The 44 Dream Meets Reality

Well, I haven’t been having any more epiphanies lately. In fact, my mind has been largely elsewhere. However, I did give some thought to the Dream Cartridge. Here are some responses to your responses and some new stuff to stir the pot.

Thank you, Adobe, for recognizing two things: 1) It’s not necessarily that I’m a bad shot or that #2 Son is a bad shot. As I wrote earlier: individual results may vary. Some of these shots I’ve taken have been inside 10 yards and the results have blown out a 4” hole on the other side and shredded the heart and lungs. I tried 170 grain after 150 grain didn’t work. However, both were Hornady RN. Which brings me to 2) Maybe I just need a different bullet in my 30-30. Winchester you say? I’ll give it a shot.

Just for grins, I tried to tackle this thing logically. First I gathered a bunch of data on the 44 Rem Mag and then I gathered a bunch of data on the 444 Marlin. I figured that if my Dream Cartridge was possible, these would be the upper and lower limits. Then I took the basic stats of both cartridges and just averaged them. I came up with a theoretical cartridge I’ll dub the 44 Thumper.

I can get into details if you guys want, but the kernel of the idea was taking a 444 Marlin case and cutting it off at 1.755” and then trying to push a 265 grain bullet at 1900 fps. In theory, this fills the niche between the 44 Mag and the 444 Marlin. In practice, however, it would be a mother. I would put this chamber cartridge in something like either a 1895 Marlin or a Ruger Deerfield. The resulting recoil would be like the 444 Marlin and the results would not be significantly better than the 44 Rem Mag. After an hour of playing around inside PointBlank I realized why the dream was not going to happen.

The reason for the lousy payoff is the same explanation the physics teacher gave me back in High School. If you take a ballon and flick it with your finger, it’ll go a few feet and then fall to the floor. If you then throw that ballon with all your might, it’ll go a few feet and then fall to the floor—a negligible increase. The problem is the ballistic coefficient. It takes a lot of energy to overcome the BC and make a significant increase in downrange velocity. I was finding out the muzzle energy and velocity were much improved, but for all that work I wasn’t getting all that much of a gain at 75 yards. For all that work, I’d be better off sticking with a 12 GA shooting punkin balls. I could buy a whole lot of Remington Sluggers for what it would cost me to develop this wildcat. There’s probably a production cartridge that could be loaded to match the 44 Thumper. Given the right powder in the right amounts I could probably drive a 40+ cal bullet at around 1900 fps and damage a deer in the way I dreamed. However, it would be doing roughly the same thing.

Just for grins, I went back to one of my earlier winter brain projects—the 358 Winchester. Now there’s a cartridge! Of course it follows that same idea we’ve been seeing for 150 years: make the bullet smaller and drive it faster. In truth, after an hour playing with my copy of PointBlank software, last year’s mental gymnastics were much further along the way to a dream cartridge than the 44 Thumper. This was a 200 yard cartridge, where the 44 ideas had a shorter range than really even the 30-30. I could load the 358 Winchester so it would be just a little bit hotter than a 35 Remington and I’d have a wicked little deer thumper for inside 100 yards. Loaded up to its full potential, it could take anything on the farm, including the stray elk that wanders onto the property.

Of course, if I really want to go that way, I should probably keep playing in my 30-06 and 308 sandbox and look no further. 30-06 inside 100 yards is overkill of tremendous proportion and my 308 project – the 308 that mimics the 300 Savage-- is right where it needs to be.

It’s funny how all this has gone. I’m sure someone was doing this math 60 years ago with a slipstick and probably came to the same conclusion. It just took longer. However, the world of dreams is unbounded by the limits of physics, and occasionally you need a dream to get you to realize how good you’ve got it.

150 grain Winchester, huh?