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I be a newbie on this forum, live up north near Lake Superior, but born in Oklahoma, folks left there when I was five.

Dad was shooten at some food and missed, no bubbling crude...so he loaded up the truck and move to Kalifornia to find work. (ala Grapes of wrath...just like the Jodes)

But I regress, the subject is revolvers with over-sized cylinder throats. My one wheel gun has .434 diameter cylinder throats, the other is close to that.

Getting a lot of blow by on dirty powder soot and Lyman Alox lube grease, switched to Clays and other Hodgdon's powders, and Trail Boss seemed to clean up things very nice.

I notice if I keep my cast bullets at least .432 the small amount of leading at the forcing cone to barrel rifling seems to be reduced to practically nothing.

But is it safe to continue shooting oversized bullet diameters in a .429 rifling barrel...such as .432 or .433 bullets that are going to be swaged down to .429 and that does worry me a little.

Can these guns take a steady diet of such over-sized bullets.

Jim

Jim, First, Welcome to the forum. This will be a good place to hang out during those long Michigan winters.

I would have a concern shooting oversized bullets in any firearm. There are a lot of factors to consider. There is no way to determine the actual pressure developed while shooting these loads. You have the potential for running pressures beyond the design strength of the gun. I could work fine for a long time, then fail.

I would have the gun checked out by a competent gun smith and possibly even contact tech support at the factory before I shot many oversized bullets.

Thanks, SRVA, for the welcome and your opinion on my over-sized bullets.

I don't live in Michigan, but about 35 air miles from UP Michigan...we are in north central Wisconsin.

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It's not like I haven't been here before with OS bullets, years ago I acquired a S&W 2nd model that was a contract gun for the brits during WW-1.

This fine gun had been converted from .455 caliber to .45 Colt caliber...probably shortly after that great world war. It had cylinder throats, not bored through all the way like some sloppy conversions.

But here is the rub, it had cylinder throats that measured around .457 to .458 diameter. The barrel is factory unaltered .455, which is really miked out about .456.

Accuracy was just so so, until I got a tip from Ross Sigfried artical in Handloader magazine. He was telling about shooting a WW-1 Triple Lock S&W in its original caliber of .455. Ross goes on to explain he had to cast his own bullets to get approx. weight of 280 grain which was near original specifications for the British .455 caliber. But his bullet was hollow base round nose, and it achieved remarkable accuracy with a modest amount of Hodgdon's Titegroup powder.

Well, if its good enough for Ross, its good enough for me to try it out. I started using different lengths of hollow basing to find a good performance. Anything between 1/8 to 1/4 cone-shape depth seem to work pretty good in my .45 Colt conversion 2nd model.

Here are the two revolvers I'm mentioning in this post...they are 2nd models S&W conversions that were once .455 caliber.





What I seem to have done is push my HB bullets (.454 diameter) to expand to .457 dia. in the cylinder throats to make a tight fit to concentrically reach the forcing cone of the .455 barrel rifling where the bullet gets swaged back down upon entry to the rifling.

Now, this seems like a smilar happening much like my more modern revolver (a Taurus model 441 .44 spl.) which has over-sized cylinder throats of .434. My other S&W 2nd model that was converted to .44 spl. had an original .44 spl. cylinder put in it with factory cylinder throats of about .432 or .433.



Below, .44 special bullets used were Hollow Based by swaging method.



The weather is not good here in northern Wisconsin, snow on the ground already, but hope to see it burn off and can get to the range again.

I've talked with a couple of guys over the internet, they seem to think .432 bullets won't hurt anything as long as I don't go Dirty Harry magnum force. Which is not a problem with me, I never shoot hot loads in my older guns...never go over 900 fps velocity...usually about 771 to 850 fps.

Jim