Are there any calibres you are or were drawn to without...

Having owned just about every class of handgun (to my own satisfaction) the one I was missing was 32-20. My hankering was primed by a simple paragraph in Bowen's book.

"No finer field revolver exists for marksmen who shoot standing on their own two feet as the gods intended."

This comment was made about a custom 32-20 based on a blackhawk frame, hand loaded to .44 magnum pressures, or essentially the .327 Federal Magnum.

Well... it took years to find but I ended up with a Single Six Bisley in .32 H&R which can be loaded to "Ruger Only" levels.

I was not disappointed, it's a keeper. I keep it just subsonic, like a great big .22 LR that can be hand loaded, except the 115 grain lead pills are just a bit bigger and three times heavier.
 
adding 308 to my list. I already load for 308, and the components are the same, bullets, powder, primers. and I came into some free 308 brass.... now I am rifle shopping.
 
I just added another. .45-70 Dies, brass and bullets in the house, looking for a Henry Steel Side-gate that is reasonably priced. They seem to be going for $100 to $300 over MSRP right now.
 
Long ago there was a science fiction author named H. Beam Piper. Piper was a fair gunsmith as well as a writer, and he liked to slide gun goodies into his stories, like the 10mm Colt auto in a story in the early '50s, or a rifle and cartridge he named in "Police Operation", written in 1948. A 1935 Sharps bolt action in a wildcat called .235 Ultraspeed-Express, from a timeline where the Confederacy didn't lose the Second War Between the States...

I admit, I just liked the name. But as I developed a liking for smaller-bore cartridges, the .235 Ultraspeed-Express haunted me. What would that cartridge have looked like, given the story was written in 1948?

The Brits occasionally used ".235" to refer to what we now call .243; difference in where they measured, plus rounding. So a .243 or 6mm bullet would work. "Ultraspeed-Express" sounded like something overbore. Back then, lots of gun cranks were blowing out .30-06 cartridges and using slow milsurp powders to see what kind of velocities they could get. So, basically a 6mm-06. I was sketching neck lengths and shoulder angles when I realized generations of shooters had probably trod that path before I was born, and checked around for off-the-shelf reamers and dies. And I have a 6mm-06 reamer and die set sitting beside the monitor, waiting for round tuits. There's a local shop that makes trophies and plaques; I'll have them use their laser to engrave ".235 Ultraspeed Express" on the barrel when it's time.
 
Let's be a bit more inventive: take a 6mm Lee Navy case, blow out the shoulder like the Ackley variations of other cartridges and neck down to an actual .235?

Or start with a .240 H&H case...

Love H. Beam Piper, especially the Parattime books.
 
When I was growing up, we had long guns, but rarely saw a handgun. So, every pistol I bought was in a caliber I had never shot (except for .22s in rifles). So, those would be .25 acp, .380, 9mm, .38 spl, .357 magnum, 10 mm, and .45 acp. I haven't felt the call of a big bore, magnum revolver or a .40 SW semi-auto.
 
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