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

SAAMI allows the .338 Winchester Magnum to have a MAP of 64,000 PSI.
The .416 RemMag has a SAAMI MAP of 65,000 PSI.
The .458 WinMag has a SAAMI MAP of only 60,000 PSI.
The .458 Lott has a SAAMI MAP of 62,500 PSI.

The standard SAAMI .458 WinMag is only 50 fps behind the SAAMI .458 Lott,
when both are kept on their respective SAAMI leashes.
Easy to see how the .458 WM+ "unleashed" is more powerful than the SAAMI .458 Lott.

The Viet Minh sniper that fell to the .44 did not learn that lesson in time to save his bacon.

A review of how versatile a standard SAAMI .458 WinMag can be with creative handloading.



The pointy bullet as long as 3.540" COL
and the big-meplat FN as long as 3.500" COL
can be loaded off the top of the box, chambered and ejected even if not fired:



Here is an old 400-gr TSX loaded to 3.540" COL, cartridge is in the bolt face above,
push bolt forward to chamber,
and below the bolt is being retracted and cartridge is starting to eject:



The single-loaded cartridge swings free:



All the ammo in the stock carrier will work through the magazine, 300-grainer to 500-grainers here,
but bullets from 250-grainer to 600-grainer are practical:



Save the longer COL .458 WM+ loads for putting the SAAMI .458 Lott in its place.

I had sent this to you in a PM a little bit ago.
But, for The Mission here it is again

Ron can I steal your Charles Askins post? The one containing the information on Lott’s buffalo and Johnson buying a 458 Winchester. I want to use it in a AfricanHunting.com, 458 discussion.
By the way, I picked up another 458 Winchester last week.
A New Haven Classic Super Express, 22” barrel.
Outstanding condition. I had a Super Express in 375 H&H years ago, we never bonded, sold it to a friend.
But, I always thought the Super Express with the 22” barrel was my idea of what a 458 should be. I never managed to acquire one, until now.

Larry

Sir Larry,
Please do take whatever you want to fling at the wall over there, and give us a link so we may spectate.
I am guessing that your "Sir Name" for Knighthood is Sir Larry ?
You are the 21rst Knight of the .458 Winchester Brotherhood,
unless you refuse this great honor.

Congratulations on the Winchester M70 Classic Super Express .458 Winchester Magnum.
You are blessed.

Old Fugly the .458 Lott fouling of a MkX Whitworth .458 WinMag may be ready come Friday.
I am learning to live with it by doing it as an imitation of Phil Shoemaker's Old Ugly the .458 WinMag.
Will use it for very light bullets and birdshot loads where the longer brass is a help.
But wait !
Actually Old Fugly is better than a SAAMI .458 Lott,
because it was made from a .458 WinMag rechambered for 2.8" brass.
Its chamber is exactly like the .458 Lott wildcat that Jack built, with .458 WinMag throat.
Distance from bolt face to end of leade is same as on a SAAMI .458 WinMag.

And now, I am wondering if I can screw the barrel off of a .458 B&M short action SC-made M70 (for .300 WSM)
and screw it onto the action of a .338 WinMag SC-made M70 All Weather ?
My .458 B&M barrel twist is 1:10" and has a short 19.75" length !
The throat might be extended to full SAAMI .458 WM.
Thus the .458 B&M+ might be born: Long COL for it is 3.340" or maybe 3.395".
Might equal the longer-barreled .458 WM+ and do it with a short barrel.
When I pick up Old Fugly, I will show the .458 B&M M70 and the .338 WinMag M70 to GUNSMITH.
See if he can do it ...
Will just have to add a "+" stamp to the barrel engraving: .458 B&M+
That is short for ".458 B&M + Winchester Magnum Throat."

+1........

Thank you Sir Ron.
The membership to the brotherhood is most gratefully accepted!!!.

That is good stuff buddy. The old 338 Win is among the top of my favorites. Me and an old P64 338 have gotten along on many a good adventure. It’s is the chips are down rifle.

CZ550 explained this to me years ago.

Before my first Zambezi safari I obtained a .458 Winchester and asked about handloads on the 24HCF Africa site. Several of the replies recommended I should immediately get a gunsmith to ream it out to .458 Lott. Instead I loaded the .458 with AA2230 to 2250 fps with North Fork 450 grain flat nosed solids and 450grain TSXs. With this I killed an elephant, a buffalo, and a hippo. good to see that North forks are now available again.

