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Old January 21, 2013, 01:42 PM   #4
carguychris
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Join Date: October 20, 2007
Location: Richardson, TX
Posts: 7,523
Quote:
For one thing, why would you (risk it)? It's largely a defunct or at best very small niche round, hard and expensive to find ammo for and with so many other choices out there to shoot.
+1. Also, the .41 Colt round is notoriously inconsistent.

It was originally produced with an outside-lubricated heeled bullet that was the same diameter as the case, like .22LR. It was later changed to a now-conventional inside-lubricated round, but Colt curiously never standardized the dimensions; it was produced with a variety of case lengths, bullet diameters, and bore diameters, seemingly without any rhyme or reason. Consequently, if you fire off-the-shelf commercial ammo- of ANY vintage- in this gun, the bullets may be substantially undersized for the bore, resulting in mediocre to unbelievably poor accuracy. This issue is one of the main reasons why the round fell into disuse; it was comparable in power to .38 Special, but the latter round was standardized from the outset, resulting in far superior accuracy and consistency in most cases.

FWIW if you look through gun periodicals from the 1960s and earlier, you may see advertisements for .41 Colt bullet molds offered in 3-5 slightly different calibers; a shooter was expected to slug the bore- i.e. drive a soft lead ball through it, then measure the ball's resulting diameter- and order the appropriate mold for his/her individual gun! However, the cartridge is now uncommon enough that such molds have generally become a custom-order proposition.
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