| by Phil W. Johnston Handgun Editor
The Super Redhawk is a brute of a double-action revolver. When equipped with the 9°-inch barrel, it weighs 58 ounces out of the box and measures 15 inches in length. Adding a scope can easily take the big Ruger over 4 pounds. Constructed entirely of stainless steel, the biggest double-action Ruger never faced a challenge when chambered for the .44 magnum cartridge. Last year, Ruger upped the ante once more by introducing us to a brand-new, six-shot Super Redhawk chambered for the .454 Casull cartridge. The .454 has a reputation of operating at pressures around 60,000 pounds per square inch (psi), and the big Ruger proved once again up to the task. Carrying a suggested retail price of $745, the Super Redhawk remains one of the least expensive ways to get into a good .454. |
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New for this year is a third chambering for the Super Redhawk: the .480 Ruger. Right off the bat, this is the first cartridge to bear the Ruger name. A joint venture between Sturm, Ruger and Hornady Manufacturing, the new .480  cartridge (.475 caliber) is based on a fat case that measures 1.285 inches in length, sharing case length with the .44 magnum. Because Ruger wanted to stick with a six-shooter, the case features a miniscule rim that allows 6 cartridges to be loaded in the cylinder, all at once! There isn't much room left for anything else.
One might ask, and rightly so, why a new, bigger cartridge? In a nutshell, handgun hunting continues to gain popularity with more of us looking for the greater challenge of cleanly taking big game animals annually, with a handgun. Some of us, who are really lucky, even carry a handgun when going after dangerous game in Alaska and or even Africa. In this light, the new Ruger .480 makes a great deal of sense. Conceived to fit the middle ground existing between a .44 magnum and the .454 Casull, it looks like Ruger has done their homework well. |
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| Anyone who routinely works with magnum-powered handguns realizes that recoil can get downright brutal when we begin driving bullets that range from 250 to 350 grains to velocities approaching 2,000 feet-per-second (fps). In the case of the .454, it's common to see a load that drives a 260-grain bullet at 1,775 fps for instance, and the big Linebaugh .475 5-shooters exceed even the .454 with some of the hottest loads. While the .454 and .475 Linebaugh have been cleanly harvesting game, including elephant on occasion, working with these hard-kickers is not often called fun, at least for long.
Recoil energy is calculated by plugging a bunch of numbers into a pair of equations that rely in part on what must be the estimated velocity of the powder charge. According to most sources, we can use 4,000 fps to estimate this number in most current small arm cartridges. Plugging in the other numbers quickly points out that Ruger may indeed have a winner in the new .480. |
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 Assuming a 58-ounce handgun, a .480 when loaded with the Hornady factory load should generate 19.99 foot pounds (FP) of recoil energy while recoiling at 18.85 fps. A heavily loaded 58-ounce Ruger Super Redhawk .44 magnum will generate 15.86 FP while recoiling at 16.78 fps, and the same arm shooting a WW .454 cartridge will recoil with 29.63 FP at 22.94 fps. Keep in mind the fact that the .480 recoil levels are but 63% of the level generated by the .454 Casull while you read on.
At the muzzle, the .480 Ruger pushes the 325-grain Hornady XTP to 1,374 fps (9°-inch barrel), generating 1,363 FP of instrumental energy. As you'll see in the accompanying chart, the big .480 manages to retain 1,144 fps at 100 yards, generating 944 FP or about the same power generated by the .44 magnum at the muzzle! As one might expect, the .454 outclasses either cartridge by leaving at 1,753 fps, while generating 1,775 FP of instrumental energy. At 100 yards, the .454 retains 1,467 fps while managing 1,243 FP of energy, or not much less than the .480 generates at the muzzle. |
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 I've long felt that John Taylor knew how to predict the effectiveness of a cartridge in the field as well as can be done. Taylor, a famed African white hunter, used the caliber of the slug and multiplied it by the weight of the bullet, times the velocity, and then divided things by 7,000 (grains to a pound). While Taylor's formula tends to favor caliber to a large degree, it must be pointed out that the .480 generates a Taylor KO figure of 30.30 while the .454 Casull Winchester load accounts for a KO figure of 29.36 at 15 feet. At 100 yards, the .480 still manages a higher Taylor figure than the .454, the .480 coming in at 25.22 and the Winchester 260-grain load hitting his scale at 24.57. For all practical purposes, then, the new Ruger .480 appears to generate ballistics that are in the same arena as the .454, while totally outclassing any .44 magnum load.
