.44 Magnum Levergun

Hickok here. It's .44 Magnum time on the range. Got my old Marlin .44 and a little tease with the .44 Magnum 3-inch Smith there in the holster. Nice combination. I could be transported back into the woolly west, couldn't I? And I'd have a nice rifle and handgun in the same caliber. Of course, I don't know if I could find .44 Magnum cartridges in the average general store in Dodge City, so I might have to go with .45 Colt, right? Which I could do, but this is a .44 Magnum Marlin, 1894, remake of the old 1894 Marlin. This is very similar to the guns I made in 1800s and 1890s. It is octagonal barrel. You can get a look at that. It's called the Cowboy Limited, the 1894 Cowboy Limited. I love octagonal barrels on these old lever guns, on any gun almost. And you notice I have a ghost ring sight. I've mentioned those before in my videos. That happens to be the Skinner sight. XS makes a nice one as well. I like the Skinner because it, I don't know, just the contour of it, it follows the lines of the old Marlin a little bit better. And great, a great sight. I have a Cabela's pad on it. Actually, I don't put those on for the padded value as much as just to get the extra length. I have a long length of pull, as you can tell at my height, so I'm always sticking things like that on my rifles just so they feel they fit me better. Not so much to pad the recoil, although that's an added benefit. .44 Magnum. I've not worked the lever. I just took a shot before I turned on the camera, and in the interest of time, I have the magazine loaded. I have an empty brass in the chamber, and I have 10 rounds in the magazine. So when I fire this, it'll be ready to go, so I won't have quite as much reloading on the camera. Since you know me, I don't do much editing in my videos, virtually none. This is a gun I've not shown, I think, in my lever gun videos or anything, as I recall. I have this in a .45 Colt, which I really like, and I like this one. This is a handy size. It's a 20-inch barrel. If you just notice that, it's just a handy little gun. If I were a deer hunter, this would be one of the guns I'd climb into the tree with, and it's just a handy, handy little rifle. I love lever guns. They're really, really fun to shoot, and easy to shoot, pretty well, I think, particularly if you've got sights you like on it. My old eyes have a little trouble with the old classic buckhorn sights and that sort of thing, so I usually take those off, put a go string on. You can't do that in a cowboy match, unfortunately, but I surely can on my range or anywhere else. If somebody wants to hunt with it, it's not a problem. That's .44, and I'm going to take a few shots with it here just to warm it up. I have some 240 grain bullets in it. Before I fire those, let me add another note. That's pretty much a standard round in .44 mag. The classic bullet is 240 grains. In the rifle, I tend to buy the flat nose, round nose, flat point bullets. Get you a closer look at that, because they cycle easier. The classic semi-wadcutter, the Keith bullets that have sharper edges don't cycle sometimes as smoothly in a lever gun, so I usually buy those. They're easy to get. I get them from LaserCast. They're very simple to find because of all the cowboy shooters out there shooting lever guns like this. One note about that, I've been shooting .44 Magnum since 1974 by the thousands, and I'd always thought I ought to get a rifle. It'd be kind of nice, you know, since I load so much and always have a bucket full of .44 Magnum rounds around, but I really didn't get around to that before a couple years ago. Well, unfortunately, I had a surprise, and the rounds that I had been firing and loading, the 240 grain cast bullets that everybody loads for the last 30 years and having lots of success with, very accurate in any .44 revolver that I've ever shot them in, or .44 Special. Well, in this gun, they were keyholing. They were tumbling, even at 20 yards. I put up some paper just to get my sights adjusted and ready to go. Well, on the paper, at 20 yards, they were tumbling. They were going in sideways. These are the bullets I'd had so much, I mean, it just did fine in all my revolvers. So, I had to go back to the drawing board, and those buckets of bullets I had loaded for my revolvers just weren't going to work, so I had to make sure I was getting a bigger cast bullet. This rifle wants .431 diameter bullets. In the past, I've been ... You can generally buy them when they get too technical, but when you buy .44 Magnum or Special cast bullets, they're usually in .429, .430, .431. You can probably get them in .432, I don't know, diameter, which also, to get even more technical, you realize that a .44 Magnum is really not a .44 caliber gun. It's actually a .43, because you're talking .429, .430, that's .43 caliber. But it needed a bigger bullet. It needed a .431, thousands, in order to function and be accurate. I