Is there a new printing of Ken Howell's book: Designing and Forming Custom Cartridges For Rifles and Handguns?

I noticed that the prices had dropped on the secondary market from $500.00 to as low as $189.00.

Thanks

LD

I really do like talking to myself. Huntingtons may be carrying a third printing of the seminal Ken Howell book about forming cartridge cases from a third party. He addresses so much more. Contact Huntingtons.

If you can get anywhere near Apache Junction, AZ, please stop into the medical facility. He is presently the engineer on the "poof" train that leads to death and beyond. Time out of the station is measured in days. The finest of men. 24 Campfire is up to date to a four hour degree of exactitude. Thanks

It is my understanding that it is back in print.

Huntington's has it for around $60

Ken Howell hangs on 24 hour... you can PM him over there...

Thanks Seafire, Ramrod 340,

What is Dr. Ken's tag line here on AR. I need to get a PM to him. If he has heirs, I can probably have a rifle built, and auction it off for a benefit deal. I will learn from the Silver lining scholarship rifle's ups and downs.

L/D

quote:

Originally posted by lawndart:
Thanks Seafire, Ramrod 340,

What is Dr. Ken's tag line here on AR. I need to get a PM to him. If he has heirs, I can probably have a rifle built, and auction it off for a benefit deal. I will learn from the Silver lining scholarship rifle's ups and downs.

L/D

His wife died of cancer about 25 years ago. His son has long since graduated from Univeristy and is on his own as an adult man. The last I heard the son was in a secure government position and did not need any donated assistance. I can't recall his specific major, but it seems to me it was something like either Forestry, or Game Biology.

His daughter is years older than his son and a very polite, mental whiz-kid. (One very sharp cookie who was also a great cook!) Again, IIRC she has also long been out of college.

His son IS a very nice guy, or at least was the last time I saw him, which was just after his mother's death. He is the fella who as a young child nicknamed Sterling Davenport "Silver Sofa".

He deserves having some form of cartridge award named after him.

The NRA does that Golden BB thing. It would be nice to annually award someone who does great work in the world of interior ballistics, cartridge design, and so on.

Although this year has given him some fits and starts, Bryan Litz would be a candidate. So would the designer of the 338 Norma Mag, Arne Brennan for his pioneering work with what became the 6.5 Grendel, Dennis Demille and the Hornady chief engineer who worked out the 6.5 Creedmoor, and so on. Thanks for the information.

Eye's rye cheer —

ken1931@gilanet.com

Ken Howell

quote:

… His son IS a very nice guy, or at least was the last time I saw him, which was just after his mother's death. He is the fella who as a young child nicknamed Sterling Davenport "Silver Sofa".

Do I know you?

BTW, 'twas I — not Ben — who punned "Silver Sofa." Ben's sharper, of course.

Ben got his degree in civil engineering — and his bride — at NAU. They now have two daughters and three sons. Ben's a paramedic and fireman in a suburb of Flagstaff.

What's left of me is house- and wheel-chair-bound in Quemado, NM, after a stroke, a passel of surgeries, and a few months in hospitals and nursing homes. It ain't easy bein' senile! :grin:

A bunch of 24-Hour Campfire buddies had a ball at nearby Quemado Lake 16 July and plan a rehash with a bigger bunch next July. Anybody from AR will be welcome, too, of course!

I'm active on the "Hunter's Campfire" forum at www.24hourcampfire.com and have a bunch of articles in the Campfire's on-line magazine, Smokelore.

ken1931@gilanet.com

Yeh, Ken, you know me. It was you who originally told me that Ben had nicknamed Mr. Davenport that, one time when you were remarking on what a clever kid he was/is, which is why I said it. But then that was a long time ago......and either way, you have reason to be proud of your son. He was always a polite, upstanding boy so far as I ever knew.

I'm sorry to hear you are not doing well, and I can empathize with you, having had a severe stroke myself. I guess it's all part of the Great Architect's plan, though...

Old age does take courage and perseverance (my wife says "pig-headedness") doesn't it?

