History on the .357 Magnum?

[The Rabbi]

In a great book called The Snubby Revolver the author mentions in passing that PDs adopted the 125gr SJHP for the .357Magnum to take care of performance problems they were having with those guns.
What were the performance problems?
What had they used initially and previously to the 125gr?

I personally find the 125gr hard to shoot--very noisy with a lot of recoil and noise (and flash).
Thanks.

 

[Cosmoline]

As far as I know, they were using 158 grain loads. I remember Elmer Keith commenting that he had limited faith in the .357 as a law enforcement round, but that was in connection with pushing his .41 Magnum. The new stuff in the 158 and 180 grain range from Corbon, Buf. Bore and others blows the 125 zippers out of the water IMHO. The bullets are better, the velocities higher and performance better than anything available before. I have very little faith in the 125 high velocity loads. They fragment too quickly and are just too light.

 

[The Rabbi]

I had the vague impression they were using 158gr SWC and the problem was over-penetration. I dont see how moving to a 180gr bullet would solve that.

 

[Magnum88C]

Since the book is about snubbies, it was probably an expansion problem with the 158s due to lower velocities.

There's also the fact that the .357 has been seriously downloaded from its original trim. The Buffalo Bore 158s are close to the original specs for the magnum, and IMHO what the magnum should be loaded like, as that's what gave it its reputation, not the lightweight bullets..

 

[Cosmoline]

Not 180 grain SWC's, but HP's. There are several really brutal rounds out there now being sold for hog and black bear hunting. But as was discussed in a very lengthy thread a few months back, a round that will drop a hog will drop a man just fine. The dogma that handgun rounds should fall apart on impact is absurd. It makes every bit as much sense as wanting hunting rounds to fragment in game and fail to penetrate. Killing is killing is killing is killing. To bring down man or beast in short order you have to destroy the CNS or cause a dramatic loss in blood pressure (aka "shock"). We know exactly how to do this in medium size thin skinned game, but we suddenly forget all these hard won lessons when it comes to people.

 

[Standing Wolf]

We know exactly how to do this in medium size thin skinned game, but we suddenly forget all these hard won lessons when it comes to people.

Sad to say, you've hit the nail squarely on the proverbial "head."

 

[Old Fuff]

The original .357 Magnum that came out in 1935 used a soft lead 158 grain semi-wadcutter. When fired out of a 8 3/4 inch barrel into a block of paraffin the nose would mushroom to .50 caliber, even though the slug was a solid point. It also badly leaded the barrel. I can remember scrubbing out a bore and having the lead come out in strips!

There were no snubbies as such, as the shortest length you could get on a S&W was 3 1/2 inches. Colt's standard (shortest) length was 4 inches on their New Sevice/Shooting Master models, but they would make anything a customer wanted.

After the war, Lee Jurras started the Super-Vel Company, and along with Mj. George Nonte started pushing the concept of lightweight/high velocity handgun loads using jacketed hollow-point bullets, particularly to the law enforcement community. George was a great salesman, and adept a blowing up water-filled milk jugs. He would invite some onlooking cop to take a shot at a water jug with his service revolver - usually loaded with the very slow standard police .38 Special load with a 158 grain LRN bullet. It would put a hole through the jug and the water would run our - eventually. Then George would hit the next jug with a Super Vel round and blow out the whole back with a spray of colored water. Thereafter the police chiefs that were in attendance couldn't order Lee's stuff fast enough.

Anyway that's where the 125 grain .357 loads first came from, along with S&W's model 19 with a 2 1/2 in barrel. Then we had a true .357 snubby.

 

[The Rabbi]

I knew we'd get the voice of authority here. I'll bet Old Fuff remembers being armorer when PDs still issued Peacemakers.

 

[ChristopherG]

I remember Elmer Keith commenting that he had limited faith in the .357 as a law enforcement round, but that was in connection with pushing his .41 Magnum.

Keith was dissatisfied with the .357 well before this; he just didn't like the relatively small bullet (even the hot 158 SWC Fuff describes), and expressed his preference for the traditional .45 colt load over it in Sixguns, before the .41 was a gleam in his or Bill Jordan's eye.

