Alan Lever at Lever Arms in Vancouver brought in a whole bunch of these back about 1965; I saw them the day they were uncrated.
Most were Martini actions in various calibres, .303 mostly, a very few in what appeared to be 577/450 MH but also a few with .45-inch bores and smaller chambers..... .476 perhaps?
The Pathan used to reload primers with matchheads, use (cellulose nitrate) movie film, all chopped up, for powder, file the rifling marks off pickup .303 bullets from the Metfords and use 'em over again. Very scary ideas, but that's what they did.
Can you just IMAGINE the muzzle blast from firing 37 or 38 grains of (essentially) flake powder out of a 5-inch barrel?
One round and your target is dead, gutted and cooked, and it hasn't even had time to fall down!
That said, two points:
1. It would be interesting to find out just how strong one really is (without damaging the thing). We do know that the Martini action is one of the strongest ever devised.
2. I think it might be safe to up the loadings a bit, but I would stay away from really super-fast powders because there is a shock factor that doesn't exist with the slower powders. Hatcher remarks on blown-up early-model 1903 Springfields (which normally fired a 52,000-psi load) when used with super-quick powders in the Guard cartridge, which wasn't supposed to generate a quarter of that pressure, but burned awfully fast, creating a shock effect rather than a propellant effect.
I will run away now and hide.
Have fun!
