Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Handguns 44 Mag/45 Colt

I don't reload yet but have always heard that the 45 Colt actually had more potential with reloads due to case capacity. That being said, while at Cabelas yesterday, I was looking at some of the Buffalo Bore offerings and noticed the heaviest 44 Mag +P+ offering had a 340gr bullet going 1425 fps and the heaviest 45 Colt +P offering had a 325gr bullet going 1325 fps.

I don't think I'd ever have need for anything that "hot" and it's kinda splittin' hairs IMO but I would like to know if the 45 Colt opinion about being more versatile for reloaders was accurate or just a popular myth....

Part of the difference there is due to simple cylinder thickness. In a given cylinder diameter, a 45 Colt chamber takes away a bit more wall thickness than a .44 Mag, so the 44 cylinder will be stronger. In theory, the 44 can be loaded hotter.

The real difference is moot, I'd suspect. Big, nasty critters don't decide to die or not based on paper ballistics.

Versatility of the two is debatable, as the 44 crowd can always toss in the fact that their darling can also shoot 44 Specials to broaden the lower end of the performance band. That's a valid point, but a small one - especially now that there are shorter case versions of the 45 Colt for the same use.

They're both great cartridges. I expect they'll both be in use as long as there are handguns.

Happy New Year Rocky!! Thanks for the clarification.

I doubt I'd ever hunt anything other than whitetail so if I were picking up some hunting ammo, I'd probably go a lot lighter than either of those. Seems that 250-270gr bullets going ~ 1000 fps would probably be a better bet for all I'd ever care to point at with a handgun anyway!!

You can count on it. The 45 Colt was the original "magnum" and was the most powerful handgun round in existence for decades. That 255-gr bullet at 900 fps dropped a lot of big critters, man and beast alike. A good SWC probably makes it even better.

That's all I load my own 45s to, and even though I don't use them for big game any more, that load would work just fine if I did.

Bore size means more with those solids than speed.

The pressure between the two is not the same!

Yep, kinda moot and the deer don't care (grins).

The bottom-line here is capacity. The case capacity of the .45 Colt is significantly higher than the .44 Magnum. For that matter, the 44-40 has more case capacity than the magnum. In guns of strength sufficient to harness the maximum power of each, case capacity always wins the day.

The real world difference is that for many years Ruger built the only gun capable of harnessing the Long Colt's potential. Of course there was the Contender single-shot too, but that hardly seems sporting to pit a cut-down rifle against a revolver. At any rate, with guns like the Freedom Arms you can load the .45 up more than the Magnum. Neither the 44-40 nor the 45 Colt have cases that will withstand repeated firings of hot loads nearly as well as the Magnum.

There is a whole school of thought that if you want a Magnum, buy one, don't try to create one. I have hot-loaded the .45 Colt and .44 WCF and have come to that conclusion over the years. Still, case capacity is king.

All that said, if I had a Blackhawk, Bisley, Freedom Arms or "old" Vaquero I would shoot loads that were hotter than I shoot in my present .45 Colt, an 1875 Remington replica.

Case capacity has two advantages. Of course, the obvious, but then you have the pressure variants. Given bullets of the same mass, pushed to the same velocity, the case with the greater volume will produce less pressure/stress on the metalurgy.

So, the 340 grain .44 Mag may be exceeding the 325 grain .45 Colt round by 100 fps, but it's doing so with a significantly higher chamber pressure.

This is why the proponents of the .45 Colt feel their favorite cartridge compares favorably with the .44 Magnum. It can be pretty logically argued, that the .45 Colt is a more "efficient" round.

I own them both and I never put a 300 grain bullet through my .44 magnum. That's not to say it won't take it.

Dan

Dan's right, on average the .44 Magnum produces a good 8,000psi more pressure than the .45 Colt.


But at the end of the day, they both do the same job. The .45 Colt tears a slightly larger hole, and the .44 mag has a flatter trajectory. Still, they both pack very similar killing power and will take the same game. So between the two, for hunting, I prefer the .44 magnum because it was intended to be operated at those pressures where the .45 Colt wasn�t. Not that the .45 Colt can�t do it (in the right gun), but there�s always that fear of one of your hot loads finding its way into a Colt SAA, resulting in a kB!!

Kevin, I call that phenomenon "spontaneous omnidirectional disassembly."

But I used to work for NASA!

For Deer sized game I agree but, for larger game (such as Bison) IME the 45 is higher on the food chain. I have never seen a 44 300 grain bullet out penetrate the same weight in 45 Colt on BIG game. I have no clue why and this is flat point hard cast VS flat point hard cast. This also is the case at the Linebaugh Seminars as well.
Nor have a I ever seen the 320 grainers in 44 Mag out penetrate the 325's in 45 cal. again flat point hard cast VS flat point hard cast in either game or at the Linebaugh Seminars.