also discovered I needed to change powder for this, so I'm using .2400 powder, and there's some others that would work as well, I'm sure. So, once I got some of the laser cast .431 diameter bullets, I changed to .2400 powder, it shoots great. So, that's just kind of a note for you folks that have shot a lot of .44, maybe you have the same thing maybe in mind. Just be aware that if you get a Marlin rifle, it might have a slightly bigger bore than the handguns you're used to firing. So, once I got that worked out, it's not a problem now. Okay, so that said, let's take a few shots. I'm going to shoot some of the standard .240 grain bullets. Then I also load a bunch of .300 grain bullets. These are laser cast, they weigh .300 grains, that's a heavy bullet. So, I thought, why not? It's a rifle. I don't like to shoot those much in a pistol, they're not a lot of fun, they have a nice little kick to them. But in the rifle, it doesn't really matter. So, first I'm going to shoot the lighter bullets, if .240 grains is light. I'm going to shoot here close by a few of these, and then I'll shoot the others a little bit further away. I don't think I get too much change in sight picture that I'll miss everything. I don't really like to shoot these targets close here with a .44 Magnum too much. I just had to put $100 worth of welding on my swinging plate thing here, so I think it's pretty strong. But I'll take a few shots at it with these .44 Magnums, they're pretty warm, and I think it'll be all right. All right, let's back up a little bit here. I know you like to see it up close. There goes that empty case I was telling you about. You notice that swings them, doesn't it? A little bit more than the 9 millimeter. Thought I had one more, maybe not. Okay, yeah, that's 10. So, those were .240 grain bullets, and simple to shoot. You know, when I'm shooting those swinging plates with a pistol, there's not much of a margin of error. If you've never shot an 8-inch plate, by the way, with a handgun, I know that doesn't look that far away, and it's not. It's 20 yards, 21, 22, whatever. Next time you're at the range, set your target stand at 20, 22, 23 yards, and put some 8-inch stickers on it, or just put an 8-inch pie plate on it, whatever. Pull out your Glock or your handgun, and bam, bam, bam, bam, try to hit it pretty fast. It's a very small target. There's the advantages of having it on paper. You can see where you're missing. The other thing about plates, or 8-inch plates, any plate for that matter, when you miss it, you don't necessarily know where your bullet went. You don't know whether you shot high, low, left, right, necessarily, and so it adds to the challenge even further. But an 8-inch plate can be a real aggravation, believe me. And those of you who have shot them a lot, you know what I'm talking about. But what I was going to make is, with this rifle, I mean, you can miss one, of course, but it's just like, you know, shooting a barrel, you know, 55-gallon drum. It's just with good sights, just a lot of fun. All right, let's load up some of these big boys now. 300 grains, bear loads. Now, I say bear loads, but they're not exactly ear splitters, but they're pretty warm. They ought to knock over anything I hit with them, to put it that way. They might not, as I've said before, the excuses I've made before, sometimes those steel targets, they get set a little harder than other times. If there's something under the pedestal, some dirt, just whatever it might be, they just don't want to fall. And they are very heavy. They're very heavy. Well, let's try a few of them here. I think I can take about the same sight picture with these heavy ones. I'm not sure. Three with one shot, not bad. Pretty warm. So, those are some pretty heavy hitting rounds. I don't like to shoot too many of those. They'll actually beat up normal steel. A lot of the steel out here is armored plate, but most of the animals are just standard. We call it soft steel, if steel can be soft. And if you look at those things, you can see little craters, small craters, even with lead bullets, cast bullets, where you hit them when you shoot them with hot stuff like that. Let's try a couple more of those. Okay. Remember now, we're throwing out 300 grains of lead, and they're hitting pretty hard. Let's go up. I think it's, and look, you can see those black ones are not. I'm gonna go for a chicken. We'll see if I can get one. Probably can't. Not where, not sure where to hold on a chicken. With the 300 grain bullets, I think it goes just a little bit higher than the 240 grain bullets, but I'm not sure. It's not just the weight of your lead. For those of you who are interested in hand loading and that kind of thing, and the ballistics and the physics of it, sometimes you can actually shoot a lighter bullet, and it will go lower, depending on the charge, where it might go higher if it has a light charge. So one thing