The N frame S&W and the .45 Colt cartridge are a great combination, working together like pastrami and rye bread or ham and swiss cheese. Big-time big bullet thumping along at a hard-moderate pace at a pressure that avoids the blast and racket of the Magnum rounds. Nice heavy bullet that settles the hash with a good hard "THUD" when it gets there, yet pleasant enough to shoot a whole bucketful during a day's outting.

My first .45 Colt S&W's were a pair of Model 25-3 125th Anniversary guns. I got them through a friend working in a sporting goods store, for list price - $350 each. They had been delivered to the store that afternoon and set aside for the store manager, who was due in the next morning, but my buddy had not been formally told this, and not been specifically instructed not to sell them. I had been waiting for them to be shipped to dealers, so when I walked in that night, he told me they would be gone in the morning, so I bought both of them then.

I kept the one with the prettiest grips. I put a box each of W-W and R-P traditional factory loads through the other one and it shot as well as I could hold. I cleaned it up, took it to the next gunshow and sold it for $700. For a while, everybody just had to have one! I still have the other one unfired.

My most mysterious one is a 4 inch Model 25-2 1955 Target in .45 Colt. Yes, a 4 inch M-25-2 in .45 Colt. The box indicates it was a "test gun" for the DeKalb County Sheriff's Office and has the name "Cheshire & Perez" hand-written on the lid. The barrel appears to be factory made in it's current form, with the normal 1955 roll markings perfectly centered, a red insert ramp front sight, exactly the same as the photos of other 4 inch 1955's I have seen that are known to have been done at the factory. The cylinder is the short one used in the .45 ACP Model 25's, as opposed to the longer cylinder used in the Model 25-5.

I lettered it. Roy Jinks advised that the gun was shipped in January, 1977 to Jonas Aircraft & Arms Co. in New York City. It left as a .45 ACP with a 6-1/2 inch barrel. Jinks said the modifications to a 4 inch, .45 Colt were done after it was shipped from Springfield, and could have been done at Cheshire & Perez, a large S&W distributor and warranty station in Monrovia, CA, who would have had access to unusual factory parts like the 4 inch barrel and the short .45 Colt cylinder. DeKalb County adopted the Model 25-5 revolver for issue a few years after my gun was made, and I believe it may have been a prototype or test sample for them. It looks new.

Most favorite .45 Colt is a 4 inch .38-44 Heavy Duty post-war transitional converted to .45 Colt by the considerable talent of Hamilton Bowen. I love this gun. It is one that S&W should have produced.

I have a few others, blue Models 25-5 with both 4 and 6 inch barrels, and a Model 625-6 Mountain Gun. I replaced the 4 inch 25-5's target trigger and checkered target stocks with a smooth, wide 'combat' trigger and smooth Goncala Alves target grips. It shoots really well. When my best friend joined a local police department that allowed these as optional duty arms, I loaned it to him. He carried it loaded with Silvertips until he bought his own later.

There's a couple .45 Colts I owned but no longer have, a 5 inch Model 625-5 Classic I just sold and a 5 inch blue Model 25-7 I sold about 3 years ago. I hadn't shot any of them first, but from the chamber dimensions and the way they timed and locked up, I bet they would have been great shooters.

My last S&W .45 Colt revolver also started life as a .45 ACP Model 25-2. I rounded up the gun and needed parts and sent it to the late Andy Cannon, a tremendous man and gunsmith who died much to young. Andy bored, trimmed and fit another N frame cylinder to .45 Colt and fit it to the sixgun, giving me a convertible that shot both flavors of .45 with a change of cylinders, using the same yoke. He cut the barrel to 4 inches from 6-1/2, with a muzzle and crown that looked like it was done at S&W's factory. He mounted a red insert, ramp front sight blade on a serrated base. He tuned the action and replaced the target hammer with a standard width one and the target trigger with the wide, smooth "combat" trigger I love. The gun is a complete joy to shoot with either cartridge and the only thing that gives up it's non-original heritage is the mis-centered roll marks that are too far forward on the shortened barrel.

I feed these guns pretty much the same diet. Rather than tinker and find a bullet and load for each gun, I settled on a standard handload that shoots excellently in all of them. I cast Lyman's 454424 SWC not too hard, 260 grains lubed and sized from my metal mix, and then size it to 0.454", leaving the driving band unsized. I load them into either Winchester or Federal brass under 8.5 grains of old Unique. Velocity-wise, they pretty well duplicate the W-W traditional factory load for velocity and bullet weight, but with a much better shape. When I don't want to cast bullets, I buy the 250 and 255 grain conical lead bullets, in bulk, that R-P and Winchester load in their traditional .45 Colt ammunition. These bullets have a concave base and are fairly soft lead, so they obturate, bump up and fill the chamber throats and then the bores of whatever gun I shoot them in, giving me useful accuracy and minimal leading. This load shoots great in both of my Single Action Colts, as well.

The Lyman bullet, if loaded and crimped in it's crimping groove, leaves you with a cartridge that is a tad too long for the shorter S&W cylinders of the converted Model 25-2 and commemorative 25-3, while the W-W and R-P bullets and loaded ammo work just fine. I solved this by taking a few boxes of brass and trimming them about .10 of an inch or so. This reduces the cartridge's overall loaded length without reducing the cartridge's powder capacity by enough to notice. I use a red or green permanent felt tip marker to make an "X" on the bottom of each round, across the primer to the edges of the rim, to mark the shorter cases. The shorter cases still shoot fine in the longer chambers, by the way.

If I had to restrict myself to revolvers of one chambering, choosing between .45 Colt, .44 Special and .44 Magnum would be a hard thing to do. The vast majority of the ammunition I would put together for any of them would be remarkably similar, a cast SWC bullet of 250-260 grains propelled by enough Unique to give me about 850 fps from my shortest, slowest gun.

I pray I never wind up in such dire circumstances!

Yes, I know, I need to buy and learn to use a digital camera...