IMHO Jack Lott was an idiot. He claimed he needed to invent the Lott because he had failed to kill a buffalo with 14 shots (I believe it was) from a .458 Winchester. That was just lousy shooting in my opinion. Yet a whole bunch of hunters became convinced that only the Lott was powerful enough for dangerous game. Good salesman, that Jack.

I don't understand why Winchester reduced the velocity of its factory loads. Powder clumping due to compressed loads and heat? I think that's a joke. I used to shoot matches at Camp Perry. All loads were compressed. And it's at least as hot at Camp Perry in August as it is in Africa during the hunting months. After all we don't use cordite any more, and the .458 Winchester never did.

Another red herring (in my opinion) was all the badmouthing of push feed. My rifle was push feed. Posters claimed it would not cycle upside down (false) and it was bad because of Remington's 700 extractor (irrelevant). It never occurred to these guys that every military rifle designed in the last 120 years has been push feed.

The recent posts about 400 grain bullets are interesting. I experimented a lot with 350 grain TSXs. I could easily get 2750 fps. The computer claimed it hit with 3000 foot pounds of energy, at 300 yards. A 30-06 on steroids. The only problem was it shot about 6" lower at 100 yards than the heavier 450 grain bullets. This was because (I think) that the 450s stayed in the barrel longer and thus the muzzle rose higher. I didn't take any 350s to Africa because I didn't want to be changing elevation all the time. But I think it would be a danged fine load for elk or moose.

The .338 Win Mag is one heck of an elk killer, Texas heart shot at departing bull took the starch out of him.:

Yes sir. It is among my favorite when the chips are down.

Well done Sir Indy.
Or would you prefer a different Sir Name, as Knight of the .458 Winchester Magnum Brotherhood, well earned.
Buy a buy a donkey, as Elvis would say in Afrikaans, as he picked up his order to go at the burger shack in Botswana.

Sir Charles and Sir Scotty,
Buy a donkey to you both.
Please do tell of the bullets used in your .338 WinMags.
Favorite handloads ?
If the younger brother of the .458 WinMag was good enough for Col. Askins, it is good enough for me.
I will think twice before screwing off a .338 WinMag barrel to replace it with a .458 B&M+ barrel.

Speaking of Col. Askins, he was not a West Pointer.
He joked about existence of a WPPA, a West Point Protective Association.
They came to the aid of West Pointers whenever he tried to relieve them of their commands due to incompetence.
I think General Austin is enjoying the WPPA currently, running a con game for Joke Biden, Joke Milley and Joke McKenzie.

Sir John,
You might find some of this interesting:











A .458" diameter right cylinder displaces 41.66 grains of water for each one inch of its height/length/seating depth.
Correcting the 2.4891" long R-P brass to 2.5000" length makes the R-P .458 WinMag brass have 95.3 grains gross water.
The Quality Cartridge .458 B&M brass was measured at the same sitting with same technique.
It is virtually identical in case capacity at 95.0 grains H2O gross, only 0.3 grains smaller,
for these compared lots of once-fired, not-resized brass.



The short and light CEB brass bullets are good in sub 3.000" COL .458 B&M, but would be plumb peculiar in a .458 B&M+.

The short COL .458 B&M with short throat, may be unleashed in a 3.4" magazine length and a .458 WM throat.



Longer COLs can be worked through the magazine as well as single loaded like with a SAAMI .458 WM.



The North Fork 450-gr SP works in either .458 B&M or .458 B&M+.



The TSX bullets of 450-gr and 500-gr weight have ogives too long to fit inside of 3.000" COL.
The 350-gr TSX works well in the .458 B&M due to its lesser nose/ogive projection.



I do not have exact specs on the .458 B&M. They were proprietary secrets last time I checked.
But this drawing came out close to the actual measured brass gross H20,
for R-P and Quality Cartridge brass averaging about 2.240" in length.
The R-P .458 WM brass lot measured in the post preceding this about identical,
and a fraction of a grain bigger if allowed to grow to 2.500",
always safe in a SAAMI .458 WM.
Both are about 95 grains H20 gross, once-fired and not resized.





BTW,
Old Fugly the .458 Lott has her new safety, still needs a rustoleum camo job, a flashlight hanger Picatinny,
and some fluorescent white tape on the barrel and scope for night sight use.

The Lottite Protective Association (LPA) is active over at africahuntingdotcom.
Mentioning 24hrcampfiredotcom over there will get you censored.

