quote:

Originally posted by Hallgeir Gravrok:
... the results it produced were no better than with the 275 and the 256.

Bell wrote in one of his books he used a .318 WR for a lot of his elephant hunting.

My family has had a very close connection to Walter bell for many years- my grandfather served with him in the RFC in WWI and my dads first .22 was a present from Bell- and I have signed editions of his first two books...

As I understand it- bearing in mind that I never met him and that my father will be 89 this year and they last exchanged letters as Dad was going off to Korea....

Bell liked the little Manchilcher carbines- they are still the slickest actioned rifles you can find today- but he hated the ammo and had constant problems with it.

He used at least two 7mm mausers- one bought in Africa and the other ordered new. With the Kynock and eley ammo of the day, he got the results he wanted.

BUT- 7mm mauser ammo wasn't that common in most of Bells hunting grounds and being a wise man he always had a .303 along just in case he ran short of ammo. One such incident occured in the Sudan and he bought a fairly new .318 WR and 1000 rounds of ammo- but discovered the ammo had got wet and gave the occasional misfire. This was something he could not chance so he used the ammo up in practice while another case of 318 was on it's way up river to him.

He was also VERY fond of his Savage 99 in .22 Save High power- a caliber he used frequently when he moved back to scotland.

His principal concern was the handyness of the rifles- His beloved 7mm were built on the intermediate action rather than the standard length and he ordered it with a short (20") barrel. The .318 he used- possibly more than the 7mm because of ammo supply but was never fond of- the same could be said for the .303. It was the rifles as much as the cartridge that mattered - but the inevitable restrictions on re-supply forced him into using many rifles for a period that he wouldn't have chosen- He had a 9x57 that he used extensively for harvesting crocodiles when their skins were up in value...but that was only for one 'season'- 3 months- and then a resupply for his 7mm arrived, the price of Ivory went up and he went elephant hunting again.

I do know he didn't actually like the .318, especially in original WR rifles. He wrote to my father telling him that the barrels were too long and the shallow metford rifling wore out in less than a season- He advised an 8mm mauser as a suitable 'all round compromise' as it was available in good rifles and Kynock (by the 1930's) was offering good steel jacketed solids and also a reasonably effective soft point (which was an important consideration to my dad as most of our problems were with lion).

I suspect that if decent solids had been available for the 300 savage in the model 99 he would have hapily used that! Why he never tried the MS carbines in 9x56 or 9,5x56 I do not know, especially as he thought so much of his original model 1903.

quote:

Originally posted by NitroX:
Yeah sure! There were no cannibals in the South Pacific ..... "Trax" has told us so ....

Your vivid imagination-delusional mind is hard at work again,

No where did I say there were no cannibals in the SP,however, that does not mean The Johnsons adventure activities [and accounts of such], were not somewhat staged,exaggerated,falsified.

Just like there really was a Vietnam War - and there really are frauds-people who have falsely claimed to serve [or intentionally misrepresented how they served].. in that war.

The Johnsons sacrificed authenticity in favor of commercial Hollywood success.

Nothing like bringing up an old thread to stir up things (not my intention), but regarding Bell and the 7X57, I KNOW I read somewhere (even written by him possibly) where he speaks about losing wounded elephants while conducting his ivory hunting days. Anybody remember this?

Don't have my copy any longer but I think that was in "Karamojo Safari".

quote:

Originally posted by jorge:
Nothing like bringing up an old thread to stir up things (not my intention), but regarding Bell and the 7X57, I KNOW I read somewhere (even written by him possibly) where he speaks about losing wounded elephants while conducting his ivory hunting days. Anybody remember this?

Of more interest to me than most of this is that he took his own boat to Dunkirk.

In the new book he discusses whaling with a rifle!! Good ole Bell

quote:

Originally posted by ijl:
Don't have my copy any longer but I think that was in "Karamojo Safari".

quote:

Originally posted by jorge:
Nothing like bringing up an old thread to stir up things (not my intention), but regarding Bell and the 7X57, I KNOW I read somewhere (even written by him possibly) where he speaks about losing wounded elephants while conducting his ivory hunting days. Anybody remember this?

Thank you very much

He certainly didn't give his 450/400 much of a chance !!!

I recall that he stopped using some calibres only due to the lack of good cartridges/projectiles.

Was it the .318 that he used up the suspect ammo shooting flying cormorants with ???

His preferred cartridges/projectiles met the Taylor requirement of long for calibre, parallel sided, blunt nose solids.

Along with the correct cartridge/projectile combination he used light fast handling rifles that were most likely in his hands when he needed them...........not on the sling or carried by a gun bearer due to their weight.

He was obviously a very good shot.

I find his reading a bit "dry" but it won't stop me reading it again.

If you guys have more "meat" like drawings, photos and letters to put on this story, please do us the honor, it would be very interessting.

quote:

Originally posted by 465H&H:
Sounds like Bell should have done what most of us do and that is to load our doubles when we take up the trail. Had he been carrying his bolt rifle with the action open it might not have closed when he wanted it to either. That problem wasn't a fault of the double rifle but of the user.

