I ran across an auction the other day and they were offering a Stevens (pre-Savage) rifle chambered for .25-25 Stevens.
Having never heard of the round, I Googled it, and what I found was interesting, to say the least.
Seems the .25-25 Stevens round didn't catch on, so the number of guns chambered for the cartridge are few.
The cartridge CASE for the .25-25 Stevens appears to be roughly 10 inches long!
It was originally a black powder round, firing a .25 caliber bullet over 25 grains of black powder, but offered nothing extra over the then popular .25-21,. so sales lagged.
From Wikipedia it says that when smokeless powder came into favor, the .25-25 Stevens quickly fell out of grace and mostly disappeared.
People still wanting to shoot theirs and lacking a commercially available ammo, went to some pretty extreme measures in my humble opinion.
Since the guns weren't made to take the smokeless pressures, it seems hand loaders mixed 3-5 grains of modern smokeless shotgun powder with 20 grains of black powder!
I've always heard it's a VERY bad idea to mix powders. I'll leave that to those with more testicular fortitude than I possess.
I have very limited search fu, and even less picture posting.
I would appreciate it if someone could find a picture of a .25-25 Stevens cartridge and post it in this thread.
It looks cartoonish.
Having never heard of the round, I Googled it, and what I found was interesting, to say the least.
Seems the .25-25 Stevens round didn't catch on, so the number of guns chambered for the cartridge are few.
The cartridge CASE for the .25-25 Stevens appears to be roughly 10 inches long!
It was originally a black powder round, firing a .25 caliber bullet over 25 grains of black powder, but offered nothing extra over the then popular .25-21,. so sales lagged.
From Wikipedia it says that when smokeless powder came into favor, the .25-25 Stevens quickly fell out of grace and mostly disappeared.
People still wanting to shoot theirs and lacking a commercially available ammo, went to some pretty extreme measures in my humble opinion.
Since the guns weren't made to take the smokeless pressures, it seems hand loaders mixed 3-5 grains of modern smokeless shotgun powder with 20 grains of black powder!
I've always heard it's a VERY bad idea to mix powders. I'll leave that to those with more testicular fortitude than I possess.
I have very limited search fu, and even less picture posting.
I would appreciate it if someone could find a picture of a .25-25 Stevens cartridge and post it in this thread.
It looks cartoonish.
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