AC

BTW, how is your daughter doing? She and your wife were both exceptional, hard-working, genteel, true ladies back when I knew you folks as a solid, devout, nuclear family.

quote:

Originally posted by ramrod340:
It is my understanding that it is back in print.

Huntington's has it for around $60

I just ordered one thanks for the heads up.

Welcome to AR Ken. Our main hobby here is infighting, but some of the guys are pretty erudite about it.

I hope you at least have a window to shoot feral visitors off of the garbage can at night when you are too uncomfortable to sleep.

lawndart

And I have a personalized, signed copy - No. 911 - from 2000.

They were worth $500 at one time?

Hej Ken - weren't you going to do an Internal Ballistics treatise as an encore effort?

quote:

Originally posted

I have a personalized, signed copy - No. 911

Me too, #383. Could have had a low 2-digit numbered one, but wanted #383, as that is the same # which was on all my Wolfe series of books.

I had posted last year that Buffalo arms had about 30 copies left and they sold them out in 3 days. I have two copies and I am holding on to them., great book!

Ken,
I believe the genius in your book lies in the time, effort and flat out toil that you put into cross referencing the cases included in the tome.

People are much more likely to tweak a basic design to optimize it for use with a given bullet, etc.

I first learned much of the above in Donnelly's book, but it has passed the reality test.


A well known example of this is seen in articles by German Salazar. He owns multiple .308 Winchester and 30-06 reamers. Each reamer is optimized for a given range of bullets. For example, I use the Palma 1995 .308 reamer as ground by Pacific Tool and Gage.

That is another point; it is important to specify who did the grinding? Hugh Henriksen, Dave Kiff, Dave Manson, JGS or some other person or company.

Counselor Whitley, Esq. at AR6mm always inserts the actual reamer print in his articles, promoting and educational efforts.

I would hazard a guess that 95% of the variations revolve around the projectile(s) of choice.

One thing about older designs, especially my pet headache producers, the Mannlicher Schoenauer cartridges 6,5x54M/S, 8x56M/S, 9x56M/S and that great destroyer of rotator cuffs, the 9.5x57M/S.

These particular rifles can be distressingly finicky, especially the M1903 Carbine and the various M1910 iterations, take down or fixed.

The first requirement is that the barrel be properly slugged (a dead soft piece of lead between two pieces of copper with diameters just under bore diameter. Then beat the cupro-lead Oreo through the bore, breech to muzzle, feeling for tight and loose spots along the way. If the muzzle itself needs a new crown, do it before you take another step/first shot. If the bore is oversized, take a Hornady 160 grain Carcano bullet and swage it down to size courtesy of the Richard Lee Reloading firm. They sell swages for whatever size you ask for.

If the bore is a nominal .264 or .265, get some RWS 159-grain S/N R/N projectiles, and load them in Norma cases to exactly 3.000" in length. The standard Hornady .264" 160-grain projectiles are only .264" behind the cannelure. These are only satisfactory if the bore measures on the order of .263" or less. Not bloody likely, eh Ferdinand.

If a case comes out of the chamber looking to be way oversize, get out the micrometer, and have your sizing die hogged out appropriately.

Also, the head diameter and the head thickness are nominally much smaller than their Mauser counterparts. Sometimes the action will not feed, extract of eject unless those dimensions are spot on.

If the rifle is marked 8x56M/S, first check to see if an 8x57i or 8x57is case will fit. many of those have been re bored; not all have been re-marked. Either Steve Gash or John Haviland wrote of such a thing in a recent Handloader magazine.

In order to be able to swage the entire case body down, get a Lyman #2 case holder, and have it ground down until only 0.030" of "holding metal remains". Then try some cheap automotive feeler gauges until one wedges the donor cartridge in tightly, but can then be removed with a modicum of effort.

Finally it is time to get out an itty bitty hobby lathe like the Shop Fox (made in Taiwan, not PRC). Decide on your favorite method of chucking your cases , nose toward the head, tail toward the 'er tail stock. The head must be turned to the correct thickness, AND diameter. You will need to invest a few dollars in a plunge cutting piece of carbide to make for the properly shaped gap between head and body.
Finally, you may have to drag your cutter down the body a bit (0.500") if the body die did not squeeze the cartridge body down sufficiently.

