Monday - August 04, 2008

Fwee Buwwets!!

My chiropractor is a Marine Lt. And a gun nut. Somebody gave him some ammo about 15 years ago, for a rifle he’d never even heard of. I happen to own such a thundergun, so now the ammo comes to me. It’s all mid-80s production, .356 Winchester. Free! Two and a half full boxes worth, 50 rounds total.

What the hell is a .356 Winchester? Well, it’s not a .357, although the bullet is the same diameter. It’s not a .358, though the cartridge dimensions are nearly identical. A .356 Winchester was an interesting and short lived idea, a highly effective and powerful round chambered in a rifle that hunters had been asking for for 40 years. But the rifle was a commercial failure, and after just 5 or so years the .356 was history. The .356 was a .30-30 rim married to a .358 body, and fed flat nosed bullets for a standard lever rifle OAL of 2.55”.

In the early 1980s Winchester was losing lever gun sales to Marlin. Both companies have a lever action rifle that has sold well for decades. Make that about a century. Winchester started selling lever action rifles around about 1873. Marlin got in the game shortly thereafter. By the end of the 19th century Winchester had several models for sale, Marlin had one or two, but the rifles that would continue to sell were chambered for the .30-30. The .30-30 is now in it’s 3rd century of production, and as an Eastern deer rifle it’s hard to beat. It will do the job, every time, out to about 175 yards. And it does it without a lot of recoil, and without blowing your ears right off your head. It ain’t glamorous, but it sure is effective. But some hunters wanted more. A .30-30 just isn’t really enough gun for hunting big elk, or big bears, or for shots at longer ranges. In the past, long in the past, there had been lever guns that could handle the big old time black powder cartridges. They didn’t shoot their bullets very fast, but the bullets were huge, and huge bullets will go through just about anything. Almost all of the large caliber lever guns were gone by the early 1930s. But both companies got letters year after year, decade after decade, from hunters wanting more gun. Eventually both companies did something about it.

Around the time I was entering kindergarten, Marlin introduced the .444 Marlin cartridge, in a modified version of their venerable model 336 lever action rifle. It wasn’t anything more than a double length .44 Magnum, but it could push a big fat 43 caliber bullet weighing 240 grains (half an ounce) at almost 2400 feet per second, a full 1000 feet per second faster than a .44 Magnum. This made an awesome woods rifle, even though the pistol bullets it fired really didn’t penetrate as well as other rifle bullets on the market. Winchester did nothing, and Marlin owned the large caliber lever sales for the next 20 years. Not being content with just one large cartridge, they also eventually brought out an even bigger one, their model 1895 chambered in the ancient but highly effective .45-70.

Winchester finally got in the game in 1978 with their Model 94 Big Bore, offered only in the “new” .375 Winchester cartridge. I put new in quotation marks because the .375 is only a slightly (and foolishly) modified .38-55, one of those old time black powder rounds from way back when. “Foolishly” because they made the .375 a hair shorter than the old .38-55, so the new round will chamber in the old rifles. But the .375 is loaded to nearly modern pressure levels, which means it can, will, and has blown some of the old .38-55 rifles to shreds. Not a good thing. The .375 fired a bullet of about the same weight as the .444 Marlin, at about the same speed. But because it was a smaller diameter, the bullets were both more aerodynamic (higher BC) and better penetrating (higher SD, plus the .444 always had an asininely slow rifling twist of 1:38. Bullets with more spin on them dig deeper, straighter holes). So Winchester had a player, but neither the .444 Marlin or the .375 Winchester had the power of the .45-70. Marlin was still the sales leader. And while the .375 bullets could hold onto velocity better than the .444s and .45-70s could, it couldn’t hold on all that well and was effectively range limited to 200 yards. That same old bunch of letter writers still wanted more.

During this time it came to light that most hunters wanted to mount a telescopic sight to their rifles. Winchester’s lever guns had always ejected the spent round straight up, which made putting a scope on one just about impossible. The Marlin 336 has always ejected to the side, so Marlin was ahead on this point too. Winny would have to do something big to recapture those sales. And they did.

