It is a Webley Mk IV chambered in .30-200, which was the British loading of the .38 S&W cartridge.
I wrote in an earlier post that as a 12 year old kid I bought a pistol through the US Mail back in the early 60s and posted it here on 12/29 and it seems to have disappeared, probably because I am clumsy with touch pads. Here it is: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2010/12/ill-admit-to-being-handful-growing-up.html#comments
I just found one for a VERY low price and picked it up. I couldn't say no at the price I got it for. Please do not ask. You will call me all sorts of abusive names including comments about my honesty and parentage. Just say I got a damned good deal.
When I picked it up, Neighbor Bob looked at it and said, "Isn't that the same pistol Indiana Jones used in the movie we watched a couple of nights ago? Looks like you're going to have to get a Sam Brown belt and a whip to go with it."
Actually, it isn't. Indy's pistol it the daddy of this one, but it's close. Jones carried a .455 Webley, which is a somewhat larger pistol and shot a larger round. This pistol is very similar in appearance and function, but is noticeably smaller.
Nobody loads the 38-200 anymore, but I can shoot .38 S&W in it safely, which is really not good enough for the Webley as the .38 S&W cartridge has been dumbed down for safety and liability reasons.
Enter the hand loader, which among other things I am. It won't take me long to whip up a couple of boxes of .38-200 loads to shoot the thing with the full power loads it was designed to shoot. I want to fire 84 rounds from this to complete this project.
When I was 12 I bought the same pistol and 108 rounds. I managed to sneak out into the woods and get 14 rounds off before I turned around and saw my dad looking at me shaking his head. He told me to finish shooting. I fired the next 4 rounds and then he shot six, for a total of 18. Then he put the pistol in his pocket and that ended my youthful career as a pistolero.
By my reckoning I had 84 more rounds left.
I wish my father was still here so we could shoot the damned thing together. I'd bet he'd get a kick out of it.
Bet when I get the 14th round off, I look over my shoulder for him.
He'll be there, smiling and shaking his head.
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For any of you that are reloaders, I'll give you the inside scoop on the reloading data. The recipe for this is 3 grains of Unique beneath a cast 200 grain bullet. We're talking about 650 feet per second(FPS) here, which is the original velocity. The Brits used a full metal jacket (FMJ) round to comply with the Hague convention but FMJ bullets are no longer readily available. The somewaht softer cast bullets should run down the bore a little easier and not create quite as much pressure as an FMJ.
If you go to the .38 S&W data, you will find that this is somewhat of an overload. For the .38 S&W it actually is s hot load. The reason it is labeled as an overload is because there are still a boatload of pre-war Iver-Johnson top-break revolvers floating around. The hinges on them are pretty weak and can't handle the pressures.
A similar situation exists with the .45/70 Government round. It was originally a black powder cartridge designed for the old Trapdoor Springfield rifles and the action is weak by today's standards. Ammo makers today can not make a cartridge for that rifle that will allow the round to live up to it's full potential because no matter what they do or how they label the box or paint the cartridges or what they say, some jerk is going to load the damned cartridge into an old Trapdoor rifle and blow himself up.
The ammo makers today load to somewhere in the area of maybe 16-1800 FPS and reloaders that have solid bolt-action rifles in this caliber have safely pushed this cartridge out into the 2200+ FPS range.
Same holds true for the .38 S&W and the boatload of Iver-Johnsons floating around. About 10 years ago at the range I saw a pretty good case of catastrophic failure by some jerk that had his friend make up ammo for one. The friend simply cut down .38 Special cases and used .38 Special data for the load.
Before the guy shot it, I suggested he think twice, but he looke at me and told me that his pal knew what he was doing, pointed it down range and fired a shot. "See?" he said.
I walked away and sure enough the second shot went Ka-Blooey and made a pretty good mess out of things. I didn't stick around as guys that do things like that are not generally in the best of spirits so I can't give a decent assesment of the damage.
Here's a picture of a Webley MKIV: http://www.bfoster.org/pics/Webley/MK_IV_38_200.jpg
my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/
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