[Jeff Higgins]

As most of you folks know, I'm fairly enthusiastic about 19th century arms, particularly single shot rifles, single action revolvers, and lever action rifles. These things are all enjoyable and surprisingly effective in their original chamberings, even when restricted to their original performance levels.

One of the somewhat under developed aspects of them, however, is just what they become capable of in modern guise, when reproduced with modern steels. These firearms all attained their (relatively modest) strength through sheer mass, the size of their actions, when produced from then available materials. So, what happens when we take these old designs and reproduce them in modern materials?

Doing so allows us to load ammunition for these old firearms (mainly the rifles) that approaches the working pressures of modern cartridges. Those of us playing this game have, for example, raised the working velocities of the old 400 grain .45-70 load from the black powder propelled original 1,300 fps to over 2,000 fps, a very notable increase.

Well, here is one that brings this whole thing to its logical extreme. The old .50-110 Express was a black powder round of, for the time, significant power. This guy demonstrates what it is capable of today. Granted, kind of an amateurish video, but the modern day performance of this old lever gun / cartridge combination speaks for itself. Over 6,000 foot pounds of muzzle energy. That significantly exceeds the .458 Winchester Magnum. Pretty darn impressive: