Oh that's great! Thanks so much for the info and link!Originally Posted by Lester Polfus
The answer is "yes."
I'm primarily using a Marlin 1894c, so I'm toting strips with 8 rounds of .357. Also, Tuff Products makes strips sized for the 30-30 case head.
Men freely believe that which they desire.
Julius Caesar
Now I want a lever 30-30...and I don't need it whatsoever.
I have a secret yearning for a lever gun, but I can't bring myself to push the buy button when in my free state of Texas I have no hurdles in using my beloved AR-15 platform.
Henry is offering it's loading-gate equipped gun in .38-55.
Which would be a fine caliber when you cannot use a tapered rifle cartridge (like .30-30 or .35Rem).
I’ve never even heard of that cartridge until now. What kind of external ballistics are you looking at with that cartridge?
255-grain pill at 1300-1800fps - https://www.henryusa.com/caliber/38-55/
Similar terminal performance as a .30-30, maybe not quite as much energy, but you know your trade off is lower pressure and legal for hunting. I wouldn't have any concerns taking deer-sized game inside 150-yards and black bear inside 75.
Despite the name, it uses a .3775" bullet diameter. Barnes has a 255-grain SJFP "Original" that I would probably opt to load in the 16-1700fps range. I imagine that would do a treat on most things. You can go as light as a 200-grainer which underneath a bunch of Trail Boss or similar would probably be nice a light on the shoulder.
Buffalo bore has a great full power load but winchester has a very mild 220gr at 1800fps iirc.
Cdnn has winchester high walls in .38-55, 30-40, and .45-70. Id love to grab one
The 38-55 is an interesting cartridge. In the upgraded loads its a decent heavier load than 30-30, some of the guys on the leverguns forum that have used them on moose in Canada seem pretty impressed with the performance, I believe they were getting complete pass-throughs on moose, i dont recall if they used jacketed bullets or cast.
The older Lyman manuals showed loads with jacketed and cast bullets running 1800-1850 fps and in the same pressure range as 30-30. The case head is identical to 30-30 and is the parent case for that round I believe. You can make 38-55 brass from blown out 30-30 brass.
One small issue with the cartridge is the wide divergence in bore dimensions. The actual groove dimensions vary from .376" to .3815", and most loads have bullets somewhat smaller than the last mentioned.For whatever reason, it seems like many or most of the modern Marlins in 38-55 had .381 groove diameters. One other small matter, if a correctly sized bullet for the larger groove diameters is loaded, often it cant be chambered. Some use different brass to get thinner necks, some use 30-30 brass blown out to help deal with it, some use soft bullets and let them "bump up" like the older factory black powder loads basically did.
Still if one wades through these details, you could consider it somewhat of a junior version of the 45-70 in performance. Good deep penetration with proper bullets, moderate pressure, very similar trajectory, and works in the model 94 Winchester, a much lighter gun than most 45-70s. A guy called Snooky(Clyde) Williams wrote a book about loading for old Winchesters, The Winchester Lever Legacy, in it he mentioned that with full power cast loads he was shooting through 2 or more deer regularly with the 38-55. He was farming in Mississippi I think, and suffering substantial losses to deer and hogs, he had some sort of depredation hunt permits and shot scads of deer with various old Winchester loads. He was pretty favorably impressed with the 38-55 and modernized loads.
To continue the thread drift, some fun at 400 and 600 yards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U7Te8-c-0w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh3Ju89s65o
Last edited by Malamute; 11-04-2020 at 08:59 PM.
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
FWIW Winchester had basically a +P version of the .38-55 they called the “.375 Winchester” in their Big Bore 1894 rifle several years ago.
I’m satisfied with my 1894 Marlin in .44Mag paired with my 4” S&W 629 and both loaded with a bullet I cast out of an NOE mold basically designed for levergun use and castable as a WFN or HP. I’ve taken deer with the rifle, shot IDPA with the revolver and plinked with both. A “Social Levergun” class would certainly be interesting, but comparing them to say a modern Colt M4 paired with a Glock 19 is like comparing a steam ship to an airliner. They’ll both get you across the ocean but the different levels of technology are easily apparent.
Leverguns, particularly pistol caliber leverguns, excel at being “walking around guns.” They are light, short, flat and easily carried slung or in hand when you are engaged in some other activity but there is a chance you might need or want to shoot something.
Most folks don't live that kind of life anymore.
My goal is to live the kind of life where optimizing my walking around guns makes sense.
If I look out my window and North Korean paratroopers are jumping into the river valley, the Marlin 1894c is not what I will grab.
I was into 10mm Auto before it sold out and went mainstream, but these days I'm here for the revolver and epidemiology information.
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