My YouTube feed dropped this jewel in my lap and sent me drooling: The Ruger Deerfield in .44 Magnum.
So my next step was to check in Gunbroker just to find out they want a couple or more mortgage payments for one of those sticks. I also find out that they were only manufactured for something like 6 years and dropped which may mean it was either issues with the manufacturing, quality control problems or simply not enough buyers. Whatever it was, it is a shame they are not being produced anymore.
I secretly want a carbine in .357 Magnum. but what is available comes in the lever action flavor and are priced in the couple of mortgage payments too.
I know, We are experiencing a huge distortion in the market and guns are expensive. But back to pistol caliber carbines, Ruger has made a killing with the PC 9 and I am not saying they are super affordable, but shooting 9mm +P aint precisely shooting BBs
I took a couple of side jobs and managed to save enough to get me a PC9 before the big escalation in prices. It had been unfired till the SW Florida Blog shoot and I was not ready for what I got. Boy, what a frigging gun and deserving all the accolades it has gotten in different places. Out of the box accurate, low perceived recoil and the reliability of grandma’s old pedal sewing machine.
The only “improvement” it has is the front sight painted green with a special and hard to find high-visibility paint….from Walmart.
I was amazed at the ease of shooting and the accuracy of the carbine. Once I found the front sight, hitting a small plate (I think 6″ x 8″) at 25 yards became boringly accurate. The only addition will be a small light for night work and that’s it. I won’t even bother with a red dot.
Now comes the point of the post: Dear Ruger: Can we get a Takedown PCC in .357 Magnum? Pretty please! I am sure you guys can come up with the proper evolution of the Deerfield. And at least 6 rounds.
(Cue Mike Kupari and Michal Bane screaming for a Ruger PCC in .44 Magnum 🙂)
My only problem with the PC-9 (which I lost in a Kayaking event), was it is a PAIN to clean. It is a simple blow back operated gun so there is a boatload of carbon in the action. To get to any part of the action for cleaning needs two different allen head wrenches.
You have to take the bolt handle out and that sucker will rattle loose if you are not careful.
Also, pulling out the recoil mass is a little tricky, don’t let any of those parts go down range or into an eye. They are hard to find.
On the plus side, it does take Glock 17/19 mags and is fun to shoot. Light and short. It breaks down nicely.
As for the pistol caliber carbines….
I would suggest you look at a pistol/rifle combination in .45 Colt or .44-40. These rounds were designed around simple cast lead bullets. You can get fancier but yeah, cast your own. The .45 Colt has similar characteristics to .45ACP which is intentional as the .45ACP was designed to replace the .45Colt. The brass is(was?) easy to find. It uses large pistol primers, same as .45ACP. But here’s the real kicker, it was designed for black powder. That means you can load black powder into that sucker and it works. Dirty? Yes. But it works.
Right now powder is hard to come by. KNO3 (Potassium nitrate) is not all that hard to find. If you get it in pearls you’ll have to process it to powder form before use. Sulfur in powder form is easy to get. And Carbon is easy to make. Once you have those ingredients it is easy to mill them to into a fine well mixed powder.
All of you guys with wet mills for cleaning your brass? You have a ball mill minus the media.
Once you have the mixed powder you have to finish the process of turning it into black powder. There are books on it.
What this means is that if you have a wheel gun say a Colt SAA in .45 Colt or .44-40 and a lever action all you need is to collect your brass, easy with a wheel gun and not hard with a lever action, primers (hard to get right now), and some lead and a bullet mold.
Magazines might be the issue here. Rimless cases (e.g. 9mm) are easier to work with and don’t suffer from rimlock. User induced or not, it’s an issue. That’s the cool thing about Ruger’s helical magazines, they tend to avoid that issue.
How’s about a PCC in 10mm?
A 357 sig version of the PC9 would be pretty interesting. Just have an option front end you can buy for your 40S&W carbine. While expensive, it would benefit from the longer barrel.
For 357, I’ve have long held that it would be interesting to do a .357 semiautomatic somewhat based on a 1100 remington. Have a 18 inch barrel and thus 10 rd capacity with a kings loading gate to top up. An adjustable gas system would be a good idea, as 357 loads are all over the place. It would be a solid option for Ban states.
Henry Arms makes lever action carbines in a number of handgun calibers, including 44 Magnum and 357 Magnum. I don’t know anything about how good their products are. Their factory apparently is in Brooklyn, of all places. Strange how many guns are manufactured in gun hating states…
I can vouch for the Henry 357 lever gun.
Thanks. Ever since I read Karl May westerns as a kid (written by a German who never set foot in the USA that I know of, but good entertainment anyway) I’ve had the name Henry in my head. I was wondering if the new company was a decent successor to the old famous name.
Yall stole my thunder,heh heh. I have seen other lever action 357s. And ya can shoot 38s in em too
Henry Arms makes beautiful lever action rifles. They are the people that invented the lever action. Winchester made them famous. Old school Henry’s had a tube magazine that you loaded from the muzzle in, you removed the stopper at the top and put rounds in the tube, then replaced the stopper with its attached spring and follower.
The original tubular magazines had a long slot and a “handle” that was attached to the follower. As you shot that handled moved closer to the receiver. There is a place where you have to take your support hand off the forearm to “skip” over the lever or your hand will keep the rifle from cycling the rest of the rounds into the elevator.
Winchester added the “Kings gate loader” which is the hatch on the side of the receiver which allows you to load from the side. This was much nicer when firing from a prone position AND you can “top off” as you shoot.
