Thinking on a .400 Whelan Improved

[FrankG]

I traded for a nice 40 cal barrel and have been thinking about a .400 Whelan Imp. with 40 deg shoulder(.458"dia) made on 30-06 cases fire formed to expand shoulder area for better headspacing anchor.

I have a 1908 Mauser large ring action I'm thinking about fitting it to.

The barrel is chambered in 40-65 at present with .410" groove .400" bore as near as I could check with a
.398 slug swaged to fill grooves. Twist is 1:16".

Has anyone any experience with the .400 Whelan Improved ?

[johnson1942]

no but i sure have been thinking about the same thing. what a gun that would be. wow. guy in montana several years ago made one like that and machined his bullets out of solid brass and shot it at 1400 yards. was very very accurate. dont know what happened to his gun as he unexpectedly passed. let us know how yours turns out.

[Mk42gunner]

No first hand experience, but I do remember reading Elmer Keith's writing about his Hoffman rifle in .400 Whelen saying "...it also kicked." That is the only time I can remember him baldly stating a rifle had some recoil. Stock design could mitigate recoil some, but I don't think you will want to lay down and shoot 2-300 in an afternoon.

Sounds like a fun project.

Robert

[johnson1942]

you are very correct about stock design and recoil. yesterday i was shooting my 45/70 and a custom castbullet muzzle loader i designed and built my self. i was shooting the same bullet and same powder and the same charge in both of them. the 45/70 recoiled a lot more that my muzzleloader.

[FrankG]

Not much luck finding a reamer as yet ?

Found one and on order !

[CA Dude]

I have been thinking about the same thing. I also have a barrel with a .400 bore and .410 grooves. Mine has a 1-18 twist. I think it will work with 330 grain bullets OK. I want to put it on a Springfield 03A3. I have been thinking about having Pacific Tool and Die grind a reamer for me. He has a 400 Whelan reamer but it is for a .403 bore and .411 grooves.

Ed

[Nobade]

Three things - do make sure your reamer is made for 40 cal. barrels, since the original 40 Whelen was made on 405 Winchester barrels. Second is to get a matching die reamer so you can make a set of loading dies to match your individual chamber. And third, make yourself a fireforming fixture so you can produce 30-06 cylindrical brass to neck down and fit to your individual chamber. I would also not go with PTG for reamers, he does not seem to know what a resize reamer is supposed to look like judging from the three I have bought from him. I would strongly recommend going with Dave Manson, he will give you a much better product.

-Nobade

[Bullshop]

How about the 411 Hawk. Try Fred Zeeglan the reamer rental guy. He is the designer of the cartridge I believe and he rents reamers.
The 411 Hawk might be described as a 400 Brown Whelen.

[FrankG]

I have my dies in hand and my reamer will be here in a week , so Im pretty well committed to my project . I hadn't looked at the Hawk but had been studying on the .400 Whelen and variants for some time . The Brown Whelen version is a 30-06 case blown out to .461" at shoulder and has substantial 'step' to the neck for headspacing . PTG had the reamer drawings and emailed them to me to look at and I went with it .

I will be doing two rifles , one for my son and one for myself .

[gnoahhh]

Go to "finegunmaking.com" and click on the two articles the late Michael Petrov wrote about the history, design, and handloading of the .400 Whelen. I doubt that a more succinct treatise on the subject was ever written, but then again Michael was quite a researcher.

[FrankG]

Thank you gnoahhh , that is one where I found a lot of info . And where I saw where PTG had reamer info. My kick start for the project :)
C&H dies has dies made for the PTG reamer dimensions and even had a set in stock to send me :)

I bored a corroded bore 8mm barrel to .468 x 2.5 and polished out to fire form annealed 30-06 with cream of wheat and red dot then annealed again the neck area . Brass was once fired TW 52 and 54 Mil brass .

So far everything is slowly coming together :)

[bgmkithaca]

You will need to cut the chamber area off and start fresh. 40-65 is larger in diameter than anything in 30-06 can muster- About .506" give or take for the 40-65 vs .473" for the 30-06 family. Things are doable , just one more thing to do to get there.

[FrankG]

Yes sir you are correct :) When I cut the threaded shank from the barrel it should give me a good starting point .

[W.R.Buchanan]

Frank: I wish I has seen this thread sooner. There is a lot more to know about the .400 Whelan than you probably have read.

First; it doesn't need to be improved, it simply needs to be chambered correctly, And by correctly I mean the same way James V. Howe did it to begin with.

Others that followed and decided to make changes to something that they didn't understand, are the ones who fouled it up. They made changes to the design of the cartridge which caused problems and as a result,,, fixes for those problems became the outgrowth of that ignorance.

