38 special revolver

roscoe said:

The advantage of the .38 is the revolver manual-of-arms. You can hand someone a 4" .38 and they are, more than likely, able to understand it and use it almost immediately. A semi-auto is more effective, no question, but for folks who want 'good enough' for minimal investment in time and energy, it works. Some of us can't get with that, in the same way that I can't understand why everybody doesn't change their own brake rotors, CV boots, and timing belts. But many folks just want something that 'works', without having to think about the details, and the .38 does that well.

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So just because I choose to carry a revolver for SD I'm a simpleton? I think not. Not much bothers me but what you posted is a little condescending.

Firing a short barrel revolver with a DA trigger well is much more challenging that most semi-auto pistols. It requires a lot of practice.

labnoti said:

Since there was no authoritative specification for .38/44 such as from SAAMI, it's not easy to characterize all the possible loads for it. But I have loaded it and can certainly testify it can be loaded to similar velocities as .357 with some bullets and powders.

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anyone can load anything to any velocity. I left a reference about the 38/44 which tells the loading used back then, not today.

murf

labnoti said:

You're thinking about where the pressure peak occurs. Also, to clarify, I am not talking about the powder not burning. I am talking about the portion of powder that burns before the base of the bullet exits the muzzle. With powders like H110, W296, IMR4227, and Lil'Gun, a large portion of a maximum book load does not burn until after the bullet exits a short barrel (4" or less). It does burn, but it burns in the empty barrel or in the air around the muzzle. Again, the net result is still higher velocities than a faster burning powder, but very poor efficiency.

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this whole paragraph is not true and will need a few good references before I can change my mind.

i'm not going to hijack the thread anymore. you have your opinions on this and I have my recollections on what I have read (my opinions).

luck,

murf

mcb said:

If you have taken the time to understand the models the program is based on you can enter good data and get good data out.

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not on a chaotic system like internal ballistics, imo. i'll stick to reality.

i'm not going to hijack this thread anymore, mcb. i have my opinion and you have yours on this.

luck,

murf

ArchAngelCD said:

So just because I choose to carry a revolver for SD I'm a simpleton? I think not. Not much bothers me but what you posted is a little condescending.

Firing a short barrel revolver with a DA trigger well is much more challenging that most semi-auto pistols. It requires a lot of practice.

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I agree ArchangleCD. The manual of arms for a double action revolver might be simpler to understand compared to the manual of arms for a modern semi-auto but that does not mean its as easy to do in practice, effectively and efficiently. Take a novice shooter with minimal safe gun handling skills and if they spend X-hours of training on both the Revolver and the Semi-auto they will be more effective and capable with the semi-auto than the revolver after equal time invested in training/practice. Everything with the revolver takes more time to learn and a bit more effort and focus to do equally well despite the slightly simpler manual of arms.

I have spent too many years shooting USPSA and IDPA with both revolvers and semi-autos to believe the revolver is equally as effective despite how much fun I have shooting practical pistol sports with the noble round gun.

I happen to think the hammerless snub excels in the pocket pistol role. What other can you fire reliably from inside a pocket? Semiautos and hammer pocket pistols can get fouled easily with the first shot.
The 158 gr LSWC, standard or +p offer very acceptable penetration from a snub, is accurate, possesses a respectable meplat and has pretty mild recoil.

It is what it is---it isn't in fashion and likely will never return to fashion unless all semiautos are tagged as being assault guns and legislated out of existence.
Getting good with any snub takes discipline, which is a useful take away that will also serve you well in other endeavors

roscoe said:

The advantage of the .38 is the revolver manual-of-arms. You can hand someone a 4" .38 and they are, more than likely, able to understand it and use it almost immediately. A semi-auto is more effective, no question, but for folks who want 'good enough' for minimal investment in time and energy, it works. Some of us can't get with that, in the same way that I can't understand why everybody doesn't change their own brake rotors, CV boots, and timing belts. But many folks just want something that 'works', without having to think about the details, and the .38 does that well.

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I think I understood what the intended message was here, and as a wheelgun fan I wasn't offended in the least.

If a non-gun person (like my daughter) asked me for a recommendation, I might make the same suggestion for the same reasons.

Too soon? Too much?

mcb said:

View attachment 864384

Too soon? Too much?

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As a slide-rule collector, I say 'perfect'!

ArchAngelCD said:

So just because I choose to carry a revolver for SD I'm a simpleton? I think not. Not much bothers me but what you posted is a little condescending.

Firing a short barrel revolver with a DA trigger well is much more challenging that most semi-auto pistols. It requires a lot of practice.

