Hodgdon’s Clays And Your .45

The .45 Colt arrived in 1873 and for the next 60-plus years it was the most powerful factory loaded cartridge available. The original load consisting of 40.0 grains of black powder would not be dethroned until the arrival of the .357 Magnum in 1935

From Wild …

Elmer Keith worked with the .45 Colt as well as the .44 Special and came up with a load in the former of 18.5 grains of #2400 under his 260-gr. Lyman #454424 cast bullet. In the 1950s and ’60s I used this load in my 7-1/2″ Colt Single Action Army and my records show it clocks out at 1,165 fps!

A milder load published in the Lyman Reloading Manual in the 1950s was 1,030 fps with 10.3 grains of Unique. My records show 10.0 grains clocked 1,013. Again this is in a Colt SAA and, in retrospect, I think both of these loads — especially the #2400 one — are heavier than should be used in an SAA on a regular basis.

Two things happened in the 1970s. I dropped my standard .45 Colt load for Colt SAAs back to 9.0 grains of Unique and relegated the above two loads for the newly arrived Ruger Blackhawk .45 Colt. Now we had a .45 Colt SA to handle them, as well as even heavier loads. Soon we were shooting 300-gr. bullets over 21.5 grains of Hodgdon’s H110 for a full 1,200 fps.

Then in the next decade, the .454 Casull arrived allowing unheard of velocities in a .45 sixgun. One day in the 1980s I shot 800 full house .454 Casull loads in a trio of Freedom Arms Model 83s with barrel lengths of 4-3/4, 7-1/2, and 10″. But that was then and this is now. Today I can’t realistically shoot any of the above loads on a regular basis. I am thankful at my age to still be able to see sights and have a trigger finger which still works, however, I am no longer invincible and have to be careful with what I shoot.

… To Mild

I’ve set my upper parameter for sixgun loads to be equivalent to the performance and recoil of .45 ACP hardball — namely a 230-gr. bullet at 820 fps. This is not a weak load by anyone’s standards and when shooting other .45 sixgun loads — .45 Schofield, .45 Colt, and .454 Casull — the same performance comes from a 250-gr. bullet at 785 fps. There are many powders available for loading at this level, including several from Hodgdon’s. For these experiments I’ve settled on Clays.

Clays arrived in 1992 as a shotshell powder with very clean burning characteristics. It’s a flake cut, double-based propellant which soon found its way into handgun cartridges — and especially for target loads in .38 Special and .45 ACP. For me it performs exceptionally well in .45 Colt, .45 Schofield and .454 Casull. It also works well in the sixgun equivalent of the .45 ACP — the .45 Auto Rim.

For loading the Colt, Schofield, and Casull .45s I use the Oregon Trail 250-gr. RNFP in all three cartridges. For the .45 Colt my standard load is 5.5 grains of Clays, which gives from 780 fps to 840 fps depending upon the sixgun used. A pair of Old Model Blackhawks with 4-5/8″ and 4-3/4″ barrels put five rounds in 1″ at 20 yards while traveling at about 800 fps.

The same load in a Jim Stroh custom 5-1/2″ Bisley has the same accuracy with more velocity. Should I want a more powerful loading — which still doesn’t get out of my comfort range — I go with 6.0 grains of Clays with the same bullet. This gives me 890 fps in a 7-1/2″ Old Model Blackhawk.

The .45 Schofield is not quite as old as the .45 Colt arriving two years later in 1875. Shorter than the .45 Colt, it was designed to be used in the shorter cylinder of the Smith & Wesson No. 3 top-break single action. It was long ago pronounced obsolete, however, it was resurrected with the coming of Cowboy Action, and now Starline offers .45 Schofield brass.

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