I have posted this article before and it has everything you need to know about the cartridge and the all of the reasons for the failures that occurred with it. ( I just noticed that "gnnohhh" posted a reference to this article as well.)

Maybe you can stop the reamer order in time and get a proper .400 Whelen reamer instead.

Always remember that Col. Whelen and James V. Howe had all of this stuff figured out long before any of us living today were even born. They also forgot more about guns and the bolt action rifle in general than any of us will ever know. They pretty much were responsible for the design of the American bolt action sporting rifle as we know it. Just copying what they did will get you where you need to go. Everytime.

Elmer Keith also commented on this cartridge and concurred with Whelen and Howe on its design.

Read this article thoroughly before you continue with this project. This is the best reference on the subject of the .400 Whelen that I have seen and all of the information was taken directly from Whelen, Howe and Elmer Keith who were the original sources to begin with.

You will need to read this article several times to extract ALL of the pertinent information. It is technical in nature and thus requires closer scrutiny.

http://www.z-hat.com/smashing_the_headspace_myth.htm

I hope this helps you realize the dream of a rifle in this caliber, and after you read the article you will understand why I have said the things I said.

PS; it should be made on a Springfield action just to be right and period correct. :-)

Good luck on your project and we want to see pics of the gun as the project unfolds.

Randy

[FrankG]

W.R.B. , that's the reamer I've on order with pilot - neck changes for my bore. Petrov/PTG is listed on the reamer design and dies as well . From the drawing on that page the the shoulder was increased to .461" and overall length to 2.500" max.

Its a dandy looking round ! http://www.z-hat.com/images/06steroids.jpg

Randy , heres another article I found useful info on that sort of mirrors the one you referred me to. http://finegunmaking.com/page33/page51/page51.html

In my opinion there is never enough info to sort through on a subject before starting. And then go over it several times .

[W.R.Buchanan]

FrankG: Thanks for the second article. I found the first one pretty much is a reprint of the article I posted, however the second article with the load data is valuable to anyone going down this road.

My interest in this cartridge stems from my fondness for the Springfield Sporting Rifle, and Whelen's approach of sporterizing ex military weapons. Him and his close circle of friends pretty much defined the American Bolt Action Sporting Rifle as we know it.

All of the Whelan derivations of the 06 case can be realized by simply boring and re-rifling and chambering the existing barrel which is exactly what I would do to build one of these guns. This idea made all of these conversions accessible to the regular guy who couldn't necessarily afford a G&H Rifle.

I bet we all would love to have that G&H rifle pictured in the article. It's probably only worth $8-10K. However the idea of shooting it with heavy loads and that steel buttplate brings tears to my eyes. That gun was definitely from a time when men were men, I guess we are all just a bunch of Wusses nowadays.

My main interest in a gun of this caliber would be shooting cast boolits from it in Short Range Silhouette matches with a Lyman receiver sight. A nice thick Pachmayer Recoil pad and 9+ lbs. would be part of that deal as well. and then of course the possibility of going to Alaska to shoot something big enough to justify a .40caliber hole.

When going into a new area of interest I ALWAYS try to find who is the brains behind the operation. Every bit of bad press about this caliber and subsequent "fixes" for it was generated by people who thought they knew what was going on with the round, but in fact didn't know what they were talking about. This peeves me.

I have a really nice book on Custom Cartridge Making written by John J. Donnelly & Bryce Towsley. Neither one of these guys are amateurs in any way, and their research on this subject was thorough and lead them to very knowledgeable sources of information.

The shoulder size is wrong on the .375 Whelen illustration and it shows the .400 Whelen as a strait walled case with no shoulder at all! The .375 Whelan Improved has correct dimensions for the proper .375 Whelen,,,

go figure?

The Data Source for these cartridges in this book are none other than P.O.Ackley himself for the .375, hence the "Improved" version, and Phil Sharp's book for the .400 Whelen, which is not even close to the correct dimensions. You'd think that these guys knew what they were talking about? However on this particular subject they didn't,,, which only goes to show that,,,

"if you really think that you know what is going on,,, you're probably full of ship!"
(I never claim to be more than the latter!)

The key to this story is that Whelen suggested that only G&H, Hoffman, or Adolph Niedner build these .375 and .400 Whelen guns, and the obvious reason was the trade secret of the proper shoulder dimensions. I personally hate this type of thing, but I have still made a good living of ferreting out the truth about why something was made the way it was.

I have seen many times over the years, the "well intentioned efforts" of people trying to correct non existent problems. If the real reasons why something was done the way it was done had been recorded and openly made known to interested parties, the problems would have never existed in the first place.

Such is the case with the .375 and .400 Whelen cartridges.