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Hmm. I think you should read the post more carefully. Nothing I wrote says anything about what you inferred. And I stand by it. A revolver is easier to understand and operate at the most straightforward mechanical level. Beyond that simple statement I did not extend. I shoot both by the way so my application to Mensa must have been lost in the mail.

murf said:

psi was never used in elmer keith's day, they used cup (copper units of pressure). regardless, the standard 38/44 load pushed a 158 grain bullet out the muzzle @ 1200 fps, or thereabouts. the 357 magnum pushes the same bullet @ 1500 fps, or thereabouts.

murf

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It's true they crushed copper, but I Keith did not do that himself. At one point he sent some cartridges out to have them tested. I could not find the figure I read referenced before which is why I wrote "about..." I did find where Gun Digest summarized the results without citing a source:

"Using a .38/44 Heavy Duty, Keith found he could simply not induce the big gun to come unglued, even with his home-brewed .38 Special loads that generated a ferocious 42,000 CUP."

We can also re-create Keith's loads based on his load data, and then test them with modern (psi) equipment.

According to Gun Digest, "Actually, he and Sharpe both pushed the Special to its redline separately with heavier bullets and bigger charges. And the time was ripe to take the cartridge to its ballistic limits. Smith & Wesson released its N-frame .38/44 revolvers in the early 1930s, engineered to weather the high pressure of hot .38 loads. For a short time there was a .38/44 cartridge, simply a .38 Special loaded to produce around 1,150 fps muzzle velocity. Sharpe and Keith took advantage of the beefed-up revolvers, cooking up rounds approaching 1,400 fps at the muzzle with a 158-grain bullet."

I'm not disputing that factory .38/44's were just as you say they were. But I'm backing up my assertion that the .38 Special case is capable of quite a bit more and very close to the .357 Magnum. What I'll get to in my next reply is how the extra case capacity of the .357's longer case is particularly useful with the bulky "magnum" slow powders (like H110 etc.) and that those powders offer minimal advantage in short barrels (3" or less).

mcb said:

I have had 38 Special loads in the past that burned so poorly that they left partial burnt powder in the cylinder and barrel and resulted in enough grains in the cylinder that it made reloads difficult.

Go offer to sweep up the range floor, ahead of the shooting line, at the local indoor shooting range and you will be amazed at the amount of partial burnt powder grains you will find on the floor. I have half filled a five gallon bucket with partial burnt powder swept up from a larger indoor range after about 25,000 rds where fired since the previous sweeping. Handguns often do not burn all the powder and the shorter the barrel the worst it is. Hence one of the reasons ammunition is made specifically for short barreled handguns.

Everyone believes a wind-tunnel data except the engineer that did it, no one believes the CFD (Computation Fluid Dynamics) data except the engineer that did it...

I have had QuickLoads work too well for me on too many different loads to simply not believe it out of hand. I have used it to create safe loads for components that had no existing data to start from. The QuickLoad data was later confirmed with real world chronograph and pressure measurements. Can you screw QuickLoads up? Sure, like most computer programs garbage in, gets you garbage out. That said the mathematical models underlying QuickLoads is based on some of the latest internal ballistics models currently being use. If you have taken the time to understand the models the program is based on you can enter good data and get good data out.

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thought you might find this interesting as I think you are the engineering/chemist type: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t5h990t7g&view=1up&seq=8

I also think the black stuff left by the firearms at the shooting range may be the black stuff we all clean out of our guns once in a while.

luck,

murf

p.s. you can download the book and read it at you leisure as there is a lot to digest

labnoti said:

It's true they crushed copper, but I Keith did not do that himself. At one point he sent some cartridges out to have them tested. I could not find the figure I read referenced before which is why I wrote "about..." I did find where Gun Digest summarized the results without citing a source:

"Using a .38/44 Heavy Duty, Keith found he could simply not induce the big gun to come unglued, even with his home-brewed .38 Special loads that generated a ferocious 42,000 CUP."

We can also re-create Keith's loads based on his load data, and then test them with modern (psi) equipment.

According to Gun Digest, "Actually, he and Sharpe both pushed the Special to its redline separately with heavier bullets and bigger charges. And the time was ripe to take the cartridge to its ballistic limits. Smith & Wesson released its N-frame .38/44 revolvers in the early 1930s, engineered to weather the high pressure of hot .38 loads. For a short time there was a .38/44 cartridge, simply a .38 Special loaded to produce around 1,150 fps muzzle velocity. Sharpe and Keith took advantage of the beefed-up revolvers, cooking up rounds approaching 1,400 fps at the muzzle with a 158-grain bullet."

