450 Marlin Ammunition

It may be worth taking this thing deer hunting. I want as light a bullet as possible, for the sake of keeping recoil reasonable. I should try the 250 grain Barnes XFN.

The powder to use is H4198. Barnes lists 51.5 to 54.0 grains of H4198 with this bullet. Hodgdon lists 51.0 to 57.0C grains. Velocities at max charge are in the neighborhood of 2500 fps.

I loaded up four groups with 51.5 to 52.4 grains. The first shot broke my scope, so I haven't shot the rest. I will try again after I have replaced the scope. The good news is that the recoil was quite pleasant.

This is my primary hunting cartridge for my 450 Marlin. The 300 grain Nosler Partition Protected Point should offer excellent expansion and a good balance between velocity (somewhere in the neighborhood of 2300 fps) and penetration. It should be good for elk and moose, plus it can be used for smaller game, including feral hogs, black bear, and even whitetail.

I have a choice here between H322 and H4198. H322 is a compressed charge, but H4198 yields a faster velocity, 32 fps faster at max charge. The difference should be a wash. I should try both and determine which gives me more accuracy.

Discontinued: Sadly, Nosler has chosen to discontinue this bullet. I have a little over a hundred of them left. That really sucks, since this is theoretically an ideal bullet for elk. I suppose I will have to pick out another bullet if I ever get to the point of hunting elk.

Theoretically, this gun was bought to allow me to hunt brown bear, so I should obviously have a load worked up for this. The common thinking is that penetration is important, and that expansion is not. I have some Beartooth 425 and 525 grain bullets on order for this purpose.

Ranch Dog is currently working on load data for the 425 grain Beartooth. He is being very thorough, including the use of pressure testing equipment. This should be very reliable load data.

I have ordered 425 and 525 grain bullets from Beartooth. One of these makes the most sense. I will use Load From a Disk to calculate loads for these, and I will compare notes with Ranch Dog, who is doing pressure tests for various cartridges.

This will be a low recoil cartridge for plinking and short-range target shooting. I will take a lighter bullet and derive data from low pressure 45/70 data. With low weight and low velocity, the recoil should be quite tolerable

Blue Dot is really a pistol powder. 16.5 grains of that behind a 300 grain bullet allegedly yields 1100 fps in a 45/70 with only 16,100 CUP of pressure. That is certainly going to be low recoil, mathematically similar to that of Tim's 243 Winchester. And the low powder charge means a bottle goes a long way. However, with so much empty space, powder position will effect the burn characteristics.

Actually, I don't know that I need to go with the slowest 45/70 data. The recoil isn't that bad. H4895 is pretty slow, but still 1974 fps. If I could find something that is 1500 fps or less, it would have recoil similar to my 7mm Rem Mag.

There is a powder out called Trailboss that I want to try. I've heard that it basically fills up the case on a 45-70 and produces a light recoil load. This sounds like just the thing. With a 300gr bullet, 14.0gr of Trailboss produces 1199 fps and 16.5gr produces 1285 fps. This is 45-70 data, and the pressures are very low. I have loaded up some 16.1gr rounds to try out.