.357 Magnum vs .44 Magnum Lever Actions

hey everybody chris baker here from luckygunner.com it is time to continue our series on lever action rifles in our intro to this series i asked you guys what kind of lever action topics you might want me to cover you responded with an enormous variety of requests some of that stuff i had already planned to cover already and some of it i never would have thought of on my own so thanks for sending me some great suggestions among the most common requests were topics relating to 357 magnum and 44 magnum some of you asked which is the better cartridge for lever actions or which one is more useful how do the ballistics compare and how do lever action ballistics for these calibers compare to the same loads fired from a revolver i am going to cover all of that and more today in the second installment of our lever action series over the last couple of weeks i have shot several tests and taken a bunch of measurements with these two cartridges for my test rifles i have been using a pair of henry x models these rifles are pretty much identical except one is chambered for 357 magnum and the other 44 magnum both have 17.4 inch barrels they have the same sights same trigger that all gives us an even playing field for our ammo testing i picked five different loads for each cartridge for these tests 10 loads total of course ammo availability is extremely limited right now and that is as true for me as for anyone else so this is all ammo that i had put aside several months ago when i first started planning the series both of these cartridges have a huge variety of loads available obviously i couldn't cover them all but i tried to gather a broad spectrum of bullet weights and bullet types from the major ammo manufacturers i also for the most part avoided ammo that is specifically marketed for self-defense because those loads are usually optimized for handgun length barrels when you push the bullets too fast they often over expand and under penetrate i wanted to use loads that might have a better chance of letting these cartridges really show off their true potential with a rifle that extra velocity can improve the range and effectiveness of these bullets but only to a point 357 and 44 are still handgun cartridges they are not going to give us the performance of a true rifle cartridge even when you fire them out of a rifle length barrel that fact quickly becomes evident when you look at bullet trajectory for these rounds and that's the first test i performed for each of the 10 loads i fired groups from the bench at 50 100 150 and 200 yards then i measured the distance from the bullseye to the center of the group to get kind of a general idea of how far the bullets drop at that distance to make it easier to compare the results before i shot the groups with each load i re-zero the rifle at 100 yards for that load the henry x models come with fiber optic open sights these are pistol style sights that are great for snap shooting at close range they're not so great for shooting groups or for making fine adjustments to the zero now normally i would not suggest mounting a magnified optic on a pistol caliber lever action kind of takes the fun out of it but i did in this case just for the purpose of shooting some groups so let's take a look at the results here is a chart showing all of the 357 magnum loads at 50 yards all five loads were hitting between a half inch and two inches high that's more or less what you expect with any rifle with a hundred yard zero then of course at a hundred yards that are all hitting right at the bullseye things get more interesting at 150 yards the 125 grain remington jacketed soft point only drops two inches at that range three of the five loads dropped around five inches and then our heaviest 357 the federal 180 grain dropped the most at eight and a half inches the wheels really start to fall off at 200 yards the 125 grain remington was almost 10 inches low all the others were between 18 and 26 inches low i got similar results with the 44 magnum loads again we're an inch or two high at 50 yards on the bullet 100 at 150 four of the five loads were in the minus four to minus six inch range the heaviest 44 which was a 300 grain black hills dropped like a rock at minus 12 inches at 200 yards the fiocchi 240 grain joined the black hills load at minus 26 inches the two hornady loads were around 17 inches low and the lightest of the 44s at remington 180 grain dropped 12 inches here are all of those results for both cartridges all combined together the 357s are in gray and the 44s are in red overall they're pretty comparable if you had to pick which cartridge was flatter shooting you would need a lot more data from a lot more loads and i still think it would be pretty close so best case scenario a 357 or 44 mag lever action is probably about 150 yard gun unless you're just a real superstar at range estimation realistically for most of us for any practical purpose it's more like a 100 to 125 yard gun with maybe some wiggle room if you use one of the flatter shooting loads and you played around with your zero you could maybe stretch it out past 150 in a pinch personally if i thought there was a decent chance i might need to shoot something that far away i would just go with a true rifle caliber when i shot those groups i also took velocity readings with our lab radar this device measures velocity at the muzzle just like a chronograph does but then it also can tell you the velocity at various increments as the bullet moves down range i had it set to give readings at 50 100 and 150 yards i also tried 200 but it had trouble picking up the bullets that far away there's a lot of cool stuff we can do with these measurements first i will just show you the raw data in case you spreadsheet enthusiasts want to pause the video and copy that down if we put all that on a chart we can kind of get an idea of how much velocity these bullets are losing over distance we can also see that even though the 357s might average out to be a little faster there is a lot of overlap both cartridges have loads on the slow end and on the faster end of the spectrum in addition to the rifles i also took velocity measurements with a couple of four inch revolvers for 357 magnum i used a ruger gp100 and the 44 magnum was a smith and wesson model 629 for the handguns i only recorded velocity at the muzzle so here we've got the handgun muzzle velocities next to the rifle muzzle velocities and then the percent increase the smallest velocity increases were in the low 20s which is still