Does anyone have a casull barrel for a Encore?
I just did a deal with the guy from Handgun hunting for one. I will be sending him the money order for a 12" Encore barrel.
Anyone have any thoughts on this round in a 12" barrel?
What kind of Performance are you getting?

Fireball

Fireball,

My beautiful wife gave me that exact barrel for a birthday present last fall and I have been able to gain a bit of an opinion on the round and barrel.

First off my barrel has a stupidly long throat, in fact, I can sit a 300 gr Speer Uni-Core Sp, UPSIDE-DOWN on top of a sized case, chamber it in the Encore and not even come within .100" of the rifling with the full diameter base of the bullet.

Because of this I have been unable to achieve any degree of accuracy with conventional jacketed bullets from 250 up to 325 grains.

Velocity with these bullets has been amazing with max loads. In fact I have driven the 300 gr Speer to a full 1900 fps and the case just fall out of the chamber, but because of the hellishly long throat, I get +2" groups at 25 yards. Not terrible for an open sighted revolver but out of the question for an Encore.

I finally tried a trick that I think may have helped my problems, I ordered a box of 395gr bullets from Cast Performance Bullets. I clean out the first lube groove closest to the crimping grooves and use it as a new crimping groove.

This allows me to seat these long bullets much closer to the rifling(still no where near touching but better) but also increase case capacity quite a bit.

Anyone with experience with the 454 knows how it dislikes reduced load density loadings using H-110 and W-296. For this reason, I switched to H-LilGun simply because it is a much safer powder to use when dealing with less then 100% load density in a round like this.

I was only able to test this load with 6 rounds before the weather got cold for a couple weeks. Groups at 25 yards were in the 1 to 1.5" range on a very windy cold day and velocity with the big 395gr LBT bullets ran right at 1400 fps with a very mild load.

I have a complete set of test loads waiting to a nice day to see what they will really do.

Although I have never slugged the barrel, I feel the larger diameter of the CPB(.453" vs .451") could also be a factor in the better accuracy.

All in all, if it were not for the long throat on my 454 Encore barrel, I would fully endorse it. With mine, I would only say that with very long, heavy, oversized cast bullets will it perform to my expectations.

I am considering a rechamber job for this barrel to get rid of the long throat, perhaps a 450 Marline or 450 Alaskan dimensioned to fire .452" bullets instead of the standard .458".

We will have to see.

Let me know about the throat on your barrel.

Good Shooting!!

You will not be disappointed with the power of the 454 in an Encore, although when left open sighted and using full tilt loads, recoil can be a bit harsh.

50

FIREBALL;
I've been shooting a 12" 454 Encore for a little over 2 years now and I wondered about the long throat myself, but I seem to be getting good accuracy any-way with Hodgdon Lil'gun and 300XTP bullets, my load is 30gr Lil'gun, which is one grain less than max in Hodgdon's manual and it conographs at 1735fps 10ft from the muzzle,the 250XTP will do 2000fps with 35gr of Lil'gun. There is no extraction problems with either of these loads, but the 300gr load will get your attention. Accuricy seems to run around 2" at 100 yards with the 300's. To date I've taken three deer with the 300XTP load all three at 50 yards or less, one was a neck shot at 20 yards and the other two where shoulder lung shots, all three dropped on the spot. My son got one deer with it using the 250XTP, he shot it in the right hip at 80 yards, the shot put the deer down but it got up and ran 80 to 90 yards, he lost the right ham because of all the damage done to it, the bullet seemed to explode so I wouldn't reccomend this bullet for deer it seems to be to fragile at this velocity. I also noticed that the 300 bullets are marked MAG on the box and the 250's are not. Albert

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Fiftydriver:
[QB]Fireball,

My beautiful wife gave me that exact barrel for a birthday present last fall and I have been able to gain a bit of an opinion on the round and barrel.

First off my barrel has a stupidly long throat, in fact, I can sit a 300 gr Speer Uni-Core Sp, UPSIDE-DOWN on top of a sized case, chamber it in the Encore and not even come within .100" of the rifling with the full diameter base of the bullet.

Because of this I have been unable to achieve any degree of accuracy with conventional jacketed bullets from 250 up to 325 grains.

Velocity with these bullets has been amazing with max loads. In fact I have driven the 300 gr Speer to a full 1900 fps and the case just fall out of the chamber, but because of the hellishly long throat, I get +2" groups at 25 yards. Not terrible for an open sighted revolver but out of the question for an Encore.

I finally tried a trick that I think may have helped my problems, I ordered a box of 395gr bullets from Cast Performance Bullets. I clean out the first lube groove closest to the crimping grooves and use it as a new crimping groove.

This allows me to seat these long bullets much closer to the rifling(still no where near touching but better) but also increase case capacity quite a bit.

Anyone with experience with the 454 knows how it dislikes reduced load density loadings using H-110 and W-296. For this reason, I switched to H-LilGun simply because it is a much safer powder to use when dealing with less then 100% load density in a round like this.

I was only able to test this load with 6 rounds before the weather got cold for a couple weeks. Groups at 25 yards were in the 1 to 1.5" range on a very windy cold day and velocity with the big 395gr LBT bullets ran right at 1400 fps with a very mild load.

I have a complete set of test loads waiting to a nice day to see what they will really do.

Although I have never slugged the barrel, I feel the larger diameter of the CPB(.453" vs .451") could also be a factor in the better accuracy.

All in all, if it were not for the long throat on my 454 Encore barrel, I would fully endorse it. With mine, I would only say that with very long, heavy, oversized cast bullets will it perform to my expectations.

I am considering a rechamber job for this barrel to get rid of the long throat, perhaps a 450 Marline or 450 Alaskan dimensioned to fire .452" bullets instead of the standard .458".

We will have to see.

Let me know about the throat on your barrel.

Good Shooting!!

You will not be disappointed with the power of the 454 in an Encore, although when left open sighted and using full tilt loads, recoil can be a bit harsh.

Well If it does not shoot well Maybe rechambering to something like a Slightly necked down 460 jurras?? that would be long enough to take care of the bad throat.......and even add some uneeded power? But I wonder if the .451 bullets would handle the added velocity.

Fireball