There's more to it than that. The case wall thickness can come into play as well. Nobody picked up on the 44-40 thing, but anybody who's shot the old .44 knows that the case walls are significantly thinner than the .44 Magnum's. Thus, you certainly need less pressure as y'all are describing...This may not come into play on one reload, but .44 WCF's are notorious for having brass that is not a long-term proposition. The .45 Colt's case walls are thinner than the Magnum's as well. The two .44's are just an easier illustration.

One on one, case capacity is king though.

JWP �

I can�t answer to that, the frontal diameter is smaller with the .44 and �should� out penetrate the .45 every time. If velocity is the same, bullet weight the same, and bullet design the same, then the smaller diameter bullet with the greater sectional density should always out penetrate the larger bullet. I can�t answer to yours and Linebaugh�s observations, but they defy all logic of physics that apply to every other cartridge in the world. Still, the net effect is the same. You can�t kill an animal with a .45 Colt** that you couldn�t have killed with a .44 magnum. The difference will be very minimal.

** When I talk of the .45 Colt in comparison, I�m talking about the magnum loads appropriate for out of the box .45 Colt Blackhawks, which is under 28,500psi. Linebaugh and several other makers build guns that can push the .45 Colt into the same category (50,000psi) as the .454. Those loads are in a whole different category from the .44 magnum and will always significantly out perform the .44 mag.

This varies from brand to brand. A Starline or TopBrass 45 case is thicker in the head than Win or Rem 44's, especially when sectioned and both makes don't show any appreciable degree of thickness in either cartridge with TB or SL cases.

Quite a few on the cowboy curcuit do not like the obturation qualities (or lack thereof) in some 45 Colt cases.

The 45 Colt "weak" case rep has more to due with variances in chamber size. Going from a Colt chamber to almost anything else and full length sizing is no good for case life.

The 44 Special, ironically has pretty similar internal construction to 44 Mags in Big Red and Big Green makes, despite not being "designed" that way.

I am starting to believe that their is more to this than SD. I have seen a 425 grain bullet in the 500 JRH at 1380 FPS Chronographed out penetrate a 420 grain from the 475 Linebaugh at 1383 FPS chronograpghed get not once but consistently. I have accumulated enough data to convince me that a meplat of 78% and of bullet diameter (with sharp shoulders) will out penetrate an equal and often times heavier wieght will consistently with a 72% meplat. I beleive that the shoulder stabilized by the bigger meplat causes them to track straighter and thus penetrate farther.

A factory Ruger 6 shot 45 Colt will safely shoot 30 to 35 thousand PSI and drive 325 grain bullets to 1400 FPS

Not in my experience. I watched a Bison (700 to 800 pounds) take six of the Buffalo Bore 44 Mag (305 grain at 1300+ FPS) in the Rib Cage and not one exit and the Buff had to be finished with a rifle. I have seen 6 of the 45 Colt loads (from a stock Ruger Bisley cylinder) shot completely through and exit 1,000+ pound Bison

I didn't believe that their could be the kind of difference between the 2 until I started using the 45 Colt and I'm now a firm believer that it is higher on the food chain. With out question

That does make sense, but it's nothing new. Whitworth (back in the 1840's) made bullet molds very similar to the ones made by LBT today for his rifle that he called penetrators. They were long bullets with very flat points and sharp shoulders. The dynamic here is they tend to penetrate in a straight line better than bullets with less frontal area. Still, with the same bullet shape, same weight, the smaller projectile will always out penetrate the larger one; it�s physics, there�s no getting around it.

That is not true the 450 grain punch bullet will out penetrate any hard cast bullet in the 500 cal revolvers no matter the weight. The same in 475, 45, 44, etc. There is a lot more to this than simply weight.

How do you explain the fact that I have seen and so have others including but not limited to John Linebaugh, Ros Seyfried have seen the 475 and 500 Linebaugh and JRH outpenetrate 416 Ribby and 458 Wins with round nose solids. They have more velocity and Sectional Density.

Best answer is own a 41 mag, and a 45 Colt.. Neither one lies about its waistline.. 429....

That�s my story and I am sticken to it...

jwp - did you miss the part where is said same bullet shape, same weight we have to keep this apples and apples, otherwise there's no debate here.

Edit - I re-read your post. The inclusion of the punch bullet also makes it apples and oranges, that's a change in metallurgy.

Easy choice for me. 44 mag is legal to hunt with here. 45 LC isn't.....