ID,
Yessir, I would love to see those tests. Actually the reason for my initiation of this thread is I'm trying to pick a wildcat for the 1895 Winchester. Pressure seems like it might be of concern. The 411 Hawk, the 400 Brown-Whelen, and 2 or 3 other 400 Whelen Improved's all have different shoulders and, from the data I can gather, significantly different ballistics. All using the same case, different shoulders and somewhat differing capacities. My concern is that a steeper shoulder (which seem to have the better ballistics by a significant margin) create much higher pressures that help to achieve the extra velocity. If that pressure spike is above what is max operating pressure for the 95 (it is a new rifle, not an original), I'm afraid I may have a new boat anchor. I know the various Whelen Improveds work well in bolt actions (even non controlled feeding actions) so I'm not too concerned about the headspacing, but I am concerned about the pressures. If it is negligble, I would go with something like the 40 degree AI shoulder or even a Wby shoulder, however if those pressures are 10,000 units higher, I don't think I want to do that. Any ideas?
Looking at the cartridge, there's not much of a shoulder to start with, so I don't think it would have the same effect as an overbore type cartridge. When Col. Whelen first designed the 400, there were terrible headspace issues because he kept the '06 shoulder angle. Since then several have overcome the headspace issue successfully by incorporating steeper shoulders. However the only data I can find for a non bolt gun is Z-hat's 411 Hawk in the 1895. The Hawk has about 10-15% less velocity than the others and the others having shorter barrels. If I could better a 26" barreled Hawk performance from a 22" barreled other '06 wildcat, I think that is a significant improvement. 4" inches of barrel in the alder thickets is something I would like to leave at home. However, there just isn't more than an article or two about any of them and we all know how "optimistic" some of the first tests of a new cartridge can be, I'm really really confused.