Elmer Keith & the .41 Special

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jski

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Didn’t Elmer Keith advocate for the .41 Special with a 240 gr cast bullet driven to around 900-1000 ft/sec ?

Big bore + heavy lead bullets ... moving relatively slow ?
 
I have a very vague recollection of the .41 Special being mentioned in Sixguns by Keith. I'm pretty sure the bullet he recommended was 200 grains.
 
Possibly but my recollection centers around the .41 Magnum as the ideal solution for the perceived shortcomings of the .357 without the punishing recoil and overpenetration of the .44 Magnum. For those familiar, the standard police load was right up there near .44 Magnum in energy, recoil and blast. Small stature officers couldn't shoot good qualifying scores and the whole experiment quietly went away. I may need to be double checked on some of this (old age = bad memory :)).
 
It did ultimately come about as the .40 S&W. What Keith had proposed for the rimmed revolver round for police use was very similar ballistically. While it made some sense in terms of ballistics, the whole package left too much to be desired.

While the Magnum factory loads did not distinguish the cartridge for a purpose different from .44 Magnum, had a "Special" version of the cartridge been more prolific, S&W still only chambered their large N frame for it. Today, S&W offers a 10mm, but it is also a 6-shot N frame. I don't know if a medium-frame revolver could be chambered for six rounds of a 40 or 41 caliber cartridge if the pressure could be restricted somehow, but it wouldn't change the fact that most people won't carry a three-pound gun. I guess I should make it clear the .41 in the "Special" specification that Elmer Keith prescribed was intended for police duty. Had the .41 been adopted as prolifically as the .40 S&W would be later, it still would have been dropped, along with all revolvers, as soon as it was evident that the polymer autos at half the weight were no less effective.
 
While I think I agree with what you are saying, labnoti, I can't make out the first sentence of your second paragraph. In particular, do you mean .41 Magnum instead of .44 Magnum?

It had not occurred to me that the 40 S&W is a realization of the 41 Special idea. That is good thinking!

What the police really needed back in the days when the 41 Magnum (and its reduced power police load) was being developed, were proper expanding bullets. This was not grasped until the "FBI Load" (38 Special +P 158 grain semi-wadcutter hollow point made of soft swaged lead) proved to be quite effective. Bigger non-expanding bullets did not get you anywhere against human targets.

Look, when you go from 38 Special to 41 caliber, you are increasing the diameter of the bullet by .053 inches, which is 53/1000's. That is trivial. Yes, you are boosting its mass and velocity too, but unless you make sure you have a good expanding bullet, you are just trading one ineffective RN or SWC design for another. And expanding bullet design has improved so much that we now have regular threads about whether the 40 S&W cartridge - the automatic pistol equivalent of 41 Special, as labnoti cleverly observes - is a dying cartridge, because 9x19mm bullets are now so good. And all of labnoti's other points also apply to the revolver round.
 
His thoughts were in the "Selection of Cartridges" chapter. He was referencing the .41 Long Colt with a special and dreaming up the .41 magnum. As I was glossing over the chapter I remember what a fan of the .44 special he was.
I attached a couple of paragraphs. "200 grains of a bullet of my design at 1200 feet would be a good killer on anything, superior to .357 magnum."
 

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I meant what I wrote when I referenced the 44 Magnum. The 41 Magnum full load was mostly redundant to the 44 Magnum. It still is today and that's why the 44 remains popular and not many people see the point of having a .41 Magnum. As a high-powered Magnum, the 41 is inferior to the 44 in every way, particularly as a result of the 44's immense popularity (bullet selection, gun selection, ammo and component price etc.). But as a "Special" or reduced load, the .41 Special would have been a very viable cartridge for police use. It was for this purpose that Elmer Keith really envisioned it. Indeed he saw its advantage in terminal ballistics compared to the .357 Magnum.

I don't agree that the effectiveness of a non-expanding SWC is strictly comparable in the bullet diameter. Increasing either the diameter of the meplat or the velocity of the bullet will produce a wound channel of a disproportionately larger diameter. Because the larger meplat is displacing more tissue, not only is the larger bullet creating a greater cavity, but the larger volume of displaced tissue is also increasing the volume of the wound channel.