Modern Henry’s come with either the front loading or with the kings gate. You get to choose. I wanted a lever action with a loading gate so picked up something other than Henry. But Damn were those Henry’s beautiful.
Their products are super nice…and are priced accordingly.
https://youtu.be/O6IWbDad3ew
Rossi Puma 38/357 Lever Gun
—————————————-
https://youtu.be/eAHbidXJqXA
Marlin Camp 9 Carbine
( takes S&W mod 5900 series magazines – incl the 32 round mag )
https://rossiusa.com/firearms/lever-action-rifles
10mm . CMMG. Glock mags.
Rimlock is a major concern with any semi-auto using a rimmed cartridge and a box magazine. This is why Ruger used a Mannlicher style rotary magazine in their. 44 and .357 carbines. This is also why the preferred option for a more powerful semi-auto PCC is 10mm.
If you really want a .357 Magnum that isn’t lever action then the Ruger 77/357 bolt action seems like the only common option. This and the 77/44 use rotary magazines for reliable feeding.
I hate you… I really hate you
(Adds Ruger 77/357 to the wish list)
Sadly, they no longer make the IMI Timberwolf, a pump action 357 mag rifle with a tubular mag.
Most mag-fed .22s have figured out the user-caused rimlock issue; just use a magazine with a shroud. This forces the user to push the round down, then back, instead of just straight down.
Past that all you need is a stiff spring and tight tolerances to keep the rounds from jiggling into rimlock within the mag. I am sure we can figure it out with modern manufacturing techniques.
Never knew this was offered in .357 – only ever saw the .44 Mag ones.
Kinda want to see an M1 Carbine in .357, myself.
I was fortunate enough to pick up a Marlin 1894C in .357 before they were bought out by Remington. I got it as a fun gun plinker, because I could load .38 Spc. with bullets cast from wheelwrights for next to nothing (at that time). Not as accurate with cast bullets as I would like (due to the Microgroove rifling) but the fun factor is off the charts. With heavy loads using jacketed bullets in .357 magnum it’s plenty accurate with mild recoil.
The reason why some of those are so expensive is because you were looking at older production models that have either been discontinued or still exist but their quality control is crap now.
A Henry .357 Lever action rifle was still almost $800 back in 2015. And new production Marlins (which were junk), what is the same. Another thing about those .357 magnum carbines they seem to copper foul a lot more than other rifles.
People of been buying up guns like crazy. All the handguns sold out, then all the shotguns sold out, then all the rifles sold out, lever action‘s was the only thing left. That and revolvers and those sold out too.
And another thing. Other than Henry most of the lever action 22s are going to be close to $500. Lever actions are not cheap.
As I recall, the Ruger .44 carbine used a 4-round rotary magazine, similar to the 10/22 magazine. Ruger has a good track record in making reliable magazines for rimmed cases, so I don’t think that was the problem. (I never fired a Ruger .44 carbine, so I may be wrong.)
As I recall, sometime in the 70s there was a mass shooting in New Orleans where the offender used one of these carbines. I don’t remember any of the details; I only remember seeing news footage of the shooter on top of a parking garage, wearing a blue nylon windbreaker that looked like a raid jacket and carrying the aforesaid carbine. The gun got a lot of bad publicity after that, and that may have had something to do with its discontinuance.
I have an original deerfield with the tube magazine. Great gun, but it does have a few foibles. For one, it is a PITA to disassemble. The main recoil spring is unconstrained, and needs to go together juuuust right or it will not go back in. But since there is so much tension getting it just right is nearly impossible. The other issue is it does not like to feed the first round from the tube. You have to pop one into the chamber *then* load up the rest of the tube. Not ideal from a safety perspective, but workable.
It also really likes the heavy stuff, and light loads will cause feed issues. I am not sure if everyone would call that an “issue” though 😉
Other than that it is a great gun, and I love the fact that I can send a half dozen freight trains downrange in only a second or so. That gun *thumps*.
I really do want to upgrade to one of the models with the rotary mag. The tube mags were made in the 60s, and the rotaries were made in the ’90s/’00s i think? The later versions were no longer called deerfields dues to some trademark dispute, but other than the feed they were basically the same gun.
I too would love to see them remade today, in both .357 and .44. I would take one of each.
The Deerfield was always weak on capacity, being a 4 round mag.
I’d love to see a semi auto with a 10 round tube mag like an oversized Marlin model 60.
The IWI Timberwolf was a great gun, I prefer pump to lever action.
The problem is that the economy of scale has made the AR so cheap, there is very little reason to do R&D into a new gun when most people would just end up buying an AR anyway.
I stand corrected (Thanks, LucusLoC). The Ruger Deerfield that I was referring to earlier was the one with the 4-round tube magazine. That’s the one that was used in the New Orleans incident.
This guy?
On December thirty first, 1972, in New Orleans, a former US Navy dental technician named Mark James Robert Essex, used a .44 caliber Ruger Carbine to kill nine people over the course of eight days. This included five policemen. He had shot twenty two during his spree.
He was shot to death on January 7, 1973 by multiple shooters . An autopsy found over two hundred bullet wounds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Essex
My Hi-Point 9mm carbine is fun to shoot and accurate. I’ve never had any issue with ammo. Not fun to take apart for cleaning, but it works. And when I couldn’t afford anything “better”, it fit my needs!
You have no idea how much this tickles me. 357 is like my pet cartridge.
IVs considered building an ar chambered in it but have settled on a sideoading Henry in future if they can be had with a 16″ barrel.
What I really want though is a 357 double rifle… I’ve found a few outfits that build them off of shotgun receivers for like $5000….