Well, gents, it's here.

Friday afternoon the Fedex truck brought me a box from Milt Morrison, Qualite Pistol & Revolver, containing a pair of Colt sixguns. The New Service .38 Special 4" had been discombobulated, and Milt set it right, making sure barrel and cylinder pointed in the same direction. The Trooper, now . . .

I've finally got my .41!

Initial impressions only, as I'm ammo-less and, in fact, my dies need to head off towards Tony for machining. Pictures should be available later today or tomorrow. It's your basic six inch Colt Trooper, with adjustable sights and the wide hammer, and the firing pin mounted on the frame (like a Python on a diet, basically). Milt mounted a .41 caliber barrel and contoured it to match the original, remounted the front sight, rechambered the cylinder and basically slickerified everything up.

We like. Oh yes, we much like.

In .357, the Trooper felt solid. It feels less so now---not in a bad way. If you have any skinny barrel big bore N frame, you've got an idea of how the .41 Trooper feels (in a 7/8s type way). A Smith 24 won't feel as "solid" as a 29, but it's got its own charm and responsiveness. Milt did caution that the Trooper should be treated as a Special, and not a pocket Magnum----but that should suit me just fine anyway.

John Taffin tested this sixgun, and one day his article might even come out. When he shipped the Trooper back to QPR, John included a strong side thumb break holster from deSantis and one of his targets---a bitsy group shot with a Lyman 410459 SWC driven by Unique. I was tickled pink that John got to shoot this pistol. His writings on the .41 Special were what opened my eyes to this cartridge. I know that Hamilton Bowen (and doubtless others) have built .41 Special sixguns on S&W L-frames, but I didn't know of any dedicated .41 Specials built on the Colt I frame (Official Police, 357, Trooper, Python).

The .41 Special, to me, just seems to make sense, particularly given the proliferation of "L-frame" sized sixguns (Colt Troopers, yes out of production but it's what I chose so I'll list it first, the 586 and 686 Smiths, the Ruger GP100). Any of these frames gives you a packin' sixgun that matches up with what Elmer and Skeeter and Bill were looking for in the .41 Magnum for use as a "general purpose" load, a kind of a bare minimum big bore.

I've turned into a minor Colt double action revolver nut, and given the history of Colt's experimentations with forty caliber sixguns in the past, I thought it was appropriate to do up a custom .41 on a Colt. Arch Stanton/JLF of this board located a nice 6" Trooper for me at a good price, the Trooper was dutifully shot some at a Athens, TX meet, and sent off to Milt Morrison for attention.

My goal with this sixgun is to find a good accurate load using a cast SWC of 200 to 220 grains, at a velocity somewhere between 800 and 1000 fps, whichever works out best for accuracy and general satisfactoriness. I don't need to romp and stomp---the .38 WCF and .44 Special and .45 Colt and .45 ACP and so forth all made their names and reputations with loads in that general vicinity, and this gun is, for me, basically a kind of Walter Mitty exercise in thinking about "what might have been."

He he. This is going to be fun.