You beat me to it! Carrying any type of 465H&H

You beat me to it! Anybody carrying any type of rifle with an open breach is simply asking to get his ass in a crack when he needs it most!

That was simply a dumb move on Bells part not the rifle!

.................................................................... Mac

quote:

Originally posted by MacD37:

quote:

Originally posted by 465H&H:
Sounds like Bell should have done what most of us do and that is to load our doubles when we take up the trail. Had he been carrying his bolt rifle with the action open it might not have closed when he wanted it to either. That problem wasn't a fault of the double rifle but of the user.

You beat me to it! Carrying any type of 465H&H

You beat me to it! Anybody carrying any type of rifle with an open breach is simply asking to get his ass in a crack when he needs it most!

That was simply a dumb move on Bells part not the rifle!

.................................................................... Mac

I once walked through a puddle of water with my shoes on, they were very uncomfortable after that so I stopped wearing shoes.

I remember Taylor telling about doubling with his .600 NE by accident but purposely firing both barrels of a double? Crazy.

quote:

Originally posted by Rune Hallgeir:
If you guys have more "meat" like drawings, photos and letters to put on this story, please do us the honor, it would be very interessting.

I am always reminded of another Bell kerfuffle,
from the "Bell's 450 Winchester?" thread last year:
http://forums.accuratereloadin...501089032#8501089032

quote:

Originally posted by RIP:
Page 16 of Bell of Africa, Karamojo's description of the rifle in question:

"Meeting one day a Greek trader at a common camp, we compared rifles. That of the Greek was a Winchester single shot black powder .450 falling block with a long, taper cartridge. (My emphasis.) Not exactly so modern a weapon as the beautiful Fraser .303, but still an accurate, hard-hitting gun, and above all a sure extractor. I offered an exchange after ascertaining that the count of ammunition was roughly that of the .303. Unfortunately all the cartridges had that abomination, the hollow copper-point bullet. But I knew nothing of this at the time, and as the Greek seemed dazzled with the .303, a trade was soon affected."

When I first read this book about 32 years ago, I made notes in the margins about Bell's cartridges.
Somehow I selected the identity of this ".450 Winchester" as the .45-125 Winchester.
It is a bottle-necked cartridge, but it also might appear to be a "long, taper cartridge" at first glance by Bell.

It surely must have been a Winchester 1885 High Wall.
Winchester chambered that rifle for over 100 cartridges, including the occasional, very rare, .45-120-3.25" Sharps.
But the 45-125 Winchester was a special-order chambering too, by Winchester, so pretty rare too.
Surely some British 450-3.25" BPE cartridges too, like Cal's .577.

Odds might be slightly in favor of the cartridge being what Cal said, and what I wrote in the margin of the book 32 years ago.
I don't know where I got that idea either, just like Cal.

".45-125 Winchester: 300-grain copper tube express bullet at 1690 fps, 1903 ft-lbs, 200 yard MRT = 9.3 inches."

Those ballistics were likely copied by me from COTW.
Yep, same MRT listed there, in the old 5th Edition COTW.
Old 5th edition said the 45-125 Express Winchester continued to be loaded by Winchester until 1916.
Ditto latest 15th Edition of that not always correct source, but the MRT is no longer listed.

Some photopucker disappearances revived:

The Winchester Book by George Madis.
Book review: It is a great book, all 654-plus pages of it, first published in 1961, and my autographed-by-author "1 of 1000" edition was printed in 1985. I probably found that brand-new copy of it at the old location of Mountain View Sports before they moved downtown, in Anchorage, AK.
Pictures of a couple of 1885 Winchesters from the chapter "The Single Shot Model" are excerpted here for review purposes:





COTW 5th Edition it was, in 1985 (Frank C. Barnes, edited by Ken Warner), that I referred to.
Excerpts from this book are presented for a book review.
Book review: Good book. It appears to be reliable on this issue, and does not contradict anything you might find in Frank Sellers' book Sharps Firearms.






Rip ...

Bell had an almost unwavering single mindiness towards many things, most notable of course big bore as opposed to single bores

We probably need to be a bit more forgiving when offering opinions as to how some of those early hunters used the firearms of their day. Even that great hunter of old India, Jim Corbett, did what to us today, is some dumbass things when hunting maneating tigers and leopards. Who would take a new Rigby 7mm rifle straight from the shop after a maneating tiger and get a good chance of taking it out, pulling the trigger and nothing happened. Thought that he had failed to chamber a round from the magazine so attempted to quietly work the bolt again with the tiger only yards away. Not being used to the Mauser double pull trigger he had only taken up the first pull and wondered why it didn't fire. In this case I recall the tiger went on to claim several more victims before Jim managed to finally bag it.

Of course those old hunters wrote the books that we today learn from and most of them just had to learn from experience. Many didn't shoot their rifles in or try them on a range, they just trusted that the manufacturers or gunsmiths did that job. Different mindset completely to ours today. Nevertheless even today there will be some really dumbass things done on hunts and in handling firearms, I'm sure some by members of this and other like forums, we just don't admit or write about it. Perhaps the Pondoro Taylor's, Karamojo Bell's, and Jim Corbetts were more open and honest about their adventures