 

[Old Fuff]

When the Old Fuff was an armorer they parceled out percussion caps, except for some darn-blasted, stuck-in-the-mud troops that insisted on chipping flints ... (Not a bad idea, they came free) ...

The .41 Magnum was originally pushed by Bill Jordan and Skeeter Skelton, both of whom were fine law enforcement officers with considerable experience. However they didn't get what they wanted. Both men visualized a true .401 diameter bullet, weighing around 180 to 200 grains, with a muzzle velocity around 1000 FPS. Smith & Wesson upped both the bullet size (to .410 diameter) and velocity 1400 FPS so that it would only work in their N-frame platform and competitors such as Colt and Ruger couldn't get into the act. The resulting cartridge had much merit, but not for law enforcement, which was supposed to be its intended market.

Elmer Keith's private opinion, as he expressed it to me, was that the .41 Magnum would fail, because he couldn't believe that people would buy a .41 when they could get a .44 in the same package. He was largely right, as was usually the case. On the other hand he fully supported what Skeeter and Bill were trying to get, and thought it would be superior to any .38 Special or .357 Magnum that it was intended to replace.

At approximately the same time Colt was experimenting with a cartridge that was identical to what the three gentlemen wanted, and tried it out in a converted Python. This cartridge was based on the old .41 Long Colt round, that was once offered in the Army Special. (That had a cylinder and frame similar to the Python, but with fixed sights.) But unfortunately Colt (again as usual) didn't go anywhere.

 

[The Rabbi]

This is really interesting because it shows the "what might have been" side of things.
If I remember early on the .44spc was a standard kind of round. I often wondered why people went away from the 40 calibre platform for the 30 calibre. Colt's idea, as presented here, makes perfect sense to me. But I guess Colt seldom missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity (to paraphrase Abba Eban).

 

[Old Fuff]

The .38 Special is descended from the .38 Long Colt, that originated in 1877 in Colt's first double-action revolver (the so called Lightning - but not so named by Colt) and later became a U.S. military service cartridge in 1889.

This cartridge in turn is descended from the Colt .38 C.F. that was used in earlier cartridge conversions of model 1851 Navy cap & ball revolvers. In a very general sense it could be said that .38 Special revolvers (and by extension .357 Magnum's) are the modernized equivalent of Colt's famous .36 Navy model revolvers.

Smith & Wesson's .44 cartridges started in 1869 with the .44 American, and S&W's first Top-Break revolver. These used a star extractor similar to those found in modern revolvers that extract all or the cartridges at once.

Consequently the cartridge needs (or at least should have) a heavier rim then that used on cartridges designed to be used in solid-framed Colt's that used a rod ejector that ejected the spent cases one-at-a-time. It is interesting to note that the .44 Russian/.44 Special/.44 Magnum rounds all have the same rim diameter (.514) as the .45 Colt (.512) but a smaller body then the .45 Colt (.457 vs. .480), which is one reason I prefer the .44 Special or Magnum in double-action revolvers over the .45 Colt. In single-action guns it makes no difference.

 

[Elmer]

Smith & Wesson upped both the bullet size (to .410 diameter) and velocity 1400 FPS so that it would only work in their N-frame platform and competitors such as Colt and Ruger couldn't get into the act.

Since Ruger wasn't even in the double action revolver business yet, and the Blackhawk was plenty strong enough for the .41 Magnum, (it had already been chambered in .44 Magnum for years), how was this supposed to keep them out of the act?

 

[Old Fuff]

Elmer:

Smith & Wesson believed at the time that if law enforcement did indeed switch over to a .40 caliber cartridge neither Colt or Ruger would stay out of the market for long. They may (or may not) have been aware that Colt was working on a .40 round themselves. In any case they wanted to make it as hard for any competition as they could. There was no way they could build a six-shot .40 on the K-frame, which at the time left them with the option of either making a new one slightly larger the Colt's Python, or using the N-frame that they had. If, as they did, go to the N-frame there was no reason from they're point of view to not go to the .410 sized bullet.