There is no doubt in my mind that the 41 Special could have been a police cartridge that was "superior to the 357 Magnum." In it's full Magnum form, it's heavier and faster than .357 with superior effect. More importantly, it could have been loaded to a lower velocity resulting in terminal ballistics on par with the .357 while handling like something closer to the 38 Special. But like I wrote before, its downfall in this role was that there would be no lightweight (K frame) revolver chambered for it -- and even if there had been by some kind of miracle, it still would have only lived a while before the much lighter and less costly polymer semi-automatic replaced it.

Today, the Model 57, the Redhawk, and Super Redhawk are the only 41 revolvers I know of in production. They're all the same size as a 44 Magnum or even bigger bore revolvers. Because of that, a great deal of the 41 Special's appeal is lost. It really offers nothing you can't have by just loading 44 Magnum a little lighter. Ok, so there's a little more sectional density for a given bullet weight, but I'd still rather have the .44's (.429") bullet selection and availability.

The closest thing to realizing what Elmer Keith was envisioning for the .41 Special would be a Ruger GP100 in 10mm. In light of the quote in the post above this one, it should be noted that Keith's plan for the police load was closer to 200 grains at 900 fps -- well within 10mm territory, and conceivably achieved with a .40 S&W and a little longer barrel. Take a look at the Match Champion or 3" Wiley Clapp model. If something like that had been available to US police in the 1960's as Keith had intended it, I am sure it would have created quite a stir for the next several decades. But it still would have fallen to the polymer semi-automatics.
 
You won't very often find Elmer Keith ever recommending anything less than a magnum version of any round.:uhoh:

That is his posthumous reputation, but Dick Casull once told me that he took his “hot .45” to Elmer’s house to try, and after I don’t know how many rounds handed it back to Dick not wishing to shoot it again. He didn’t care for the recoil. I am sure this wasn’t the first or last person to dislike the beating Dick’s wonder cartridge produced!
 
My recollection from reading "Gun Notes" there were many occasions where Elmer advocated for less than maximum charges, usually recommending a grain or two below max for best accuracy.
 
That is his posthumous reputation, but Dick Casull once told me that he took his “hot .45” to Elmer’s house to try, and after I don’t know how many rounds handed it back to Dick not wishing to shoot it again. He didn’t care for the recoil. I am sure this wasn’t the first or last person to dislike the beating Dick’s wonder cartridge produced!

My post was a tongue and cheek remark on Elmers well known love of powerful rounds. And just because a round is loaded to the gills doesn't make it better. Sometimes you can get too much of a good thing.
 
My post was a tongue and cheek remark on Elmers well known love of powerful rounds. And just because a round is loaded to the gills doesn't make it better. Sometimes you can get too much of a good thing.

I recognized it as tongue in cheek and related a story that Dick Casull told me. Nothing more. Nothing less.

There's a common misconception that holding velocities down is a virtue in terminal effectiveness and I will only say that this is true ONLY if the bullets used are not up to the task of handling higher velocities. The .454 Casull loaded to the gills with a bullet that can handle the high impact velocities is better....:D than one loaded down with the same bullet. I've used that round on numerous game animals and as long as your bullet is up to it, it's a killing machine. Just sayin'
 
Chambering an L-frame/GP-100 size gun for 41 special is more a concern of rim clearance than case body diameter. The Army ran in to that problem long ago with the Colt single action army when using 45 S&W rounds in the 45 colt revolvers because the rims on the S&W rounds were bigger in diameter than the colts. The only way to load the colt revolver with the S&W rounds was to load every other charge hole. Your 6 shot gun was now a 3 shot gun.

Thats why I had mentioned in another thread why didn't someone add a rim to the 40 S&W/10mm and make a mid frame revolver for it? You would have a little more steel in the cylinder compared to a 41 special and rim clearance shouldn't be an issue. And no moon clips needed. I don't like moon clips.
 
Chambering an L-frame/GP-100 size gun for 41 special is more a concern of rim clearance than case body diameter. The Army ran in to that problem long ago with the Colt single action army when using 45 S&W rounds in the 45 colt revolvers because the rims on the S&W rounds were bigger in diameter than the colts. The only way to load the colt revolver with the S&W rounds was to load every other charge hole. Your 6 shot gun was now a 3 shot gun.