a major change half the loads had an increase in the 30s and two of them were right there at almost 50 percent in a minute we will see what kind of impact that velocity increase had on the ballistic gel performance so we've got the handgun muzzle velocities and we also know the rifle velocities at various increments with that we can make a reasonable estimate as to the distance where the rifle velocity is equal to the handguns at the muzzle here's that chart again with the 357 magnum velocities from the henry lever action with the revolver the 125 grain remington had a muzzle velocity equal to the rifles at 138 yards the other four loads all had handgun velocities that match what the rifle was doing between 90 and 105 yards so if you shoot something with your 357 henry that's 100 yards away it's basically like shooting it at point blank with a four inch revolver the disparity between rifle and handgun was even more dramatic with the 44 magnums the handgun velocity with the hornady xtp and the black hills were both slightly less than the rifle velocity at 150 yards for the other three the converging point was in the 120 to 130 yard range there is one more thing we can do with these velocity numbers if you know the velocity and you know the bullet weight you can calculate the energy of the bullet here's a chart showing the bullet energy in foot pounds for all 10 loads when fired from the rifles three of the 44s started out at around 1600 foot-pounds that's getting close to the energy of a light 30 30 winchester load the other 244s were way behind that 125 grain remington 357 again has proven to be an outlier it's starting out at a bit over 1200 foot-pounds less than the 44s but it's still about 300 foot pounds greater than the next 357 but it's not some kind of special snowflake load there are plenty of factory 357 loads that can put up these kind of numbers the remington just happened to stand out in this batch of five as we're going to see in a minute energy is not everything i don't want to over emphasize it but it's easy to measure and it's kind of a way to compare apples and oranges when we've got bullets with different weights and different velocities in this case i think the energy numbers demonstrate just how important load selection is and how much of a difference the longer barrel makes here's one more chart on the muzzle energy this is showing the energy at the muzzle for each load the reds represent the rifle muzzle energy and the grays are for the revolver compare the red bars on the left to the gray bars on the right just by firing it out of a longer barrel a 357 magnum will meet or even well exceed the muzzle energy of a 44 magnum from a handgun okay let's move on to the terminal ballistics for the ballistic gel testing i used synthetic blocks from clear ballistics each block is 16 inches long and i lined up two of them long ways i fired one round of each load with the handgun and one round with the rifle i would have preferred to fire at least two or three rounds of each load to make sure there was some consistency but with a short ammo supply i had to settle for one round per test starting with the 357s the remington 110 grain hollow point was moving just too fast this is one of those self-defense loads i was talking about earlier it's designed with handguns in mind but in this test with both guns the handgun and the rifle it expanded too much and too soon which led to severe under penetration the remington 125 grain jacketed soft point did not have enough velocity with the handgun to open up it zipped right through both blocks with the rifle it expanded nicely with decent penetration again remember that is one of those with almost a 50 increase in muzzle velocity between the two the next three loads all performed more or less the same with the rifle as they did with the handgun not a major difference in either penetration or expansion with any of those they all had pretty solid numbers moving on to the 44s the remington 180 grain soft point did the same kind of thing as the 357s off point no expansion with a handgun and lots of expansion out of the rifle with moderate penetration the hornady lever evolution had nearly identical performance with both guns the fiocchi 240 grain again turns out to be kind of a powder puff load the velocity was just too low to get any expansion out of either the handgun or the rifle the hornady xtp showed us that classic inverse relationship between expansion and penetration it did okay out of both guns but we got more expansion with the rifle and more penetration with the handgun the black hills 300 grain jacketed hollow point was kind of interesting it had nearly equal penetration out of both guns but with the rifle there was almost 50 percent more expansion if we look at all that data together it's pretty clear that you can get decent performance with either cartridge the 44s will obviously have a larger expanded diameter on average but generally the absolute diameter of the bullet doesn't really matter as much as simply whether the bullet reliably expands or not the shape of an expanded bullet crushes and tears tissue more effectively than the shape of an unexpanded bullet both of these cartridges have loads that will do that really well without sacrificing penetration the final test i performed was the hard barrier penetration test for this i used pieces of 5 8 inch plywood i lined up 18 sheets with a little gap in between each one the idea was to find out just how many sheets of plywood the bullet could penetrate before it stopped i only did this test with the rifles not with the handguns again it was an issue of ammo availability the wood i used was kind of old and dried out so i would not compare these results to any other wood penetration test and in general wood is just not a great medium for repeatable testing because it changes so much based on its environment but this should at least give us an idea of how these 357 and 44 magnum loads compare to each other the plywood is not meant to simulate bone or thick brush or the walls in your house or any other specific barrier it just gives us a general idea of how these bullets might behave when they have to punch through hard things the 110 green remington was again the poorest performer of the lot it only made it through four sheets of the plywood and left a big dent in the fifth the 125 grain remington went cleanly through five sheets of plywood and almost but not quite through a sixth i'm going to call that five and a half both of those bullets expanded and left big nasty exit