Bond Arms Cowboy Defender 3" .45 Colt only

Argh! Without reloading, you're going to be lucky to break 700 fps with factory .45 Colt from the 3" tubes. Wish you were nearby so you could come over and use my equipment to load up something that will meet your requirements.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using proboards

Well, on the upside, a .451" 255-grain chunk of lead is pretty liable to leave a mark.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using proboards

Eric I believe I would send those barrels back I doubt if that flaw is going to smooth out.
From what dealings I have had with Bond Arms they have been real good about making things right.
I had to send my 22 mag. barrels back because you could not eject the shells after you fired them.
It did take almost 2 months to get them back which I wasn't very happy about but at least they fixed them.
BTW where did you get the adaptors and were they cheaper than a new barrel would have been.

Well you do have a point about not wanting to be without it when I sent my barrel in I figured they would just send me a new barrel back but according to the letter that was with it they reboared the barrel.
Thanks for the info on the inserts I will check them out for sure I have been thinking about getting me a 22 barrel but if those inserts work good that will be the way to go

Oh, and probably everyone saw this article this past weekend:

www.gunsamerica.com/blog/bond-arms-derringer-review/

The article mentions how Gary Bond redesigned the trigger face to reorient the vector of force from the trigger finger and thereby make the pull feel less heavy. Check out the difference between the original trigger face and my newer one:

Older


Newer


This struck me as a pretty neat engineering fix . . . and a simple one. The new triggers are just fine.

People seem to think that it did, outlaw.

Here's Jeff Quinn on the subject (it looks like they can be retrofitted to the old guns):

www.gunblast.com/BondArms.htm

Check out this pic from Quinn's site:



Anyway, I had the new 3" .45 ACP barrel set out to the city range today (5950'>sea level, c. 50° F, c. 40% humidity), and it was interesting. Man, that .45 ACP gets up from these little things. One thing that I did differently than usual was that I only fired two rounds of each loading over the chrono - I'm worried about hitting the thing with this gun, and I'd already fired other rounds of each type to determine where the top and barrel were hitting on a man-sized target. Some of them were pretty unpleasant, particularly out of the top barrel. The first number is from the bottom barrel, the second from the top. None of them keyholed.

230-gr Velocity RN/7.2 gr Power Pistol 878.6/869.7
225-gr Penn DEWC/4.7 gr BE 833.7 (only one round fired)
Hornady 200-gr +P TAP error/895.6
Winchester Ranger Talon 230-gr +P 853.5/847.1
255-gr Penn RNFP/(hidden) gr Unique 925.5/915.6 (Wow. And, ow. Less than Elmer Keith's load, FWIW.)
200-gr TVB LSWC/(hidden) Green Dot (+P) 1011/957.9

I also found a .22 LR round that didn't keyhole for me from the adaptors . . . Lapua 40-gr subsonic HPs. Great . . . the adaptors have good taste. Most of the 40-gr bullets ran in the mid-600 fps range from the adaptors, btw, and the 36-gr Win bulk HPs (which keyhole almost every time) run around 780. It's so pleasant to shoot with those adaptors.

BTW, the .45 ACP barrel set cleaned up very easily and it shot probably more accurately than the .45 Colt (only) one. The bottom barrel shot a bit low with everything except my reduced version of St. Elmer's crazed heavy bullet load, which was 2" high. The distance spread between the impacts at 10 yards was still around 8".

These were all pretty heavy-duty .45 ACP loads, but the gun is seriously no-BS with them. Man, I think you could legitimately use the heavy-bullet load for black bear defense (easy to pack in; no problems hitting right after waking up from within the tent, which is the only time you're liable to have a blackie gnawing on you) - you're talking old-school BP SAA performance from a palm-sized gun.