I'm not disputing that factory .38/44's were just as you say they were. But I'm backing up my assertion that the .38 Special case is capable of quite a bit more and very close to the .357 Magnum. What I'll get to in my next reply is how the extra case capacity of the .357's longer case is particularly useful with the bulky "magnum" slow powders (like H110 etc.) and that those powders offer minimal advantage in short barrels (3" or less).

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is this helpful: http://sixguns.com/tests/tt38spcl.htm

and this: http://www.elmerkeithshoot.org/AmericanRifleman/Keith357.pdf

luck,

murf

roscoe said:

As a slide-rule collector, I say 'perfect'!

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I have four slide rules, two passed down from my father and two I have bought since. To the joy of my physics professor and jeering from my classmates I did second semester of physics in college with the pictured Pickett, despite the HP-48SX I also had in my bag.

So if the 6-shot double action 38 Special is slide rule would that make the 8-shot moonclip fed revolver a Curta???

roscoe said:

Hmm. I think you should read the post more carefully. Nothing I wrote says anything about what you inferred. And I stand by it. A revolver is easier to understand and operate at the most straightforward mechanical level. Beyond that simple statement I did not extend. I shoot both by the way so my application to Mensa must have been lost in the mail.

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A revolver might be easier to understand but that does not make it easier to be effective. Take a novice shooter with basic gun handling and marksman skills to an IDPA match and the contrast between running a revolver vs a semi-auto become night and day. Do it at a USPSA match and the contrast between the two is turned up to eleven. When you put the time constraint, moving, difficult shooting positions and moving targets into the mix the short coming of the revolver rear their ugly head in many ways.

murf said:

thought you might find this interesting as I think you are the engineering/chemist type: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t5h990t7g&view=1up&seq=8

I also think the black stuff left by the firearms at the shooting range may be the black stuff we all clean out of our guns once in a while.

luck,

murf

p.s. you can download the book and read it at you leisure as there is a lot to digest

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Thanks for the book link. I love the old technical papers and books. I found a larger collection of internal and external ballistic papers from the late 1800's into the 19-oughts on Google books and that has been a great read. I found a particular paper where the authors were still arguing if the drag function should have a linear and/or cubic velocity term in it to go with the now commonly accepted squared velocity term we use to model drag. Some of the early methods for measuring pressure and velocity were pretty interesting too.

As for the powder clean up it was clearly partially burnt powder as the grain shapes (flakes, stick and ball) were still identifiable in with the other stuff that was just soot and debris. There was a far amount of 380 ACP shot over that time period thus making that clean up especially ladened with partial burnt powder. This partial burnt powder residue from handguns is a real problem for indoor ranges. Improper clean up, especially if this partial burnt powder ends up into some aspect of the ventilation system, has burnt down more than one indoor range down when an ignition source comes along.

For me, the best quantifiable evidence of power burn percentage for a given load in a given barrel length are the calculated results from Quickload. Others have already pointed out subjective evidence such as the fireball from the combustion (burning) of the powder that is blown out of the barrel after the bullet leaves. The fireball is strong evidence that combustion had not completed or ceased while the bullet was still in the barrel.

Some powders, notably IMR4427, produce powder skeletons that are grain-shaped but will not combust at atmospheric pressure. Other powders do not noticeably produce these. But my earlier point is not about powder skeletons or unburnt powder. It is about combustion time. A book max load of slow magnum powders (IMR4227, H110, W296, Lil'Gun etc.) will only have completed about 50% combustion by the time a 158-grain bullet's base exits the muzzle of a 1.875" barrel (S&W Model 340). Because of this, the muzzle velocity produced by a book max load of H110 in such a short barrel is only about 2.5% faster than a book max load of HS-6, whereas in a 10" barrel, the H110 load can be as much as 20% faster than the HS-6 load.

A book max load of the magnum powders often uses more than the capacity of the .357 case and is a compressed load. For these powders, the smaller .38 Special case substantially diminishes the potential velocity. For the less bulky powders like Longshot or HS-6, a book max load only fills about 65% of the case. These loads can fit into a .38 Special case, reduced as necessary so as not to exceed maximum peak pressure with the slightly more deeply seated bullet, and will deliver practically the same performance as they would in a .357 case.

Ratshooter said:

I have always wondered why someone didn't add a rim to the 40S&W or the 10mm and load it with 180gr bullets and make a revolver for it that didn't need the stupid moon clips. An L frame sized gun should have been able to hold 6 of those and while the recoil would have been stiffer than the 38 special it should have been less than a full bore 357 with a lot less blast. And we already have the load data.