A few years later, in 1983, Winchester upped the ante, and released a New & Improved version of their Model 94. This one had a name nearly as big as the rifle itself: the Winchester Model 94 Angle Eject XTR Big Bore, and it was a wonder. The receiver of this beast weighs half again as much as the regular Model 94 receiver, because the walls are twice as thick. It ejects the spent brass up and over at a 45 degree angle - hence the Angle Eject part of the name, so the receiver walls are higher too. And they put a heavy weight barrel on it. All of this was for a reason: the new rifle was offered in two rather amazing cartridges: the .307 Winchester, which duplicated .308 (7.62 NATO) ballistics, and the .356 Winchester, which duplicated .358 ballistics. And that’s a LOT of gun. Plus, to make sure they stole the sales from Marlin, Winchester made the thing pretty. The XTR ("extreme"? “eXTRa range”? nobody is sure) got fancy wood, hand cut checkering, and a quality of bluing and polishing that would never be seen again. It’s a beautiful rifle ... but it’s also an abomination. Remember how I said that market research of the time showed that most hunters were using a scope? Well, when you mount a scope on a rifle, your eye needs to be a bit higher up to align properly with it, compared to open “iron” sights. Which means the stock has to be taller. Winchester went an put a Monte Carlo (ie raised cheek piece) stock on a lever rifle. And the purists just about had aneurysms.  No such thing had ever been done. Practical be damned, a lever rifle MUST have a scrawny, low, flat little stock with all the ergonomics of a fence post! So sales didn’t exactly take off. Especially when Marlin followed suit and chambered their own rifle for these two potent rounds a year later.

The .356 is a high pressure round, and it can shoot a 200 grain bullet just as fast as a hand loaded .30-06: 2400 feet per second. That’s a lot of power. More than enough for any bear or elk that ever lived. Plus it can shoot a 250 grain bullet at 2200 feet per second, just in case you need to hunt Volkswagen Beetle sized mooses or the occasional marauding dinosaur. The 250 grain load is within a hair of the power of the .444 Marlin at the muzzle, but after about 20 yards the better ballistic specs of the .356’s bullet take over, and by 200 yards it has pretty much double the retained power of the .444. And at 300 yards it still has plenty of whack left, while the .444 Marlin bullet has long since fallen to the ground. (you slow bullet shooting, “rainbow trajectory” guys know exactly what I mean here).

But all that power comes at a cost. The .356 kicks like a pissed off mule having a ‘roid rage fit. The XTR quickly gained the reputation as a nasty little rifle. Even the reloading manuals, which would have you believe that shooting a .340 Weatherby is a walk in the park with free ice cream, say things like “recoil in such a light rifle can only be described as brutal”. And it is, oh yes it is.

Oh, the rifles worked fine. The XTR is the best and strongest lever gun ever made. It’s just as polished inside as it is outside; the action is really smooth. But the thing is, the guys who wrote all those “give us more” letters for all those decades were idiots. When you put a high powered (and that’s real high powered, not the MSM’s concept) round in a light little rifle like the Model 94 carbine, painful things happen when you pull the trigger. Especially when you realize that the butt pad of a lever gun is about the same size and shape as an Italian sausage. It’s small. Really small. Half the area of a good bolt gun’s pad. And while it’s made out of rubber, it’s that very special kind of rubber reserved for butt pads: it will last 100 years or so, but that’s because it’s only slightly softer than a brick. The bottom line is you have a whole lot of recoil expressing it’s displeasure into your shoulder onto a very small area. It’s kind of like holding the edge of an axe to your shoulder, and handing a really big guy a sledgehammer and daring him to smack the back of the axe head as hard as he can.

I am prone to exaggeration. You may have noticed this a few million times by now?  I also routinely shoot heavy rifles that have lots of recoil. I shit you not: I am afraid of this rifle. It hurts. It hurts really really bad. When I was young, and in the best shape of my life, hitting the gym every day, I tried to force myself to shoot one entire box of ammo - 20 shots - through this rifle from the shooting bench over the course of an afternoon. I could not do it. I was so battered after a dozen shots that my arm would hardly move. My hands were shaking. Tears started to run when I put the 15th round in the chamber, but, by God, I was gonna tough it out, even though I was actually whimpering. The 15th round loosened a filling, and I admitted defeat. I had to drive home left handed, and had a really amazing bruise for the next two weeks.

After that I learned that you can reload the .356 using pistol bullets. D’oh! It can launch a 125 grain bullet at 3200 fps - the kind a typical .357 Magnum pistol can shoot at 1400 fps - and the recoil is pleasant. And the thing is quite accurate, able to group these little bullets inside 2” at 200 yards. It will also shoot 180s at a pretty good clip (still a hair faster than the same weight bullet in a .30-06) and they don’t kick so bad. So it’s a moose gun that’s better suited to hunting armored woodchucks. It really has no good niche, and that’s why both the cartridge and the rifle became orphans in just a couple of years.

The ammo I got from my chiropractor has sales stickers on it from 1987. One half of one box has been used, and a few rounds have scratches on them. I guarantee what happened: somebody bought the rifle and a couple boxes of ammo, went to the range, and had his ass whupped by 10 rounds. Then he traded the thing in on something softer and saner, or gave up shooting altogether. A half a decade ago I put a nice thick recoil pad on my XTR, but I haven’t fired it since. I think I’ll take a trip to the range soon, just to see if I’ve gotten any tougher over the past 25 years. It’s a guy thing I guess.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/04/2008 at 06:32 PM   
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control •  
• Comments (12) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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