 

[timothy75]

Smith also knew the single action blackhawk would not be acceptable as a police gun in 41mag. COSMOLINE you cant say killing animals and people are done the same way. Yes cns or blood loss but humans on average are only 10 to12 inches thick. Hogs can be 10 feet long. Penetration is great for killing game but bad for stopping humans. The fast moving 125gr 357s penetrate about a foot and give a perfect football shape wound channel. Sounds perfect to me.

 

[Elmer]

Smith also knew the single action blackhawk would not be acceptable as a police gun in 41mag.

Ahhh... Tim.. I'm old, but I never carried a single action on duty....

Since Ruger wasn't even in the double action business yet, my point was, I don't think Smith thought a new caliber would keep Ruger out of it. If the caliber had been a success, Ruger could have just as easily made the Security Six series around it, instead of the .357. It was years later before even the first prototypes were built.

Heck, I don't think S&W even thought Ruger was a potential threat back in those days. They were pretty dismissive of them, even after the Security Six came out.

That was S&W's biggest mistake. They had such a lock on the market, that they took the business for granted. They shipped crap guns, and treated customers like dog poop. They never believed cops would carry anything else. They lost some market share to Ruger in the revolver days, and we all know what happened when Beretta, SIG and Glock showed up to the party. It shouldn't have happened. They did it to themselves.

They learned though. The company has definitely turned themselves around. Course, it helps when it's being run by folks that actually like guns......

 

[The Rabbi]

That was S&W's biggest mistake. They had such a lock on the market, that they took the business for granted. They shipped crap guns, and treated customers like dog poop. They never believed cops would carry anything else. They lost some market share to Ruger in the revolver days, and we all know what happened when Beretta, SIG and Glock showed up to the party. It shouldn't have happened. They did it to themselves.

I thought that was Colt. In the 1930s Colt had the market for PDs and then lost it. Could be both I guess.

 

[Elmer]

I thought that was Colt. In the 1930s Colt had the market for PDs and then lost it. Could be both I guess.

You are correct. Smith took it away in the 50's and 60's. They ended up with the largest LE market share that any handgun company in the US ever had, only to piss it away.

History does repeat itself.......

 

[ChristopherG]

Isn't it a little misleading (I'm not saying intentionally so, at all; but at least it's confusing the issue) to talk about S&W losing the LE market without mentioning that this coincided with the transition away from revolvers? Wasn't it an issue of company focus (i.e., on the sixgun)?

I'm not suggesting they weren't caught flat on their feet by the changeover; but I am suggesting it's not as though all those 10 bajillion model 19's and model 10's just stopped working as designed. The biggest issue leading to S&W's loss of the LE market was surely that they were (correctly) perceived as being primarily a revolver manufacturer at a time when cops were being (hysterically?) told they needed more bullets.

Absent that change, do you really think they would have lost the bulk of the market to Ruger or anyone else?

 

[The Rabbi]

You make a good point.
Presumably they had good relations with PDs already and had significant "market penetration." If they were listening good they would have figured out that PDs were going to autos over semis. They did make semis, many models of which are even today used by PDs. So why didnt the PDs that used their revos then go and use their semis? I would say they were caught napping and didnt foresee what must have been obvious. They didnt have the marketing or the products on hand to make those sales.

 

[Elmer]

Smith lost significant market share in revolvers to Ruger and the Security Six series. When the GP100 .357 came out, (far too late...), testing done between the two companies clearly showed the Ruger to be a better gun. Law enforcement was losing faith with Smith, with even the New York Times running articles about their quality problems. NYPD, for a time, banned the further purchase of Smith revolvers, along with other agencies.

As to auto pistols, S&W had a high capacity, double action 9mm pistol, long before the transistion started. They actually took quite a bit of the early LE business that went to 9's.

But lack of quality control, and failure to listen to their customers, opened the door to off shore competition.

 

[Elmer]

You make a good point.
Presumably they had good relations with PDs already and had significant "market penetration." If they were listening good they would have figured out that PDs were going to autos over semis. They did make semis, many models of which are even today used by PDs. So why didnt the PDs that used their revos then go and use their semis? I would say they were caught napping and didnt foresee what must have been obvious. They didnt have the marketing or the products on hand to make those sales.

You pretty much have it nailed.....