GUN NOTES
The .416 Taylor Revisited
So maybe there is room for just one more big .416.
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For the last couple of years, I've been harping that we have too many new cartridges. Certainly, we have at least enough .416s, but this is a relatively new development. Just 20 years ago the future of the .416 was pretty much speculation.
In the mid-1980s I used the wildcat .416 Hoffman on a Remington M700 action, and a couple of years later I had my first .416 Rigby, a large-action left-hand Dumoulin. Then, in 1988, working fast and quiet, Remington slightly modified the .416 Hoffman and came out with its .416 Remington Magnum. Within a year Ruger was chambering its big Model 77 to .416 Rigby and Federal was making the ammo, and Weatherby had necked down its big, belted .460 case to create the .416 Weatherby Magnum.
These three .416 cartridges were probably enough, but in the mid-1990s Krieghoff took the old 3 1/4-inch .470 case and necked it down to create the .500/.416 3 1/4-inch Nitro Express for double rifles. John Lazzeroni also has two proprietary .416s on his fat rimless case. One is full-length and very fast, the other short and medium-fast.
There are lots of .416 wildcats as well--probably too many--but there's one I think deserves attention. In the 1970s, before George Hoffman's .416, the hot .416 wildcat was the .416 Taylor. The cartridge was the brainchild of hunter and gun writer Robert Chatfield-Taylor, whose work graced these pages in the late 1960s and early '70s.
The cartridge is a simple necking down of the .458 Winchester Magnum case to produce minimal body taper, a relatively short neck and quite a lot of powder capacity. It is said that Winchester seriously considered legitimizing the cartridge at least twice, and Ruger had an interest in it as well. Bob Chatfield-Taylor's early death probably didn't help the future of his cartridge, but he wasn't alone in championing it.
It was a favorite of John Wootters as well, and in the 1970s Wootters was spending a lot of time in Africa. But despite all that ink spilled across the pages of both Guns & Ammo and Petersen's Hunting, the .416 Taylor became an also-ran to the .416 Remington Magnum. And that should have been fine, in my opinion, but I suddenly and unexpectedly needed the .416 Taylor.
The immediate and specific need was for a forest safari in Cameroon. I was going to hunt bongo, which doesn't necessarily call for a big-bore cartridge, but in the forest there's always the chance of a sudden encounter with an unhappy elephant. You must carry enough gun to get yourself out of trouble.
The most common choice would be .458 Winchester Magnum, but I wanted a bit more versatility. There are wildcat .375s that would work, but when things get really serious I prefer the over-.40 crowd, and the old .416 Taylor came quickly to mind.
Reamers are readily available. For those willing to work at it, loading dies are standard and there is plenty of data out there. If you're pressed for time, you can call Larry Barnett at Superior Ammunition, which I did--ordering .416 Taylor ammo with 400-grain Hornady solids and softpoints.
In the meantime, I sent my left-handed Ruger M77 Mk II in .300 Winchester Magnum to Don Golembieski at Kodiak Precision. I told him to leave the stock alone, install a 23-inch heavy barrel and add iron sights from New England Custom Guns. Last, I had him mount a Trijicon tritium-illuminated 1.25-4X scope in the standard Ruger rings.
There is never a great deal of time in my life. I trusted Don enough to put the rifle--in .416 Taylor, not its original .300 Winchester Magnum incarnation--on my Cameroon gun permit long before the gun existed in such form. This means that I was on pins and needles until, a couple of weeks before departure, the rifle arrived. It wasn't fancy, but it was ready. The stainless barrel was left in the white, and Don had replaced Ruger's recoil pad with a Pachmayr Decelerator and installed the irons. Otherwise, it still looked like a standard Ruger.
At the range, I started by removing the scope so I could check the iron sights first. The front sight, on a barrel-band ramp assembly, was a 3/32-inch bead as I'd requested. It was still a bit high (better than the other way around), so I filed on the rear sight a bit and brought it down. The barrel was stiff enough to keep recoil manageable, but I was still happy for the Decelerator pad.
Iron sights good to go, I reattached the Trijicon scope, boresighted it and started shooting. I liked the bold illuminated post, and the rifle came into zero very quickly. Even better, it put Hornady softs and solids to the same point of impact. The last step (which could have been the first step) was to check feeding. All too often you run into problems with the rails when you rebarrel an existing rifle to a different caliber. This one worked; I ran every cartridge I had through a full magazine and into the chamber, and functioning was perfect. I was ready for the forest.
Unfortunately, the rifle didn't make it to Cameroon at the same time I did, and we were several days into the safari before a vehicle brought it in. By then I had taken the primary animal, a good bongo, with a borrowed Krieghoff double. In the latter part of the hunt we tracked forest buffalo to no avail, and I shot a couple of the forest duikers: the small Peters and the big yellowback. Neither is ideal game for a .416, but that wasn't why I was carrying a .416.
I liked the rifle, and I also liked the cartridge. In power it usually lags just a wee bit behind the .416 Remington and .416 Rigby cartridges. Due to limited case capacity, it's difficult (but not impossible) to get a full 2,400 fps with a 400-grain bullet, but it's easy to get 2,350 fps, which is exactly what the huge-cased (and low-pressure) .500/.416 delivers. The latter figure puts a 400-grain .416 a bit under 5,000 ft.-lbs. of muzzle energy--still enough.
No buffalo or elephant will ever know the difference in 50 fps, but since it's a wildcat your results will depend on your loads, the powder you select and, of course, your barrel. Superior's loads clocked about 2,370 fps from my 23-inch barrel.
This is certainly not what I can get out of a .416 Rigby or Remington, but there are some advantages. John Wootters knew about these at least 30 years ago, but I just hadn't thought about them. First, the rifle was a great deal more compact than any large-actioned Rigby and more compact than any .416 Remington (which requires a .375-length action). This doesn't always matter, but it made a difference when scrambling through the forest.
Plus the action is exactly the same as a left-hand Ruger M77 Mk II .30-06 that I'm using. I've never actually had a "light" and a "heavy" on exactly the same action, and the familiarity is great.
Finally, the ammunition is a great deal more compact. It isn't usually necessary to carry a whole bunch of ammo, but I never leave the truck with less than about a dozen rounds. That's a whole bunch of, say, .500/.416 or .416 Rigby ammo; the Taylor rounds translated to a lot less weight and bulk.
Maybe we have enough .416 cartridges, but maybe there's room for just one more--especially if we missed a really good one all along. Perhaps the big manufacturers might be willing to take a new look at the .416 Taylor.
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