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| Swiss Vetterli Rifle .41 Swiss |
I used to think finding
ammo for my 7.35 Carcano was hard until I recently purchased a Swiss
Vetterli chambered in 10.4x38 Rimfire
(.41 Swiss). Now I know what hard to find is really like! I tried my usual
haunts like
Old Western Scrounger and
Graf and Sons finding
not a trace of this
beyond obsolete round. Best I could find on Google was some guys suggesting it
could be converted to a centerfire and custom make the ammo using some strange
combination of .348 Winchester Brass and
.44 Magnum Bullets. Sounds great, after several months of work you end up with
the firearm equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster. For me would probably end up with a similarly
dangerous and gruesome outcome.
I finally found some on
Ammo-one for the low, low price of
$14.95 a round, limit 3 rounds per customer. Guess I won’t be doing any
plinking with this one. To make myself feel better I decided to see if there
were any other rounds out there that were even more expensive and scarce. Here
are some of the results I came up with.
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| .700 Nitro Express vs 30/06 |
700 Nitro Express $99.95 per round
(Ammo-one) : This behemoth giant killer shoots a 1,000 grain bullet at 2,000
fps with 9,000-15,000 ft-lb’s of energy. If you really want to get that bull
elephants attention this is your round. This is actually a fairly new round
developed in the 1980’s by Jim Bell and William Feldstein after Holland
and Holland refused to build Feinstein a rifle in .600 Nitro Express. H&H
had ceased production of the .600 rifle but was looking for a new big game
round. (Shoulder replacement sold
separately.)
.50 Crispin Long $399.00 a round: Developed and patented by
Silas Crispin, a U.S. Army Ordnance officer in the 1860s mainly to circumvent a
patent issue. Pistol versions of this cartridge in several calibers were made
for pistols manufactured by Smith Arms of New York. The rifle cartridge was
patented for use Smith breech-loading carbine manufactured by Ethan Allen. As
far as I can tell the rifle never made it off the drawing board so you probably
won’t be looking for a box of these any time soon. This is a highly coveted
collector round
Pinfire Pistol ammo $20-50 per round: I owned several of these guns
and the old European pistols can actually be bought fairly cheap right now.
It’s been 100 plus years since any ammo was produced for these in some of these
calibers. Quiet often enough ammo to fill the chambers will cost you more than
the pistol.
.43 (11x52) Egyptian Beaumont $25-$78.00 a round: This close
cousin to the Dutch Beaumont was one of the first bolt action rifles produced
in Europe along with my Vetterli. In fact it looks like the two rifles were
close in the size and design of the ammo. I could find very little other than
vague references to the Egyptian but the Dutch was sold in small batch
production by Buffalo Arms for $78 a round. I will have to look through some of
my old gun books for further reference to the Egyptian model; even Google has
its limitations!
