

Marlin followed soon after with the lever action Model 1894 in. Ruger introduced its first long gun, a semi-automatic carbine called the Ruger Model 44 chambered for. 44 Special ammo, contributed to that model's popularity. The film Dirty Harry, prominently featuring the S&W M29 shooting. 44 Magnum revolvers and even a handful of semi-automatic models, the first being produced in the 1960s. 44 Magnum Ruger Blackhawks are still in production, and have been joined by numerous other makes and models of. The direct descendants of the S&W Model 29 and the. 44 Magnum was an immediate commercial success. 44 Special firearms and potentially causing injury or death to shooters. This alteration was not primarily intended to increase the propellant capacity of the cartridge, but rather to prevent the far higher pressure round from being chambered in older, weaker. 44 Magnum case is slightly longer than the. Ruger began shipping their new revolver in late November 1956. There is a popular rumor that a Ruger employee found a cartridge case marked ".44 Remington Magnum" and took it to Bill Ruger, while another says a Remington employee provided Ruger with early samples of the ammunition. īy the summer of 1956, Sturm, Ruger became aware of this project and began work on a single action Blackhawk revolver for the new. Smith & Wesson produced 3,100 of these revolvers in 1956.


44 Magnum cartridge appeared in the March 1956 issue of the magazine. Hatcher's review of the new Smith & Wesson revolver and the. 44 Magnum revolver, the precursor to the Model 29, was built on December 15, 1955, and the gun was announced to the public on Janu for a price of US$140 ($1,330 in 2020 dollars) Julian Hatcher (technical editor of American Rifleman) and Keith received two of the first production models. Keith and his associates successfully lobbied Smith & Wesson and Remington to produce a commercial version of this new high-pressure loading, along with revolvers chambered for it. This allowed higher pressures to be used with less risk of a cylinder failure. 44 caliber revolvers had thicker, and thus stronger, cylinder walls than the. In revolvers of the same cylinder size, this meant that the. 44 Special case was smaller in diameter than the. 44 Special's brass was thicker and stronger than the dated. 44 caliber projectiles for hand-loaders was more varied, and the. 44 Special cartridge as the basis for his experimentation, rather than the larger. 44 Magnum revolver taken using an air-gap flash, clearly showing the bullet One of these hand-loaders was Elmer Keith, a prominent writer and outdoorsman of the 20th century. 44 Special and other large-bore handgun cartridges with heavy bullets and higher than normal powder charges to achieve superior ballistics and better hunting performance. In the early 20th century, experimenters loaded the. 44 Magnum cartridge was the end result of years of tuned handloading of the. 500 Bushwhacker nevertheless, due in part to its more manageable recoil, it has remained one of the most popular commercial large-bore magnum cartridges. 44 Magnum has since been eclipsed in power by the. 44 Special case but lengthened and loaded to higher pressures for greater velocity and energy.įamously called "the most powerful handgun in the world" by Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, the. 44 Russian all use 0.429 in (10.9 mm) diameter bullets. Despite the ".44" designation, guns chambered for the. 44 Magnum or 10.9x33mmR (as it is known in unofficial metric designation), is a rimmed, large-bore cartridge originally designed for revolvers and quickly adopted for carbines and rifles. 340 gr (22 g) LFN +P+ Buffalo bore heavy (+P+ used in special guns only)
