Long ago, someone chopped her nickel barrel to 4.25", installed a band at the muzzle, and to it, integrally mounted a blade front sight. I've kept the old gal here a couple years and casually shot her once in a while. Accuracy neither merited a letter home, nor was worthy of mention here. Then I tried 4.5 grains of Trail Boss behind a cast 240 grain SWC.......The load is easy on the old gun, slower than Christmas, and all of them land in one itty bitty group dead down the middle and about 1.5" above p.o.a. at 40 feet.

I get my best accuracy in .44 Special from a number of different guns using a gentle handload that approximately duplicates the performance of the standard, traditional 246 grain round nose lead bullet as sold forever by Winchester-Western and Remington-Peters.

I carefully cast the Lyman 429421 250 grain SWC and am picky when inspecting them as I lube and size them. Most of my .44 Special brass is W-W from decades back, but some is Federal obtained by shooting their old 200 grain lead SWC-HP. I bought a case of new Starline brass a couple of years ago but haven't shot any of it yet.

Large pistol primer (not magnum, although the W-W LP primer probably is either there or close) of W-W, Federal or CCI brands. I load 4.1 grains of Bullseye or 5.5 grains of Unique. Very firm roll crimp in the deep crimping cannelure the bullet has. This gives me velocities running from about 675 fps to 775 fps, depending on the gun. They are pretty gentle and quite accurate in a dozen Colt, S&W, Charter Arms and T/C Contender handguns with barrels running from 3 to 10
inches.

My standard, "Does Everything Else" load is Skeeter Skelton's same cast SWC bullet over 7.5 grains of Unique. That gives me about 850 fps to 975 fps in the same guns.

For real precision shooting, be very picky about sorting your bullets as you lube and size them.