The Perfect 10:

1972 I had just finished up my fourth summer in graduate school when I returned home and had a couple of days before I resumed teaching. Dot and I were out enjoying my freedom and we stopped at the Gunhaus to look around. There in a display case was an original Ruger Flat-Top .44 Magnum with the rare 10″ barrel length.

I noticed three things immediately. The factory walnut grips were of exceptional quality with marble grain throughout, and the anodized grip frame had been re-plated with a gray color. The front sight had been replaced with a Keith Long-Range style with three gold bars inlaid for shooting at different distances. It was priced at $150, which was real money in those days so, although I really wanted it, I passed it up.

She’s A Keeper

I went back out to our ’68 Ford pickup where Dot was waiting and she asked me if I found anything interesting. I told her about the Ruger and she said, “Go buy it as a graduation present for yourself.” Gotta love a woman like that! I did buy it and soon added an Al Goerg shoulder holster. This is a spring clip, very lightweight holster for handgun hunters and I also carried a unit on the opposite side with 12 loops for .44 Magnum cartridges. I had my first dedicated handgun hunting rig.

When Ruger introduced the Super Blackhawk in 1959, it was finished in high-polished blue and available in only one barrel length, namely 7 ½”. When the transition was made to the New Model action in 1972, the bluing was now somewhat subdued and still only available in one barrel length.

I had decided I wanted a 10″ Ruger with a scope and I certainly did not want to drill holes in either of my original Perfect 10s. So, starting with a blued New Model, I had a 10″ barrel installed and the entire sixgun finished in a hard chrome. It looked somewhat like stainless steel, which had not yet arrived at Ruger. With the addition of a handgun scope and a set of Herrett’s stocks filling in behind the square-back Super Blackhawk grip frame, I now had a scope-sighted hunting handgun.

With the spread of Long-Range Silhouette competitions in the late 1970s, gun manufacturers started to listen to shooters as to what they wanted for competition. Ruger, for the first time, offered another barrel length on the New Model Super Blackhawk by offering just what was needed, namely a long-barreled .44 Magnum.

By allowing a longer sight radius, the 10 ½” proved to be much better for shooting silhouettes. Diamond Dot and I both competed with a pair of the new Rugers equipped with Pachmayr non-slip recoil-reducing grips. We found out early we needed different sight settings, so we each had our own. When Ruger went to a stainless steel Perfect 10, I bought one immediately and found it was even more accurate than the silhouette sixguns we were using.

Both of our blued guns have now been turned into Perfect Packin’ Pistol lengths of 5 ½”, with one still a .44 Magnum while the other is a Heavy Duty .45 Colt with a five-shot cylinder. The stainless Ruger remains an iron-sighted hunting handgun and it has never let me down.

On the Golden Anniversary of the Ruger Flat-Top .357 Magnum, the Ruger Collectors Association (RCA) issued a very small number of 10″ New Model .357 Magnum Blackhawks. I certainly had to have one as a companion to my original and it is also proven to be an exceptionally accurate revolver.

With the availability of 10 ½” barrels for both the .44 Magnum and .357 Maximum, it became easy to come up with custom Perfect 10s. I contacted Gary Reeder who had “takeoffs” from other custom guns and he provided the barrels I needed.

Perfect Fit

I’ve always felt the .44 Special was pretty close to the perfect sixgun cartridge so I had Gary fit a 10 ½” .44 Magnum barrel to a New Model Flat-Top .44 Special. I know I keep saying this, but once again this turned out to be exceptionally accurate. Switching to the .357 Maximum 10 ½” barrel, Gary installed this on a New Model Flat-Top .357 Blackhawk and once again the result was — yes, here it comes — exceptionally accurate. The .357 was fitted with a brass Super Blackhawk grip frame along with stag grips. Both of these are embellished with my name on the barrels in gold — heirlooms for the grandkids and great grandkids.

Elgin Gates and Dan Wesson collaborated on a truly grand sixgun silhouette cartridge, the .357 Super Mag. Ruger countered with their Super Blackhawk chambered in .357 Maximum, a different name for the same cartridge, by using a longer frame and longer cylinder. It was absolutely perfect for silhouetting as it allowed the use of 200-grain bullets at the muzzle velocity of 158-grain .357 Magnum bullets. It was killed off at Ruger by those who did not understand the cartridge and tried to turn it into a “.357 Swift” by using the lightest possible bullets at the highest possible speed, resulting in flame coming off the top strap. I still have my original 10 ½” Ruger .357 Maximum.

When I was hunting on the Penn Baggett Ranch in Texas, I borrowed Penn’s custom Ruger, which had been re-barreled and re-chambered to .445 Super Mag by Ben Forkin. It worked so exceptionally well I had Ben build one for me. In both cases the original cylinders were rechambered so these are six-shot sixguns and I shy away from some of the very heavy .445 loads which have been published. It remains just a cut above what is possible with the .44 Magnum.

Most of my shooting life has been with really heavy, big-bore cartridges. However, as I have grown older, I find I gravitate to less recoil producing loads. This means the natural direction was to come up with a Perfect 10 chambered in .32 Magnum. This is an exceptionally fine cartridge and starting with a Ruger New Model Single-Six I had a custom 10″ barrel fitted resulting in — here we go again — an exceptionally accurate, easy shooting small game and varmint sixgun.

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