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.400 Whelen

Rifle cartridge

Field	Value
name	.400 Whelen
image	[[Image:400 Whelen sketch spec.png	270px]]
origin	United States
type	Rifle
designer	Townsend Whelen
design_date	early 1920s
parent	[.30-06 Springfield](30-06-springfield)
bw1	300
btype1	SP
vel1	2300
en1	3522
bw2	350
vel2	2100
en2	3430
balsrc	350gr - Barnes

The .400 Whelen cartridge was developed by Colonel Townsend Whelen while he was commanding officer of Frankford Arsenal in the early 1920s. The cartridge resembles a .30-06 Springfield case necked up to .40 caliber to accept bullets manufactured for the .405 Winchester.

Design

Colonel Whelen asserted the very small remaining portion of the .30-06's 17° 30 angled shoulder was likely to cause potentially dangerous headspace difficulties. The headspace issue has been widely discussed. Frankford Arsenal machine shop foreman James Howe necked down cylindrical brass available in the arsenal manufacturing process to form cartridges with a .458 in shoulder to fit the chamber of his rifles. Experimenters had less success forming cartridges by enlarging the necks of .30-06 cartridges with .441 in (or smaller) shoulders, but could form brass from .35 Whelen cases.

Quality Cartridge has manufactured unformed, cylindrical empty brass cases headstamped for this cartridge.

Performance

Griffin & Howe chambered custom-built rifles for this cartridge; and using neck resizing with cases carefully fire formed to the chamber in which the loaded cartridges were to be used, these rifles were reportedly very effective for killing elk, moose, and bear at ranges up to 400 yard.

References

Barnes, Frank C.. (1997). "Cartridges of the World". DBI Books.
Donnelly, John J.. (1987). "The Handloader's Manual of Cartridge Conversions". Stoeger Publishing.
Sharpe, Philip B. ''Complete Guide To Handloading'' (1953) Funk & Wagnalls pp.206&398
"Smashing the Headspace Myth". Michael Petrov.
Howell, Ken. (1995). "Designing and Forming Custom Cartridges". Precision Shooting.
"Catalog". qual-cart.com - Quality Cartridge.

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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