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The exercise raises a question for which I have no answer. How did Col. Askins pull and reuse the bullets successfully for his .221 Askins? I define "successfully" as winning the championship at the match referenced previously. Did he sneak in a swage die we don't know about?

The gun was lightweight junk and went in the trash. The ammo, however,was interesting and Askins kept it. That ammo was a long skinny .22 center-fire round, close in dimensions to the old .22 WRF. Center-fire is the key word in this equation, because the Velo Dog cartridge easily made the definition of “any center-fire.” Askins was competing primarily with autos, using an early Match grade 1911 for the .45s stages and a Colt Woodsman for the .22 events. He had no choice but to use a .38 revolver for the center-fire, as did almost all other competitors. Charley wanted to use an auto for center-fire, but there were none available. So he made his own, using a wildcat .22 round based on the Velo Dog cartridge. First he had to get the dimension of the Velo Dog down to approximately the same as that of the .22 Long Rifle. This was very complicated and included shortening the case, reducing the diameter of the rim and reaming the case mouth to accept .22 bullets. Tedious, but it was not as hard as converting a King Woodsman to fire the stuff. Buchanan, an ace pistolsmith, changed the gun to center-fire, modified the breech face and extractor for the thicker rim, and then opened the chamber and modified the magazine feed lips for proper feeding. It was cut-and-try gunsmithing, but they made it work.

Dubbed the .221 Askins, the new round was an almost recoilless winner and the good Colonel started taking all the marbles in every match he entered. As Camp Perry approached, the word was out that Askins couldn't be beaten—his new gun and ammo raised his center-fire scores by an average of 9.7 points per string.

These were cheap revolvers that originated in France, intended for bicyclists as a defense against against dogs attacks. They fired a curious centerfire cartridge, the 5.5 Velo Dog, that was similar in size to the .22LR, but much longer- and it was a centerfire cartridge:



The Velo Dogs were loaded with a jacketed bullet, as opposed to the heeled lead bullets used in .22 rimfire cartridges. The bullet diameter was the same as the standard .22, but the case diameter was larger than the bore, like most modern cartridges.



Askins managed to buy up or otherwise acquire several thousand rounds of of these obsolete cartridges. He pulled the bullets on several hundred, and shortened them on a lathe to .22LR length. He then found a supplier of lead bullets in the correct size, a set of reloading dies, and had one of his Colt Woodsman pistols modified to take the new cartridge, which he dubbed the .221 Askins. His load was a cast lead semi-wadcutter over about 1.5gr of Bullseye or DuPont #5, depending which version of the story you read, and with it he won the All-Around pistol championship in 1937. Following that match, the NRA amended the "any centerfire" pistol rules to read "any centerfire (.32 caliber and above.)"