444 Marlin Pistol - Gathering ideas

[J E Custom]

Should I be thinking .450 Marlin instead to improve feeding from a magazine? Ammo availability makes me nervous about 450 marlin.

Look at the 450 Bushmaster. It is ideal for a bolt action and has plenty of power for 200 yard kills.

It is also very popular on a AR platform.

Just a thought
J E CUSTOM

 

[ATH]

A bit of an old thread, but why not just go with a BFR in .450 Marlin or .45-70? Not enough good things to say about mine.

 

[HarryN]

Look at the 450 Bushmaster. It is ideal for a bolt action and has plenty of power for 200 yard kills.

It is also very popular on a AR platform.

Just a thought
J E CUSTOM

Thanks for the input. Like the Wildley series of rounds, it is based on the .284 winchester case, which is convenient because of its widespread use. Lots of power in that round. It is also fairly short, so easy to carry around.

Two short comings in my mind:
- I cannot find any factory ammo that is CA legal - as in no lead. That makes is not much better than a pure wildcat for me. I am not saying that there is no one making it, but I have not found it. Hand loading is ok, but not for every round in an AR platform.
- It uses quite short bullets - essentially 44 mag type as far as I can tell, so poor BC. At that very short bullet length, no much mass to work with.

I am a big fan of wikipedia.org, but the fool who wrote the article on the .450 bushmaster decided that instead of saying "it uses 44 mag size diameter bullets", he tried to make it sound like a 45-70 and said it uses "standard .458 bullets - swaged down". I didn't think it through sufficiently and spent a lot of time looking for rifle bullets for this round. At least in the copper / no lead bullets, the correct place to look is "handgun bullets".

Cutting Edge appears to make one copper bullet that would work, probably GS Custom does as well, but it isn't quite as obvious. GS will make anything if you ask, so I am sure that it isn't a problem, still, I am hesitant to jump into a cartridge that has so few options to work with., at least here in CA.

 

[HarryN]

A bit of an old thread, but why not just go with a BFR in .450 Marlin or .45-70? Not enough good things to say about mine.

Thanks for posting and the input. I like revolvers, but I have gotten more hesitant about them for really heavy round use and cylinder gap potential issues. That side blast starts to be something to think about even at the local range with fairly narrow boxes to shoot in.

The nice thing about the 45-70 is the wide range of power loads readily available. I have been trying to be a bit more "modern", but it is a good option.

As a practical matter, one of the reasons that I have not moved forward on this pistol is that the area that I would like to hunt hogs in has turned out to be a "shotgun slug hunting only" area.

Even more foolishly, the fish and game regulations hold us to the same "3 rounds total only" (like deer / duck hunting) and we are not allowed to carry a sidearm / backup gun.

As a result, I am thinking about a shotgun / slug gun more (different discussion of course) and am still thinking through if this "zero margin for error" 3 shots concept is within my risk taking tolerance. It just seems like a really bad idea to hunt hogs with no backup gun.