I have a question for the experts.
I have no experience with lever action rifles.
Why lever action rifles use rimmed or semirimmed cartridges?
Do rimless cartridges work?
Thanks
Martin

The 35 Remington is rimless and it is chambered in Marlin leverguns, though not in Winchesters as far as I know.

Martin

I have a Winchester 95 that shoots 30-06 and can be had in 270.
I think the deciding issue as to what caliber most lever action rifles are chambered for is the bullet nose shape. The tubular magazine stacks the base of one cartridge against the nose of the bullet behind. Most flat nosed bullets are loaded on rimmed, older style cartridges.
Because of the 95s design, it can be made with rimmed or rimless. The Winchester 95 has a box magazine to prevent the spitzer shaped bullet from setting off the primer in the cartridge ahead of it. Winchester 95s can be purchased in many calibers, 30-40, 7.62 - 54 Russian, 405 Winchester, 30-06, 270.

Jim

Thank for yuor answers.
I rewrite my question:
Why all new cartridges are rimmed like the .444 Marlin or semirimmed like de .307 Win. or the .308 Marlin express?
also, I know that the .450 Marlin is bletedlike.
Just can not find any logic in using rimmed while you can use a slimmer magazine or you can have more powder room with rimless cases.
Thanks
Martin

thr 450 marlin is belted so it cannot be used in a 45-70, due to the pressure
the reason a lot of the older ones were rimmed was so the extractor could get purcchase on it.
a lot of the older ones are just cases based on other cartridge series 38-55 32-40 32 special and 30-30 as well as the newer 7-30 waters are all the same case.
much like the 308 243 260 358 and 7-08 are all the same case.
so it sometimes is just a matter of taking a case that already exists, and fits in a particular rifle, and just changing the caliber to come up with something new.
other times it is just to improve something old [raise pressure] and make it so it cannot be used in the older guns.

Martin
I'm not sure of the logic behind rimmed cartridges of recent introduction, other then tradition.
My next lever action will be a Winchester 95 converted to 375 Whelen, 375-06.
Always wanted a Sako, I think it was Finn Wolf, a lever action discontinued in the 60s, came in 308. And a Winchester, I think mod 100, a modern lever action in 308. Both of these rifles were really slick looking weapons.

Jim

quote:

Originally posted by arkypete:

Always wanted a Sako, I think it was Finn Wolf, a lever action discontinued in the 60s, came in 308. And a Winchester, I think mod 100, a modern lever action in 308. Both of these rifles were really slick looking weapons.

Jim

Finnwolf, yes.
They command fairly high prices even here in their domestic Finland.
Also made in .243 Win.

The Win you think about is the 88 - the 100 was semi-auto!

By the time I got where I could have one and could afford one Sako discontinued them, much to my chagrin.
I've seen a few and they are wonderful.

Jim

The question remains specifically: Why Winchester and Marlin still develope rimmed cartridge for their lever actions?
Thanks
Martin

Martin
I'd bet on the reason being two things. Traditional lever action were rimmed cartridges and I suspect that the tolerances required for rimmed can be a bit looser then rimless.

Jim

Marlins are chambered in 35 Rem. Win 100 came in 243, 308 and 358 Win. Win 95 could be had in 30-06, Savage Mod 99 was available in a variety of rimmed and rimless cartridges.

I've got a 356 Win reamer on order for a Marlin 35 Rem I have. They made the 336 in 356 at one time and it's a pretty good step above the 35 Rem. Might even use a new douglas barrel or something and see if I can't make it into a dandy brush gun.

The Win model 94 is made to work with rimmed cartridges. If you look at the piece that is on the bottom of the action that the lever operates on, on the front of that piece is a little nipple that rotates up and down to allow the rim to pass over or stop.
When the lever is closed, the nipple is down and out of the way so a round from the tubular magazine can feed back into the action.
When the lever is pushed down, the bottom plate starts to pivot down(it hinges at the front and the nipple is on the front top side of the plate) and the nipple rotates up to block the rim of the next round so it stays in the magazine.
Finish cycleing the lever down and back up to feed a round into the chamber. If you stop just before the lever is closed and listen, you can hear the next round slip past the nipple when the lever is closed all the way.
Then the next round is sitting part way in the bottom of the action to be fed in when the lever is cycled again.
If a rimmless round was used, when the lever was opened, the nipple would crush into the side of the case. If the case had lots of body taper, you might be able to get away with it, but it might take lots of work and custom parts to make it so.

