Reeder Custom Guns - Cleaning Day(s)

I pulled out an old holster and gunbelt that has not been used in 25 or 30 years. The cartridges were stuck in the loops and when I got them out they were mostly green! They are old Balloon-Head cartridges and I did not want to throw them away, so I set out to see if I could clean them. It took me 3 days but I got it done! I did not take any BEFORE photos sadly. But they were a mess.

I used Brake Cleaner on them to get rid of the verdigris. Under that the cartridge was blotchy. Tarnished. I used metal polish on them, adding it to ground corncob in my vibrating cleaner. After running 8 hours there were still dark spots on them. I put a polishing tip in the Dremel Tool and polished them. Then I ran them overnight in the cleaner. This morning they looked like this:

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Balloon-head cartridges were phased out of production for the solid head cartridges by the 1940's/
I have a little over 100 balloon-head cartridges. The headstamps are:
REM-UMC ... 10 are nickle plated ...
WRA
WRA CO
WESTERN
WC CO
PETERS

Some of the ones I have could be close to 90 years old. Peters and Western went out of business by 1944.

Most everyone here probably knows what the balloon-head cartridges look like. Here's the comparison to the solid head.

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You can get 40 gr. of 3Fg blackpowder in the balloon-head but not in the solid head.

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They are old enough that they can be admired. :-)

old "balloon head" brass, played with them for duplicating real old west loads (by volume, not weight, they weren't weighed back then for loading anything), back when you could buy the Remington hollowbase bullets, impressive to shoot, always threw them in a jug of diluted Windex (which no cowboy ever had) immediately after shooting to keep fouling from eating them in the fold.

Thought they looked impressive in the belt, but nobody else ever noticed, and had to admit the prop masters for Wanted: Dead or Alive had it right in putting .45-70 cartridges in the gun belt if you wanted to be noticed back then. Today, anything bigger than 9mm raises eyebrows and/provokes gasps. So, naturally, I carry one. Glad you were able save them for posterity. They ARE unique today.

I have more than 100 rounds of balloon head 44's and 45's. I finally loaded them all and put them a special ammo box. When some of them started splitting I stopped shooting them.

I also have some original .45 short Colts. These are not Schofield rounds. The cartridge box is deteriorated and I have it put away - at least what's left of it. But it is plainly marked ".45 Colt Government". The headstamp on the cartridges is ".45 Colt" ...BUT these are SHORT .45 Colts! The headstamp is the same as the longer .45 Colts, even down to the "W" on the primers.

These are NOT S&W or Schofield cartridges. The rim diameter is the same as the long .45 Colts, which is smaller than the Schofield rim diameter. These are true .45 Short Colts. The cartridge is listed in Cartridges of the World on page 306 as ".45 Colt - .45 Colt Government".

The case is 1.1" long. The powder charge was black powder, approximately 28 grains. The bullet weighed right at 230 gr. and was lubed with a white chalky-looking substance. I fired one from my Ruger 7 1/2" barreled .45 and it went through the chronograph at near 750 fps.

A few days after chronographing I went out in the hills and called up a nice large coyote and shot him with the .45 short. He ran to within 10 feet of me, responding to the call. I pulled the gun up and shot, hitting him up through the right shoulder and spine, dropping him instantly. The little pointy bullet did not damage the pelt at all. I was able to tan the hide and make a nice looking wall hanging from it.

I wrote this up .. I think it was in Guns & Ammo (but I am not sure anymore .. it could have been one of the other Peterson Publication's magazines) ... somewhere between 1985 and 1989.

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barring an intrepid historian finding and going through discarded original Winchester records that somehow survived, or perhaps US Ordnance records, I doubt we'll ever know an answer.

I could hypothesize that the govt had some spotty problems with Schofield rims in some SAAs, snd wanted an equivalent load in .45 Colt rim brass, or perhaps Schofield ammunition stocks exhausted by the time of the Moros and easier to load a shortened .45 Colt case or easier to produce by the company/companies, but, who knows?

My brass ended up splitting at the case mouth snd was discarded, I did not know of annealing back then. Thanks for the blast from the past.

