I might as well ask:  What are you packing there, Jesse?

So .41 is the 10mm of the revolver world?

Well, from a guy who was there when the .41 magnum came out...

The .41 Magnum is .410 Diameter the .44 Magnum is .424....

More expensive, and power is near as no beer.  But like the .401 Herter's it still enjoys a fan base.  There was an attempt at a .41 Special loading for police, but they were underwhelmed and stuck with the .357 or went to semiautos.  There were also some people who carried the .41 magnum with the police special load and were disappointed in the stopping power.

Geoff
Who notes he has been around a while.   

I've only purchased one box of factory ammo and reloaded from there, so my ammo cost is virtually identical to .44 Magnum.

The .41 is one of those strange cases where the numbers just don't tell the story. As far as comfort and shootability, it really does fall smack dab between .357 and .44 - despite being just a couple hairs smaller than the .44 and nearly identical in power. Don't ask me why. It doesn't make sense. It's just one of those magical things that happens sometimes, like the way it's hard to get a bad .22-250 load.

For me, it's just about perfect. I wanted a sixgun suited to hiking, plinking, and hunting in my area. I wanted something enjoyable to shoot and stuff like defense against grizzlies is a complete non-issue.

Yeah, I'm with you! The .41 mag, is terrific! It shoots very flat, more so than the .44 mag. In a large framed 4"-5" revolver, it's near to perfect.

How is it that the .44 is really .424 inches?  Why don't they just call it a .42 Mag?

Welcome to the wonderous world of caliber designations, where a .32 can be a .308 and a host of inheritances going back to cap-n-ball make for interesting history.

And then there are inside and outside lubricated rounds...and those that used to be outside and are now inside... "Don't try to understand 'um, just match the box to the barrel and blast 'um!

Geoff
Who notes a .45 can be .451 or .455 and a .38 special is .357.   

How is it that the .44 is really .424 inches?  Why don't they just call it a .42 Mag?

It's actually .429".

But anyway, this is one of those artifacts of the evolution from black powder guns loaded with separate components to the adoption of metallic cartridges.

In the days of percussion black powder revolvers, their calibers were specified as something reasonably close to their bore diameter. The barrel for a Colt 1860 Army or Remington 1858 .44 revolver started with a hole drilled to a diameter somewhere close to .440". After that, it would be rifled and the groove diameter would be somewhere around .455", but the lands would remain around .440". These would be loaded with lead balls around .455" or a little more, to get a god bore seal. All was well and the names made sense.

When metallic cartridges got invented and people started converting the cap-and-ball guns to use cartridges, the simplest way to do that was to drill the charge holes in the existing cylinders all the way through. This left you with a revolver with chambers that were around .450" all the way through. You'd then load the cartridge with a heel based bullet (as still seen on the .22 long rifle today, the bullet is the same diameter as the case, except at the base whre it narrows to fit inside the case) the same size as the round ball you would have used before.

Heel based bullets though, needed their lubrication grooves on the larger portion of the bullet, that lay outside the case. This meant they were messy to handle, the lube could be rubbed off, or collect dirt. To solve those issues, they moved to non-heel based bullets that were smaller than the outside diameter of the case for their whole length, so the lube grooves could be located on the portion of the bullet covered by the case.

Unfortunately, these smaller diameter bullets didn't properly fit the full diameter of the bore, and solutions of using hollow-based soft lead bullets to swell and better fir the bore didn't work all that well. So they started making guns with smaller bore to fit the new, inside-lubricated rounds. They still called what had been based on a .44 case a .44, despite the fact that the smaller bullet was now only .429. The same thing happened to make .38s really use a .358" diameter.

And this affliction only affects old school revolver cartridges? Or does it apply to other guns as well?  (For example, I read that the 7.62x54R is apparently in .311 diameter).

It's not strictly old school revolver cartridges. A lot of those naming conventions carried over to similarly sized pistol rounds, including some invented not all that long ago.

.32 ACP is really something like .312"
.38 ACP is .356"
.380 ACP is .355"
.44 Automag Pistol is .429"

Lost of cartridge designers (or marketers?) choose names that will easily compare to existing rounds with little regard to actual measurment, so these historical quirks can linger for a very long time.

As for the 7.62x54R, that gets even weirder. The Mosin-Nagant is a "three line" rifle. The term "three line" is based on archaic Russian measurment, the "liniya", which is roughly 0.1". Between the conversion to metric and the choice to measure bore rather than groove diameter, we somehow arrived at calling it 7.62mm.

Care to guess what .218 Bee, .219 Zipper, .220 Swift, .221 Fireball, .222 Remington, .223 WSSM, .224 Weatherby, and .225 Winchester all have in common?

Funny thing that liniyia phonetically sounds just like "line" in Spanish.  Does it have to do with Arshins?  I read that old-school 1891s were calibrated in Arshins instead of metres.

I know this sounds like a stupid question, but what is the difference between bore and groove diameter?  I could probably make an educated guess as to what it is. But I want to have a legit source, and Jesse, when it comes to guns, you are pretty legit.

Oh, thanks for the graphic.

Is the .003" difference between the bullet and the bore significant at all?

So NORSEMAN, are you saying that original "rifling" was straight?

As for the 41 magnum specifically, the Speer 200 gr HJHP in front of enough blue dot(yes, I know about the blue dot data recall/warning, but it's a load I've used for years with no signs of high pressure) to run 1550fps muzzle velocity is a neutron bomb on jackrabbits.......

That had to be a long time ago that they had straight rifling, even the kentucky rifles back during the Revolution had actual rifling, didn't they?

FluffyHitman-  Yes the Kentucky Rifles had rifling.  Long arms that aren't shotguns without rifling are called muskets.  Example?  The "Brown Bess" musket that the British fired at the Kentucky Riflemen and the Continental Army during a little dust up a few hundred years back.