.50-110 Smokeless Powder Lever Action Rifle

Am Shooting Journal ^ | 6/5/2019 | T Vickman

[w1n1]

Are you into old buffalo cartridge and want to make it better?
Do this, load it up with smokeless powder in a lever action rifle. You will surely have some fire power with a .50-110 caliber rifle. Which means lots of fun shooting and yes you can take down some game as well.

We can't say this enough, loading this cartridge with smokeless powder makes this lever action rifle a hard hitter that can punch holes in steel and obliterate other targets.
The 450 grain .50-110 caliber can create more energy than the 458 Winchester Magnum. This cartridge is good to have on hunting trips and expect encounters with larger tough dangerous animals like brown/grizzly bear.

This cartridge was even mentioned in Craig Boddington’s book The Perfect Shot North America.
"…He went on a voyage to Antarctica, and at one point they put in at one of the earliest explorers’ camps, finding many of the supplies still intact. Among the gear was a huge quantity of century-old ammunition, including a large quantity of .50-110 ammo, a big more, black-powder cartridge chambered to the 1886 Winchester. Why? Because early visitors to Antarctica fully expected to run into polar bear or similar big beasties." Read the rest of 50-110 smokeless powder.

[Paal Gulli]

Another idiot who not only thinks there’s only one metric for “energy” but that kinetic energy is the chief determinant of a rifle cartridge’s effectiveness.

[polymuser]

Right? A big more, sentences are.

[Tijeras_Slim]

The original video notes the KO value of the round, referring to Pondoro Taylor’s “Knock Out Value” he assigned to various African game guns, not quite scientific.

[schurmann]

“The 1886 was Browning’s first lever action...”

Winchester’s M1886 was the first lever-action repeater designed by John M Browning to enjoy mass production.

Winchester’s M1885 single-shot was the first lever-action John M Browning designed, to see mass production.

Winchester’s M1892, designed by John M Browning, was based on the M1886 - smaller, simplified. It’s widely described as Winchester’s first million-seller: slightly more than 1,000,000 were made before production stopped in the 1930s. But it wasn’t the first: that honor belongs to Winchester’s M1894, which introduced smokeless powder to the sporting rifle market. Serial number 1,000,000 came out of Winchester’s factory in 1927.

[schurmann]

“Another idiot who not only thinks there’s only one metric for “energy” but that kinetic energy is the chief determinant of a rifle cartridge’s effectiveness.”

There is only one metric for “energy”, kinetic energy. It is readily calculated -

E = (mv**2)/2

where

E = energy
m = projectile mass
v = projectile velocity

if m is in grains and v is in ft/sec, divide the result by 450380. This is a conversion factor that accounts for dividing by 2, and for the fact that grains are weight, not mass (pounds aren’t mass either). Gravitational acceleration must be factored in.

Stopping power is widely discussed but has no formal, quantifiable definition. Figures derived for the Thompson/Lagarde tests of 1905 were relative, not absolute, and applied to handgun bullets only.

No direct relation between momentum, nor other measures of “stopping power”, has ever been established. Probabilistic correlations have been proposed but no one has ever worked out physical/physiological causality factors. That’s why state hunting regulations specify minimum kinetic energy and sometimes bore diameter for certain game. The military uses delivered kinetic energy on target as a measure of effectiveness of small arms rounds, and has amassed page after page of statistical correlation factors to predict probabilities of incapacitation in various situations. Stuff that isn’t formally classified, but they don’t release details to the public.

A human adversary is simply too variable as a target, to make hard & fast predictions.