Buhmiller found out how much I was shooting my .458, he asked me if I’d like to buy a barreled action he had, a wildcat .50 caliber based on a necked-up .460 Weatherby case fitted to an Enfield action. It came with dies. A customer had ordered a rifle and then cancelled before it was done. He said it was a little rough on the outside and wanted $110 for it as is, and I said yes.
I ordered a Bastogne blank from Jack Burres in California. The package from Buhmiller arrived and Art Freund took the barrel off in his barrel vise and put it on his barrel polisher, a hand-held device that put the barrel between centers. He held the barrel against a homemade belt sander with about a 12 foot long belt and put some drag on the barrel with a welder’s glove. In about 5 minutes the barrel was beautifully polished and Art refused to charge me for the job since it had taken so little time. In those days Art charged me $6 an hour for gunsmithing work.
My uncle’s gunsmith Hunt Turner (mainly a shotgun gunsmith and refinisher) polished the action for me and I didn’t have to pay for that, either, as my uncle had bought Hunt his milling machine and he liked that I was so involved in shooting.
Art put the walnut blank in his Bridgeport, did a lot of careful measuring, and inletted the wood most of the way for the barreled action, using about a half dozen different end mills. I got to work and got the rest of the inletting done with hand tools. Art showed me how to finish bed the metal with Devcon Plastic Steel, his bedding compound of choice. Shaping the outside of the stock took another day, and the finish, many layers of marine spar varnish, took over a week. Hunt Turner made an English-style recoil pad from a 7/8” thick piece of rubber he had for that purpose, and I had my first custom rifle, first wildcat, and first .50 caliber, all at once.
Bullets for the .50-.460 were a problem. Barnes bullets (now sold by Richard Hoch under the Colorado Custom name) were $350 a thousand plus shipping from Colorado. That was more than I was willing to pay. I ordered a Lyman mold and began to cast bullets, but they leaded badly well before the velocity got interesting. I wrote Buhmiller for ideas. He said the gun had a 14” twist and might stabilize .50 BMG bullets if I could find any and didn’t mind using the gun as a single shot. A call to Charley Steen in New Jersey (with the multipage display ads in Shotgun News, with lots of .50 BMG parts) confirmed he had surplus .50 BMG bullets for 45 cents a pound plus shipping. How many tons did I want? I explained what I was doing and he sent me 20 bullets to see if they’d stabilize. The Powley Computer said to use 110 grains of 4350 with this bullet. I didn’t have any 4350 but my uncle had a fast surplus lot of 4831 from Hodgdon so I tried that. Then my seating die wasn’t right for the long spitzer bullet but Art made a hand seating die out of a length of aluminum rod and I got some ammo loaded. The load went a bit over 2000 FPS and the holes in the target were round. The gun would stay in 2” at 50 yards with open sights and surplus bullets. Success! I ordered 200 pounds of bullets from Charley and a custom seating die from RCBS. The guy on the phone at RCBS said it was no problem, they got a lot of orders for odd things, but warned me the die wouldn’t fit in their standard plastic die box. I didn’t care.
More later...
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