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They do make rimmed .40's, it's called the .38-40. It's actually 40 caliber, not 38, shoots 180g bullets, and its ballistics are similar to a .40 S&W. Several new guns are still chambered in it. A modern DA revolver could certainly handle it loaded to 10mm pressures.

mcb said:

I have four slide rules, two passed down from my father and two I have bought since. To the joy of my physics professor and jeering from my classmates I did second semester of physics in college with the pictured Pickett, despite the HP-48SX I also had in my bag.

So if the 6-shot double action 38 Special is slide rule would that make the 8-shot moonclip fed revolver a Curta???


A revolver might be easier to understand but that does not make it easier to be effective. Take a novice shooter with basic gun handling and marksman skills to an IDPA match and the contrast between running a revolver vs a semi-auto become night and day. Do it at a USPSA match and the contrast between the two is turned up to eleven. When you put the time constraint, moving, difficult shooting positions and moving targets into the mix the short coming of the revolver rear their ugly head in many ways.

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Oh, I agree - an autoloader is clearly a better firearm in practice. But a revolver is loaded or not, and that is it. For a non-mechanical person, having to think about whether there is a magazine loaded, and inserted, and whether a round is chambered, and whether the safety is on (if there is one), can be a lot and is probably too much for some to think about under pressure. A revolver is like a computer mouse: point and click. Yes, it might not be as accurate for most, given the double-action trigger, but will go bang, and that is probably what matters for most people.

My dream is to get one of the Model 1 Curtas, but, since I got kids headed off to college soon, it will have to wait. I am an analog math nerd, and have a nice analog theodolite and a sextant that I threaten the kids with regularly. My best slide rule is a Hughes-Owens Log-Log, but I also have a Concise circular trig slide rule that is pretty cool.

The analog instinct has also driven be to black powder revolver shooting, with the goal of producing each element: slug, powder, and cap (the scariest part).

Speedo66 said:

They do make rimmed .40's, it's called the .38-40. It's actually 40 caliber, not 38, shoots 180g bullets, and its ballistics are similar to a .40 S&W. Several new guns are still chambered in it. A modern DA revolver could certainly handle it loaded to 10mm pressures.

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I am well aware of the 38WCF round. And yes they did make rifle only loads at one time. And I am sure a few found their way into some of the old iron frame Colts from the 1800s and may have wrecked the gun. I really don't think anyone is going to make a 38/40 gun these days and then sell rounds loaded to 10mm pressures that may find their way in to the cylinders or chamber of some old Winchester or Colt.

And 38/40 brass is thin. It was reported the old hot rifle only loads pretty much wrecked the brass the first firing. Or the second loading for sure. So no loading to 10mm pressures with that brass.

Speedo66 said:

They do make rimmed .40's, it's called the .38-40. It's actually 40 caliber, not 38, shoots 180g bullets, and its ballistics are similar to a .40 S&W. Several new guns are still chambered in it. A modern DA revolver could certainly handle it loaded to 10mm pressures.

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If I'm not mistaken Ruger made a run of convertible Blackhawks in .38-40/10mm a couple of decades ago.

mcb, I have read about using a third derivative of velocity for variable acceleration scenarios. I didn't know the ballisticians were doing that.

I didn't know about the range burnings caused by unburned powder. I know there is no such thing as "complete", so I will have to change my thinking here. thanks for the "heads up".

murf

just to add: I am not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination. the extent of my formal science education is high school physics, chemistry and calculus and college statistics. although, I do read a lot.

found an article on gunpowder residue: https://www.researchgate.net/public...l_characteristics_of_the_ammunition_gunpowder

i'm now convinced about unburned powder out the end of the barrel. still not believing the computer model can predict how much.

murf

WestKentucky said:

The 32s were effective enough for a long time, but then car doors became shields and people became bulletproof...

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Much like elk now need a .338 mag. to die.

ontarget said:

The way I see it the gun/cartridge combo has less to do with effectiveness than the shooter does. 38Spl falls somewhere between .380 and 9mm on the power scale and they are both very effective defense rounds. 38Spl is also a very effective defense round. I tend to agree that in a lot of cases capacity is used to cover for lack of skill. I'm totally content with 5 shots at the ready. Others may feel 17 is what they are comfortable with. On a soft target I don't think the recipient will be able to tell the difference between 9mm or 38 Spl.

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Roger that! I concur completely. If all I had was a 38 Special when the stuff hit the fan I wouldn’t go running around feeling sorry for myself. Based on what I’ve read, and heard from police officers, where civilians are concerned the exchange is going to be at bad breath distances and will be over in a matter of seconds. From 380 on up to the heavier stuff, assuming modern high performance ammunition, shot placement has much more to do with it than caliber. Practice, practice, practice!