I can imagine someone walking into a hardware store around the turn of the last century and asking for a box of .45 Colt's. As the clerk pulls down a box the customer says, "Not the short ones. I want the long Colts!" and the name ".45 Long Colt" came down to us as a "user-applied" name, not a factory name.

The short versions were written about back in the 1950's by those who had used them. Remington made a short version also, though I have only read of them. I've never seen any.

nomenclature debates, all I can say is that I never heard ".45 Long Colt" until the last couple of decades. Every gun and every box of ammo and every piece of brass was marked ".45 Colt", so that is what I always called it. Post-1911 I can see the "Long" creeping in to differentiate from .45 Colt Automatic Pistol by folk asking for ammunition, while even the modern ".45 ACP" or ".45 Auto" is still not proof against confusion by store clerks today, as I have certainly called stores several times seeking loaded .45 Colt ammunition in desperation, was assured they had some, and on arrival, proudly presented with a box of .45 ACP. If .45 Government were still around today, the confusion would be even worse for someone seeking ammunition for their .45 Government Model, and end up going home with the wrong cartridges. But, today with .45 Colt, .45 ACP/Auto, .45GAP, .45 Super, etc, I see the "Long" appendage as rather frivolous. Perhaps it appeals to the market segment which would not buy small or medium condoms, but only large, but which would buy large, extra large, and maybe forego jumbo condoms.

I don't mind people calling it otherwise but if I write it I like to not capitalize the word long. I suppose some ammo has been marketed that way though I have not seen any. Short or long the headstamps always were .45 Colt.

another example of modern mass media internet trendism, making all things fluid, where formerly a dictionary was definitive, but now even dictionaries and encyclopedias take their cues from what is the latest internet butchery of meaning or knowledge or spelling. "Long Colt" has taken off like wildfire with the internet, where formerly it mainly an isolated local thing, and now guns and maybe even brass so marked or at least ".45 LC". I expect in another few decades that people will need an AI assistant to read a newspaper article from 1965 where they will learn fascinating tidbits such as we were invading Vietnam in response to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, to protect our supply of Nike shoes.

can. My Dad had 2 45s, one marked 45 Government and the other 45 Long Colt. That was in the early 50s. We hunted the 45 Long Colt. The Government Colt was considered for target use. If I remember right, Jim Taylor has a box of 45 Long Colt. I apologize if I am thinking of the wrong person, but 45 Long Colt has been around for at least 50 years. We had both versions at our house.

on the 45 Government and 45 Long Colt. The 45 Government (45 Colt). Neither names are new, only new to a person that has to go with the name that their buddy uses.
If you look back in the very early Gun Digest, and Shooter's Bible you will see the caliber 45 Long Colt used countless times by gun manufacturers and gun writers.

Gun Digest, and in the catridges section was no mention of Long, only .45 Colt, Colt so marked their revolvers, and they should know the name better than anyone, SAAMI calls it .45 Colt, and I rarely read Long Colt (rarely, not never) in articles by folk in the past, and that takes us back to what people call things (includung article writers) versus standardized nomenclature. I don't argue with folk if they call it Long Colt, folk have been doing it a long time, whether its proper name or not, including undoubtedly cartridge companies. But my experience has Long Colt used in a minority of cases until more recent times.

whole paragraph just on this sunject. I will see if I can copy it and post on here.I remember telling either Jim Taylor or John Taffin (maybe both).Especially John Taffin as he wasn't in favor of the Long Colt name. But I will find it as the Long Colt name isn't anything new. If I remember correctly the Long Colt was dropped around the end of WW2, maybe a bit later. The article gave the reasoning for the 45 Government and the Long Colt names and why it was later dropped. Anyway I will find it.

only that its widespread use is relatively new as opposed to more local use, and that shift complements of the internet. There might even be out there the odd Long Colt marked Colt, but also suspect the vast majority were marked .45 Colt, if not all of them. And any other (what few there were) gun chambered in the cartridge, as for most common use. Looking forward to the article. Meanwhile, all of my references such as old Gun Digests go back to the first issue, and have yet to see Long Colt, and I do not count an article writer as anything but a local source, nor do I count the odd cartridge box so marked as proof of anything but a short term anonomoly.

I long ago decided that .45 Colt and .45 Long Colt are the same thing, as are .45ACP and .45 Auto. :-D

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