holes in the wood they penetrated the barnes vortex all copper hollow point was actually the exception in that regard it was the only load out of all 10 that did not expand at all in the wood but that in turn led to much better penetration it sailed through nine sheets of plywood and stopped on the 10th here's the recovered bullet from that one it looks like rather than expanding outward the hollow tip kind of collapsed in on itself the other two 357s the hornady lever evolution and the 180 grain federal hollow point both expanded and made it through five sheets of plywood the 44 magnum performance was pretty straightforward all five loads expanded and all five loads penetrated seven sheets of plywood it would be really interesting to see what the 44 version of that barnes vortex load would do in this test unfortunately we did not have any on hand at the time i think it's probably safe to assume that if any of these 44s had not expanded they would have penetrated at least nine sheets of plywood like the barns did even though the best performer on this test was a 357 i would not want to suggest that 357 magnum generally has better hard barrier performance than 44 magnum for the bullets that opened up clearly the 44s penetrated better so if you had to decide between these two cartridges based only on the external and the terminal ballistics it looks like 44 magnum has a slight edge but honestly it's not as much of an edge as i had expected the only metric where 44 really blows 357 out of the water is energy at the muzzle our most energetic 357 would need about 33 percent more energy to be on par with the best of the 44s but the energy numbers alone don't really tell us anything the 44s did a little better than the 357s and the plywood and the gel test but the difference was not as striking as the energy figures might suggest it's all about how that energy is being used these bullets use some of their energy to travel from the muzzle to the target and then whatever is left over can be used to crush a small hole that goes really deep or they can expand and crush a bigger hole that doesn't go quite as deep typically that's pretty much all handgun bullets can do they make holes so if you want to humanely take that deer or you need to stop that soviet paratrooper that just landed in your backyard you'd better hit some vital organs directly on the other hand true high-velocity rifle cartridges can hit hard enough that for a medium-sized mammal like a human or a deer the tissue around the wound channel stretches out beyond its elastic limit that causes tearing and bleeding and all kinds of trauma besides simply making a hole sometimes that'll happen with a handgun bullet but it's not really the norm unfortunately this effect doesn't really show up in our gel test the clear ballistic synthetic gel is too elastic it's too stretchy to give us an accurate picture of what's going on there according to the wound ballistics experts the velocity threshold where the temporary cavity starts to reliably cause wound trauma is thought to be somewhere around 2200 to 2500 feet per second it depends on bullet design and what part of the anatomy is affected and some other factors and a similar effect can take place at lower velocities with very large projectiles like a 12 gauge slug fired from a lever action 357 magnum and 44 magnum are moving pretty fast they're not really in the realm of typical handgun ballistics anymore they're also not quite into true rifle territory they're kind of in between they're still shy of that 2500 foot per second threshold so they might cause some of those secondary wounding effects but there's no guarantee this gray area is where 44 magnum could have an even further advantage over 357 magnum that's really hard for us to test or demonstrate outside of anecdotal evidence so that is all a very long-winded way to say that if i had to choose between a 44 and a 357 lever action i don't see any reason not to choose the 44 if the primary purpose is hunting or self-defense but like i touched on in the intro to this series most of us like lever actions for reasons that are not purely practical these are fun guns that might sometimes be used in a practical role so there are plenty of factors to consider besides ballistics if you want to put a whole lot of ammo through a lever action it might make more sense to go with a 357 magnum when we're not in a crazy ammo market like we are currently 357 is a little more affordable than 44 and it tends to be more commonly available of course you can also shoot 38 specials out of a 357 or 44 specials out of the 44 magnum either way the specials can help you save a few bucks on ammo costs they're also convenient if you want to shoot these guns with a suppressor since most 38 and 44 special loads are subsonic depending on who's going to be shooting the gun recoil might be another thing to think about with both of the henry x models recoil was very sedate even when shooting magnum loads however the 44 magnums did have a little bit of a nudge that was not as noticeable with the 357s personally i found it a little more satisfying in a way to feel that recoil from the 44s and they seem to hit the steel targets with a little more of a thump but if you got younger kids who are going to shoot this rifle or someone who is very sensitive to recoil or noise you might want to lean more toward the 357 you could always get the 44 magnum and have them shoot 44 specials and that'll take care of the recoil issue for the most part but when you're not shooting suppressed i think it's more fun to run these rifles with magnum loads in my experience the magnums tend to be a little more accurate and you can get a bit more range out of them that is all kind of splitting hairs though i know it's cliche to say it but you really can't go wrong with either one both 357 magnum and 44 magnum are a ton of fun with a lever action with most rifles that are offered in both cartridges you will get the same ammo capacity both the henrys have a seven shot tube with either of the magnums you will pay a lot less for the ammo than you would for 30 30 or any other rifle cartridge you can feed a lever action if you still can't decide just flip a coin because they're both awesome as always guys thanks for watching hit that like button and subscribe if you haven't already and be sure to drink your oval team [Music] you

Channel: Lucky Gunner Ammo

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Id: H8SHPYTdPh0

Length: 20min 44sec (1244 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020