COTEP.org - .41 Special loads?

Well as I said earlier I went to Barnes and Noble and WalMart but came up empty on trying to find Handloader. There must be close to 200+ magazine titles on the shelf between the two stores an Handloader wasn't one of them. Imagine my suprise when yesterday while grocery shopping with the family for Thanksgiving supplies at a different Publix than we usually shop, there on the magazine rack was Handloader! I grabbed it and thumbed through and sure enough Part 2 of the .41 Special was in there! Says December 2016 and I think they come out every other month so I got really lucky as this issue may not be on the stands much longer. Now that I know where it is I can pick up a copy at the store. I always love buying Gun magazines at stores so that it forces sellers to keep shelf space devoted to it!

Thanks for the heads up Zane! I already loaded up a couple hundred soft shooting rounds for my grandfather. Went with 5gr of Unique over a 200gr LFN bullet. So he should be good to go. Now I will also have data to load full power loads.

While working up that soft load for my grandfather I got the chance to shoot 20 full power .41 Magnum loads to get a feel for how it is and that is quite a round! I think the Ruger I have is a 6" barrel and even with all that weight it ended up pointing almost straight up after the first shot! I managed to control the recoil after that but it was deffinatly some work. The soft Special loads I laddered down gave a similar point of impact at 10 yards but with 4gr less powder so I was happy.

One thing that I didn't notice till I got home and cleaned the .41 Magnum brass was that two of the brass were split down the side. If those were handloads I would have pulled all the bullets and started from scratch because that would have been a very bad sign of over pressure. However this was factory Winchester Super-X that my grandfather supplied for me when he loaned me the Ruger. The 20 round box has a Woolworth price tag of $10.99 on it and there hasn't been a Woolworth around here since the mid 80's. So the ammo was probably at least 30 years old but that shouldn't be that much of a factor. Needless to say I was very suprised that there were two case splits. I will keep an eye on that brass as I reloaded them at .41 Mag with 9gr of Unique, with Hornady XTP bullets and think they would be great on Hogs!