The Win model 92 doesn't have the bottom plate like the 94 does. It has a small spring loaded claw in the front bottom left next to where the rounds come from the magazine. With the action open, the claw is pushed out to block the next round from entering the bottom of the action.
When the lever is closed and the bolt is all the way forward, the bottom of the bolt pushes the claw to the left and lets another round go into the action. I think this could be made to work with a rimmless round.

I don't have a marlin so I don't know exactly how it works.

Were the Marlin's in 356 and 375 built from a different grade of steel to handle the higher pressures?

jkingrph,
Yes, but the .35 is a Remington cartridge.
Lar45,
Thanks, now I can underestad why they continue with the rimmed cases.
Martin

quote:

I'm not sure of the logic behind rimmed cartridges of recent introduction, other then tradition.

One word MARKETING

shooters believe believe that leverguns require rimmed cartridges therefore any new levergun round must therefore be rimmed.

IMOP The rimless 35 remington in a 336 is much easier to load and smoother to cycle than the same rifle chambered for 30-30

quote:

Were the Marlin's in 356 and 375 built from a different grade of steel to handle the higher pressures?

Supposedly the only difference were the barrel threads. By all accounts I've read the receivers were the same. A popular conversion for marlin 336'es is reaming them to what you call 308/307 or 358/356

Basically you ream the chamber to 308 or 358 specs use that brass and dies and simply load using the lower pressure 307/356 data. This gets you the preformance boost of the 307/356 chambering whilst using the much cheaper 308 brass, and even though there's no rim they supposedly work great

Actually I think it's more a case of "why reinvent the wheel"

The Marlin rifle has an exsisting boltface and they simply design new cartridges to fit THAT boltface.

There's nothing really "broke" that they need to fix.

Do remember that rimless cartridges were developed because rimmed cartridges didn't work well from stacked "box" magazines.

if a rifle doesn't use a box magazine it doesn't need rimless cartridges.

The Sako Finnbear, the winchester 1895 (and winchester 88) and finally the BLR are odd ducks and really another discussion.

there are valid reasons for the belt on a 450Marlin cartridge but that again is a seperate discussion based on entirely different reasons.

Marlin and Hornady WANTED a "+P" standard adopted for the 45-70, but SAAMI wasn't having it.

the 450Marlin was the result of multiple compromises in the name of creating a "modern" full power handloaded 45-70 for people that don't reload.

IF you DO reload you can actually get better performance out of a 45-70 than you can from the 450Marlin, simply because the 45-70 has thicker chamber walls allowed by
it's skinnier cartridge case...

AD

quote:

Why lever action rifles use rimmed or semirimmed cartridges?

It is historical. When lever action rifles were perfected in the 1870s and 1880s then the only cartridges that existed were rimmed cartridges. Usually of low pressure as usually either black powder or smokeless versions of blackpowder cartridges.

That worked well in the lever action designs that already existed for the rimfire cartridges such as the 44 Henry an which required little modification to use a central ingnited rather than a rim ignited rimmed cartridge.

So it wasn't a question of why did they use rimmed cartridges it was a question of that was all that existed.

It wasn't until reliable bolt action megazine rifles came into use that rimless cartridges became widespread. All based on Mauser's 1888 design.

As the existing lever actions were still of a construction or a metal based on the earlier blackpowder capable designs there weren't any lever actions actually safe to use with the new higher pressure rimless rounds.

With Winchester's 1895 model and Savage's 1899 and as better metals came into use this changed. Both using box or vertical magazines. Why? Because the parent cartridges such as the 30-06 had sharp noses which made the old tube magazines unsafe.

Today many "lever action" rifles - such as the Miroku, the Winchester 88, the Browning BLR - aren't actually what the shooter of the 19th Century would recognise as a "lever action". For they are, in fact, modern bolt action rifles where that bolt is operated by a lever.