.44-77 PP bullets.

[Distant Thunder]

Kurt,

I have never had a .44-77, but I have research the snot of the cartridge and most of the people who have had one have been very happy with the cartridge and get very good to excellent accuracy. All the naysayers of the .44-77 are just like the ones who trash talk paper patch bullets, they have never owned one or shot one, heck they probably have never seen one, but they have a friend who knows a guy who talked to guy whose buddy told him that .44-77s are junk and don't work.

Then there is the old, "Well, the original Sharps Rifle Company dropped all the bottlenecks because, well you know, they fouled the barrels excessively and weren't accurate!". The other one that I dislike is then I read, "I had and original Sharps or Rolling Block and it had a groove diameter that closer to a .452" and I could never get better than 2 or 3 MOA accuracy out of it using .446" diameter bullets. Therefore all modern day .44-77s are inaccurate too!".

Then this stuff gets repeated by every non-thinking internet expert out there who has a keyboard!

I have been lucky to have been schooled in the machine tool trades and that has given me the ability to machine anything out of steel that I can see or think of or be told about. Having been a tool and die maker for 37 years taught me that there is always a way to get something to work, even if it doesn't seem as though it wants to. So maybe I'm a little more prepared than the average shooter to take on a .44-77, but I don't see how someone who wants the challenge and is willing to work it through should be discouraged from perusing it. There will be a little extra expense up front with brass and dies, but it can be done. For me the .44-77 should be a perfect fit.

I have emailed Starline about making .44-77 brass or better yet making .44 basic brass and they have emailed me back that they have no plans to do so in the immediate future. I think all of us .44 BN and wantabe .44 .44 BN shooters should start emailing them every so often and keep doing it until they give in. You're right, Kurt, if the brass was there we'd see both .44 SBN cartridges more often. One of the things that may be holding them back is the wide variation in rim thickness. Production people like to produce the same part is large numbers without having to deal and variations that would require additional setups. This problem is only compounded by C. Sharps and Shiloh Sharps using two different rim thicknesses, it's bad enough that the originals are all over the place. It would help if all modern manufacturers got on the same page.

That being said, reducing the rim thickness is one of the easier things to do if you have a lathe, but not everybody does.

I think I'll heat up some lead and cast some more bullets for a rifle I don't have! Life is good!