I looked because Sir Larry copied and pasted there, and this has clarified the Walter Johnson identified by Col. Askins on the 1970 Botswana safari.
Must have been Wally Johnson, Sr.'s son Walter Johnson, Jr.

Someone over there said: "Hopefully it's not that guy that thanks you for contributing to the mission. He deserves a perpetual swift kick in the pants until Jesus returns."

I replied there:
"Sir, I resemble that remark.
However The Mission at a certain Arab-owned website became The Crusade at **NOT**PERMITTED**.
Now, the war is over. The .458 Winchester Magnum is truly victorious. The WinMag won.
Now we celebrate The Brotherhood of the .458 Winchester Magnum.
Honorary Knighthood in this Brotherhood is part of that celebration.

And here is what I said about the confusion over Wally, Sr. versus Walter, Jr.:
****************************************************************************************
Nowhere in the Capstick book does Wally deny ever owning a .458 Winchester Magnum.

On page 57 he did say this, circa 1987-1988, when he was 75 years of age:

"I still consider and always will consider the .375 Holland & Holland Magnum as 'the only gun.'
In fact, I shot many hundreds of buffalo with the 9.3mm Mauser to save .375 ammo. I had no problems, but I would have preferred the .375 if I could have spared the ammo."

The book mentions Walter Junior being a PH in Botswana about 1970, so about age 30 y.o., before Senior pitched up there maybe. The book (Wally) said Walter Junior was using his own .458 to stop charging hippos, etc., page 112.

So Askins said it was "Walter Johnson" with the M70 African .458 Winchester Magnum during the 1970 safari in Botswana.
Must have been Wally's son, most likely was. Askins can be sketchy.
But I cannot find Wally denying ever owning a .458 WinMag in his recountings within the Capstick book.

There is a passage about Wally guiding two Americans with their wives in Mozambique, no year specified, probably pre-1970 from the context.
One of Wally's trackers was carrying "a spare.458 Winchester Magnum caliber and I knew it was stoked with solid 500-grain bullets." So said Wally.
One of the clients wounded a cape buffalo. PH Wally and the two clients followed it.
It charged from the "long grass" at 20 yards and Wally yelled for all to fire. The clients shot once each then one's magazine opened and dumped and the other's rifle "had a lock-tight jam!"
Wally got off 3 shots before the buffalo hit him, all good shots,
and he had a misfire/dud for a fourth shot with muzzle pressed into the buffalo's face,
later attributed to dirty rifle, and old ammo, worked fine after cleaning thoroughly and with fresh lot of ammo.
No calibers specified for any rifles except the spare .458.
Wally was probably carrying his .375 H&H, tracker carried Wally's "spare .458" ?
Client Gerry Knight ("... to whom I owe my life" said Wally) took the spare .458 and shot the buffalo off of Wally. Pp. 169-173.

One more bit from over there:
**********************************
When starting out, youngster Wally Senior hunted lion with his trusty .30-30 WCF lever action, elephant with a .30-'06 Springfield and upwards in caliber.
From page 82 of the Capstick book of interviews with Wally:

"... I only had a .30-'06. Guns were hard to get and I was really broke. Later I was able to buy a Brennecke 11.2 X 72mm rifle, along with fifty cartridges. But it was such a weird caliberfor Mozambique, although a good one, that when I was out of ammo I was out of business."

I think Wally was kissing up to Capstick's penchant for the .375 H&H throughout that book.
I do not think he had any disdain for the .458 Winchester Magnum.
If guns and ammo were so hard to get, he would most likely have grabbed any .458 WinMag that came along, to have as a "spare" to be carried by his tracker while he carried his beloved .375 H&H M70 Winchester.

No, Wally did not literally trade in his .375 H&H for a .458 WinMag.
But the fact that his favorite rifle survived to be offered for sale by his family after his death,
that must mean that it had been sent ahead with his son Walter to Botswana,
during the Mozambican bush war of Marxist aggression.
When Wally finally got out of Mozambique he lost everything but the clothes on his back and a few bills in his wallet.
The cache of guns and ammo he had buried under a bush in his yard were dug up by the thugs.
The gold bars hidden in the butter pats in his home freezer were consumed at a forced lunch for the thugs too.

Wally used Jack Lott's .458 WinMag to save Jack Lott from a buffalo goring in 1959.
Client Gerry Knight used Wally's "spare .458" to save Wally from a buffalo goring a few years later in Mozambique.
Ironic.
I bet Wally Johnson had at least a little fondness for the .458 WinMag, even if he professed to love the .375 H&H more.

Sir Indy is fine with me.