I am not the one who makes many of these rifles so finicky. I am not the first to notice, either. Is the toil worth the result. Yes!

You can take a $0.25 case and transform it into a $4.25 case; just check prices for Hulsen Horneber cases from Huntingtons. You can make 500 cases, use 120 and hawk the rest in the Mannlicher collector's club newsletter. ibid for the German gun collector's club. They are pretty stuffy, but usually well heeled.


The hard part is turning a correctly sized mandrel to put a case over while the mandrel is chucked into the four jaw. Actually that is not hard. The hard part is drilling a small hole dead center, and then tapping it for a depth of 0.400". THEN you can attach the case with a cap screw that fits through the (prepped) primer pocket and blow hole with a cap screw. If the cap screw is dressed down just enough to be a slip fit in the primer pocket, THEN you can relax and whistle a happier tune.

Remember, you only need one such assembly for 8mm, 9mm and 9.5mm (0.375"). I do not know if leaded steel is stout enough. I suspect not. At any rate, hard or heat treated steel is hardly necessary; just some round stock of slightly greater than desired final finished diameter.

***ALERT*** Patrone und Lagermasse by Triebel is a CD of cartridge dimensions. It is not entirely trustworthy. You have been warned. That is all.

Remember,

One day it will be our responsibility to add to this wonderful book; perhaps an addendum in ten years.

As long as the world contains marketeers (not musketeers) there will be more cases to catalog.

quote:

The first requirement is that the barrel be properly slugged (a dead soft piece of lead between two pieces of copper with diameters just under bore diameter. Then beat the cupro-lead Oreo through the bore, breech to muzzle, feeling for tight and loose spots along the way. If the muzzle itself needs a new crown, do it before you take another step/first shot. If the bore is oversized, take a Hornady 160 grain Carcano bullet and swage it down to size courtesy of the Richard Lee Reloading firm. They sell swages for whatever size you ask for.

Lawndart-- I am curious as to why you advocate using (what appears to be) a copper coated "slug" to get the size of the inside dimensions of the barrel. It seems to me that using one of those football shaped fishing sinkers with the hole down the center (to negate spring-back) would be much easier and would produce just as good a measurement.

No,
a piece of copper goes first, then the sinker, then a tail end piece of copper.

Mike Brady,
Founder of North Fork bullets told me that this was his method because it was more accurate than just pounding a dollop of lead down the bore.

As he explained it to me, shoving just the soft lead down the bore can result in falsely large diameter values.

My experience with his method has been positive. I have much greater faith in the obtained values. That comes from comparing methods side by side.

At one time all that was available was the dead soft fishing sinker method. It has been passed down by three generations of gun writers as the truth and the light. As a doubting engineer, Mike took a hard look, and tried a different method.

The world will likely not spin off of its axis if most people continue to use the more common method.

I pass along this different method for your own critical analysis and personal decision.

lawndart

Lawndart-- Thankyou for the clarification. I have copied your explanation and will try it at some point. Have a great day!!

I never knew that lead would "spring back".

quote:

The hard part is turning a correctly sized mandrel to put a case over while the mandrel is chucked into the four jaw. Actually that is not hard. The hard part is drilling a small hole dead center, and then tapping it for a depth of 0.400". THEN you can attach the case with a cap screw that fits through the (prepped) primer pocket and blow hole with a cap screw. If the cap screw is dressed down just enough to be a slip fit in the primer pocket, THEN you can relax and whistle a happier tune.

Remember, you only need one such assembly for 8mm, 9mm and 9.5mm (0.375"). I do not know if leaded steel is stout enough. I suspect not. At any rate, hard or heat treated steel is hardly necessary; just some round stock of slightly greater than desired final finished diameter.

Lawndart,
There is an easier way to do this.
Find a Wilson trimmer holder that will hold your case on the body or make one. Hold them in a lathe with a 5C collet.