Quote:
Originally Posted by longrange1947
I stand corrected. Several articles I had read on the old guns grouped the Rigby with the other "Elephant guns", H&H and Weatherby, with higher pressures and reduced accuracy.
I bow to your experience in lieu of my readings.  |
You are right with respect to some of the early Elephant calibers. The old propellants were fine when used in England and America, but when subjected to the extreme temperatures of tropical Africa, they developed very high chamber pressures which in turn split cases or made extraction impossible or difficult. Not something hunters were enamored with when hunting dangerous game. For instance, the .458 Win Mag, based on a straight-sided .375 H&H case got a very bad reputation in Africa because they were downloaded by Winchester to avoid excessive pressures in the tropics and thereby delivered sub-standard performance.
Older bullet performance was also unsatisfactory in some of the first Express and Magnum rounds. Rigby gained a great reputation with its .416 round not only because of its gentle pressures but perhaps more importantly, because its patented bullets had very thick steel walls and tips and a well crimped rear which held the led in place and didn't deform badly when penetrating elephant sculls and buffalo shoulder bones. The bullet paths were straight and went further than other bullets through solid flesh and bone.
The .458 Win Mag's reputation is only now recovering, due to modern powders combined with modern bullets, but various higher performing .458 variants are still very popular such as the .458 Lott and Ackley rounds which attempt to cure the round of its old illnesses.