that affects the point of impact, even in a rifle, especially a handgun, is when you're firing, how long that bullet's in the barrel makes a difference. If you think about it, you're shooting a hard-kicking handgun, and the actual recoil of the gun throws the bullet up slightly. Before that bullet leaves the muzzle, the recoil of the gun is actually affecting where that bullet's going to hit. That make sense? That's why sometimes you can shoot a hotter round, and it will actually print lower. It'll print lower because it's out the barrel before the recoil affects it as much. So it's a strange dynamic, depending. It's not as much with a rifle, but it is. But anyway, that's a neat gun, a fun gun. Those sights put you right on the target. If you have never, I know I'm always proselytizing revolvers and lever guns, even as much as I enjoy the Glocks and the newer guns and AR-15s, but if you've never tried a lever gun with a sight that works for you. Now if you've got young eyes, or you've got clear eyes, not so much age. My left eye is really clear. That's one reason I shoot with my left eye with a pistol, even though that's my dominant eye. I shot for whatever, 40 years or 45, with my right eye with a pistol. Even though that's not my dominant eye, I did just fine. But I switched over because my left eye is clearer. It's more correctable. I think it's 20-20, or it's very clear. Or I've got a little bit of a stigmatism, so I get a blurred sight picture slightly with my right eye. And I don't with the rifle, with the ghost ring sights. If you're someone who doesn't have a clear right eye, you don't get a really crystal clear sight picture, a ghost ring sight will help that a great deal. If you've ever shot an AR-15, or an M1 Garand, or anything like that, and you like those sights, and they take care of that, that's what these do. These skinner sights, or the excess on a lever gun. So as you can see, a lever gun is a blast. It is a blast. 44 Magnum, for a lot of people, makes more sense. I have this in .45 Colt, and since I hand load, there's virtually no difference, really. In fact, it's easier, because the same bullets I can use in my revolvers, my .45 Colts, I can use in my Marlin. I don't have to go through that change I was talking about earlier, how the bore's a little bit bigger on this .44 than it is on my revolvers. So I don't have that issue to deal with. But for a lot of people, if you're just picking up your ammo at Walmart, when you can find it, in .44 Magnum, one of these is a blast. Now I will say too, I don't have that issue with factory ammo. If you're buying just jacketed rounds, hunting rounds, you're picking up an expensive box of .44 Magnum jacketed ammo, you almost have to take a second mortgage to buy that these days, don't you? But it functions fine in here, it shoots great. So that's kind of a hand loading insider tip I was giving you on that. It was a real surprise to me, and a lot of you do hand load, or you're thinking about getting into it, so I just wanted to mention that. .44 Mag, Marlin, Cowboy Limited, it's a blast. And you know what, there's a bullet left in there, and so let's do something with it. What I tend to do walking around the farm or shooting with my son, I've kind of taught him the same thing, you can't just stop an unloaded lever gun, right? And you don't necessarily want to shoot all 10 rounds you have in it, or 13, like the other one holds, it has a longer barrel. So if we're traipsing around the farm and we're just plinking at some targets and that kind of thing, what we do is what I just did, you know, bam, bam, shoot a couple shots, and on that second shot, that last shot you shoot, just leave the empty in the chamber, and then we carry it like that. And then if you see something else you want to shoot, rack out that empty, bang. So that empty round in there is kind of your safety, it's our safety. These Marlins do have a cross bolt safety. Most old lever guns and some of the others I have do not, so I tend not to get in the habit of using it. I'll let the hammer, let the empty cartridge be my safety. I do use it occasionally, but I don't want to get in the habit of depending on that safety, because I don't have that on most of my lever guns. In fact, I wish it weren't on this one. Okay, so, Cowboy Limited 44 mag, one of the most common cartridges, one of the most popular cartridges on the planet, and a really neat lever gun that chambers it, and is fun to shoot. So, thought you might want to see that handy little gun and see it in action. And I will shoot the 3-inch .44 here. I'm playing another video where I do nothing but the 3-inch .44s. Got a couple of those and see if I can hit anything with them and show them off a little bit more. All right, so, Marlin lever guns, great guns, fun to shoot. Don't have my cameraman with me today, so I couldn't do any zooming. Y'all take care, and I'll see you again soon.