Making .44 Evans Long Ammo

One of my favorite pastimes is making ammunition for obsolete firearms. I have a fairly extensive collection of antique, and they all go BANG at one point or another. I don’t merely collect these old guns just to watch them sit around collecting dust. I only collect things that I can actually fire. Most times this means I have to make the ammunition to shoot in them. For me…. Half the fun of collecting them is restoring them to shooting condition and making the ammunition as close to the originals as possible.

One such antique firearm I have in my collection is an 1870’s New Model Evans rifle. It’s a 25 shot lever action repeater made here in a Maine about 9 miles from where my gunsmith shop is located. Fortunately for me I was able to find an out of print book on Maine gunsmiths and it had a lot of original patent drawings of the gun, and the various models.

So I pulled the old girl apart, and made a new extractor, a new firing pin, and a few new springs that were missing.

To help the old girl operate smoother, I carefully sand blasted and polished the interior parts, but I preserved the patina of the exposed parts and exterior with masking tape. I scrubbed and polished the interior down to new shiny metal. Remember — I’m going to actually fire this old rifle.

The rest of the interior was kept original as possible and decades of crude were cleaned and scrubbed.

I was luck enough to find an original bullet mold for the gun.

I trimmed down .445 Supermagnum brass to the right length of 1.4” and loaded the appropriate charge of black powder for this cartridge. I really don’t recommend using smokeless loads because the gun has a split receiver that wouldn’t hold up to modern smokeless powder charges.

But once the gun is cleaned and reassembled you can’t tell that the interior has been cleaned. The old patina is still on the outside of the rifle.