Thats why I had mentioned in another thread why didn't someone add a rim to the 40 S&W/10mm and make a mid frame revolver for it? You would have a little more steel in the cylinder compared to a 41 special and rim clearance shouldn't be an issue. And no moon clips needed. I don't like moon clips.
The rims clear just fine on my GP100. I don't see a need for adding a rim to a 40 S&W, when shortened 41 Magnum did the trick as 41 Special. Add to that the advantage of 41 Magnum guns being able to use 41 Special in the same way as 44 and .357 Magnums use a shortened-case, lower power version. You also have 45 Cowboy Special as the same concept with 45 Colt.
 
labnoti, I very much appreciate the evenhandedness of your posts. I don't agree with you that a 41 Special revolver could have "terminal ballistics on par with the .357 while handling like something closer to the 38 Special", but that is mainly because I don't agree with your point about the stopping power of flat-nosed, non-expanding bullets. There, however, your opinion is at least as good as mine, and probably better, because you seem very well informed. But as any regular reader of these forums knows, handgun stopping power is the subject of FIERCE disagreement, particularly on what constitutes empirical evidence of stopping power.

What the police all over the US are adopting is a cartridge with even lighter bullets than 38 Special +P, with a higher velocity to obtain improved expansion - i.e., 9x19mm. This is the opposite direction from a 41 Special. I agree that it might very well have had some value back in the days before decent expanding pistol bullet designs. This would have been particularly true in a specially chambered version of the Colt Official Police, because, as Lucky Derby points out, the OP was designed for a larger round than 38 Special*. But I think that time has long gone.

But perhaps that means I do agree with your overall point - a 41 caliber cartridge might have been useful for police work, 50 years ago, if it had been a LESS powerful design than the 41 Magnum. The world did not really need a little brother of the 44 Magnum. It did need something better than 38 Special RN, or even 38 Special +P SWC. It's just that thing turned out to be the FBI Load, not 41 Special.**

I apologize if I am quibbling with you unnecessarily.

* The "41" Long Colt round that the Official Police was designed for actually used a .386 diameter bullet, once it was switched from heeled bullets to inside-lubricated bullets. That's a bit short of the .410 of 41 Magnum/Special.

** One of Massad Ayoob's "Greatest Handgun" books has an interesting account of the conflicting advice the San Antonio PD was given by experts in the field, such as Elmer Keith and Bill Jordan, when they were trying to decide on new police revolver around 1970. They were one of the few department to adopt the 41 Magnum, but it was NOT by a consensus of the experts. There was no consensus of the experts.
 
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What a nice post Monac. And yes the bullet/caliber debate will never end. But does anyone really want it to? I doubt it. It fun to talk about.

Another reason the 41 may have not really caught one was the release of the Super Vel ammunition in the early 1970s. For no more than the price of a box of amunition police could get a jump in bullet performance over the RN lead load without the expense of dumping the guns already owned and buying new guns in another caliber. And as Super Vel became the sensation it was every other ammo company came out with their own versions of high performance 38 special loads. And that ammo war goes on today.
 
Back when I was shooting IHMSA, it was thought that .41 Magnum was within the durability of an N Smith and the .44 Magnum would beat one up. It didn't mine, but I was not shooting full house loads. I just stared in amazement as Elgin Gates got the Freedom Arms guns banned because they cost too much!

There were several .40-.41 wildcats out there from such innovators as Pop Eimer. I believe he used a .401 WSL case cut to revolver length.
Too bad Herters never got the announced double action .401 Powermag on the market.

And if you want to go automatic, there were the 9.8mm Colt and the 9.65mm Grand Browning.
 
Another reason the 41 may have not really caught one was the release of the Super Vel ammunition in the early 1970s. For no more than the price of a box of amunition police could get a jump in bullet performance over the RN lead load without the expense of dumping the guns already owned and buying new guns in another caliber. And as Super Vel became the sensation it was every other ammo company came out with their own versions of high performance 38 special loads. And that ammo war goes on today.

I did not know that Super Vel dated back to the early 1970's. I have heard of them, but I did not really start learning about and shooting handguns until the early 1980's. I thought they did not get started until the mid to late 70's. Thanks, Ratshooter!
 
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