Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Express Rifles and Big Bores Only The great 458 Winchester. Everyone should own one at least once

Parried another Lottite thrust in a joust at AH:

I think (CENSORED Lottite's handle) is upset that he cannot load his .458 Lott to as short a length as the .458 WinMag,
yet the SAAMI/CIP .458 WinMag chamber can be loaded to longer COL than the current SAAMI/CIP .458 Lott chamber.
Shooting non-SAAMI ammo in a SAAMI .458 WinMag chamber is not fair, according to (CENSORED).

The biggest shame of the .458 Lott is that Jack Lott used a
1949-designed .450 Watts Magnum chamber reamer for 2.850" brass
in a .458 WinMag barrel and called it what he did, after shortening the brass to 2.800" in 1971.
Then Art Alphin came along and short-throated it for SAAMI version of 1998.
Art must have gotten the idea from his Army days when he got short-sheeted by barracks mates.
Art also stole the .510 Buhmiller Magnum and called it the .500 A-Square.





Nice article by Don Heath aka Ganyana
in AFRICAN HUNTER Vol. 12 No. 3.
Picture above from that article.

At least James Watts told WRAC in 1954 that it was good of them to call the .450 Watts Short by a new name, ".458 Winchester Magnum" finally released in 1956.
WRAC might even be responsible for throating it that way.

Also great to see "A late 1950's vintage .450 Watts magnum factory load."
Funny that the .450 Watts brass looks to have been trimmed to shorter length than the "modern .458 Lott round."

Could it be possible that some ammo factory trimmed .450 Watts Magnum brass to less than 2.850" and still called it a .450 Watts Magnum ?

I no longer weep about having mutilated a .458 WinMag by re-chambering to .458 Lott.
All it took was renaming it to ".458 Watts Express."

I am very happy with my .458 Watts Express which was made by running a SAAMI .458 Lott reamer
into a SAAMI .458 Winchester Magnum rifle with no set-back of the barrel.
That cleans up a SAAMI .458 Lott throat, transforming it to leade-only.
A totally new cartridge !
Slightly different and better than the original wildcat Jack Lott did.
It has chamber length of only 2.810" instead of the 2.870" chamber length of the first ".458 Lott."
Trimming my brass to 2.790" makes more sense.

The .458 Watts Express and the SAAMI .458 Lott are both better for imitating a .410 shotgun.
You can get a bit more birdshot into the 2.8" case than the 2.5" case.