I get the idea of exclusive rights to given information, they are usually called patents. However patents run out in 17 years, and had the .400 Whelen been patented, then by 1940 everyone would have known what it should look like, and none of these issues with wrong chambers or reloading dies would have existed and the blemish on Whelen's name (small as it is) would not have existed either. All of the mutations appear to have taken place in the 50's and beyond when the un-educated and very common misconception was that these cartridges were simply "necked up .30-06 cases like the .35 Whelen is. Obviously this was not the case.

Since nobody patented cartridges (I think) then Whelen could have simply published the correct chamber dimensions in American Rifleman so that more rifles of this caliber could have been made the right way. It would have been the smarter way to go.

This is a perfect example of the phenomenon of NOT "Understanding All You Know" about a subject.

It can be the difference between success and abysmal failure or if you're really lucky,,, simply mediocre performance, or stellar performance.

Moral of this story is do your home work, and then do it some more.

Randy

[FrankG]

Randy , I built a .375-06 AI (Whelen) many 20 years or so back and love it . I used a nice FN Mauser 98 action and a Wilson barrel . It doesn't care what its fed , Hornady 270 gr spire point or 270 gr cast Lyman , it does great with either.

I fire formed some more brass , annealing the '06 parent case first then loading with a bit of Red Dot ,pinch of tissue and Cream of Wheat and pinch more of tissue to keep it all together. They were fire formed straight wall in a mauser 8mm barrel I bored out and polished to .468" for 2 .5" . They needed tapped out with a range rod after firing.

I sized them back in the 400 Brown Whelen die to a little long to adjust later for headspace after chambering my barrel.

I still need to give them a trip through the tumbler to purty them up.

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b74/ModocWrangler/400%20Whelen/DSCN1501_zps32306455.jpg (http://s17.photobucket.com/user/ModocWrangler/media/400%20Whelen/DSCN1501_zps32306455.jpg.html)

[W.R.Buchanan]

Frank G: well done and a perfect start on your .400 project.

What concerned me most after learning that my Handloader's Manual of Cartridge Conversions was completely wrong on these two cartridges, was the burning question of "How many more cartridges are they wrong about?

Nothing more frustrating than having a reference manual that has erroneous information, and breaks your trust.

This one can only be used now if the data can be verified by another credible source. Luckily I am not one to go too far afield when it comes to my caliber choices, however I never know who will come to me with an interesting project.

Randy

[FrankG]

I used to subscribe to Handloader years ago and it was pretty informative . I kept all the issues for reference and am glad I did as Im always going back to them for information.

[W.R.Buchanan]

FrankG: If you go back and look at the other pics I posted of the actual pages you still can't see the dimensions clearly but to make a point the .375 Whelan they show is simply a necked up .30-06 case.

The Ackley Improved version is correct to Whelen's drawing.

The .400 Whelen drawing has no shoulder and is listed as a strait walled case! and that info came from Phil Sharpe's book!

Point being that the misunderstandings about those two cartridges was not isolated to the bumpkins of the gun world.

Randy

[Nobade]

There are numerous mistakes in the Donnely book. The Ken Howell book is a far better resource, with much more useful information and less mistakes. Plus they just put it back into print so it is possible to get one.

-Nobade

[FrankG]

FrankG: If you go back and look at the other pics I posted of the actual pages you still can't see the dimensions clearly but to make a point the .375 Whelan they show is simply a necked up .30-06 case.

The Ackley Improved version is correct to Whelen's drawing.

The .400 Whelen drawing has no shoulder and is listed as a strait walled case! and that info came from Phil Sharpe's book!

Point being that the misunderstandings about those two cartridges was not isolated to the bumpkins of the gun world.

Randy

Randy , I know what you mean . When I put a 338-06 together several years ago I ran into same problems . All different versions of it , when in reality it was initially just a bored out 30-06 using same shoulder. Nosler reloading book drawing was totally different than my old version 338-06.

Someone didn't proof read before sending that book to print. That supposed 400 Whelen looks like a 444 Marlin Rimmed case to me .
I did read somewhere someone made a 444 Marlin bolt gun using 30-06 brass blown straight and headspacing on the case mouth ! That sounds like an iffy situation .

[TXGunNut]

Awesome thread, guys! Great story and some useful knowledge as well. Looking forward to hearing more as this project progresses.

[FrankG]

Hi all! I swapped for a Springfield MK 1 action for this project to go along with the Mauser 1908 build now that I have barrels for father and son guns :)

Now waiting on reamer and headspace gauge.

[W.R.Buchanan]

Now you're talkin'

Randy

[FrankG]

Getting closer :) Made a shorter seating plug for the dies as the one that came with dies was for a jacketed bullet and the cast boolit is a might longer !

The .405 pilot came in for barrel I got from Bullshop but reamer and headspace gauge are still two weeks out :( Two weeks longer than was told when ordering . Business must be good for them !

Found a throater for the .405 I can rent too instead of buy .