As one might expect, the .480 does shed velocity much faster than does the .454, and where the .454 tends to be a flat shooter (in the world of handguns), the .480 is slightly less so. According to our Oehler Ballistic program, the Hornady .480 load will drop 10.68 inches at 100 yards while the WW .454 load drops 4 inches less, or 6.6 inches. Interestingly, the .44 magnum Garrett load drops more than either of these big guys, hitting the scale just over 14 inches. |
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37% Less Recoil The new .480 Ruger Super Redhawk looks like a winner to us. It recoils 37% less than a similar .454 Casull while exhibiting ballistics on paper that are remarkably close, by one measure, at least. It totally outclasses any .44 magnum, no matter how the criteria are stacked up.
To see how the .480 would perform, we slipped a great old Redfield 4-power scope on the sample Redhawk. Scoping a Super Redhawk is duck soup, because Ruger uses a great integral ring system that looks good and has proven bulletproof thus far. Because we knew that we'd be working with substantial recoil, we took the time to lap the lower rings to insure that they were perfectly round and would mate perfectly with the scope tube. We also mounted the scope with the rear of the turret against the front of the rear ring. If the rig were ours, we'd also use Loctite® to keep everything tight, but that wasn't the case here. |
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 We shot the big Ruger off of sandbags with the targets set up 25 yards downrange. We caught the velocities of each round with a pair of Oehler 35P printing chronographs with the skyscreens spaced 4 feet near the muzzle and 2 feet directly in front of the targets. To insure a large velocity sample, we fired four 5-shot groups over the Oehler chronographs to obtain velocity information and accumulated six 5-shot groups for record. The Hornady ammunition proved extremely consistent, hitting 1,374 fps, 15 feet from the muzzle and 1,317 fps at the 25-yard target.
The six 5-shot groups averaged 1.87 inches, center-to-center, with the largest group going 2.6 inches and the smallest going 1.3 inches. Several groups proved to be ragged one-hole affairs measuring less than 2 inches. This Ruger Super Redhawk should stay under 8 inches at 100 yards, making it a valid hunting rig without a doubt. |
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 As we'd expect, there were no malfunctions or hang-ups with the sample Ruger. The single-action trigger was a tad heavy, easily lifting all of my 4 3/4 pounds of weight, and it also had a noticeable "notch" or slight bit of heavy creep before it would break. We didn't care what the double-action pull was, doubting that many will be operated that way. While the .480 recoils less than a .454 to be sure, let's also say that we never failed to notice that something big had taken place when it went off each time, either.
We're looking forward to keeping this big Ruger well into this coming fall. We would love to bust an animal or two on the farm to find out if, in fact, the .480 acts like a mild recoiling .454 in the field. I suspect that'll be the case. Ruger has done a good job keeping prices in line, and regardless of the caliber the Super Redhawk carries a suggested retail price of $745. I'm not sure that I'd replace a .454 with a .480 yet, but I wouldn't mind having a .480 in addition to a .454 or two, either. Fortunately, Ruger makes having two Super Redhawks completely affordable. For more information about the .480 or any other fine Ruger firearms, drop them a line at 200 Ruger Road, Dept. GWK, Prescott, AZ, 86301; phone: 520-541-8820; or log-on at www.ruger-firearms.com. |
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The Ruger Super Redhawk was introduced in 1986 as a heavy-framed .44 magnum that could take any hunting ammo that was banging around back then. According to R.L. Wilson in his book, Ruger and His Guns, over 86,000 Super Redhawks had been sold 7 years later, when Wilson published his great work.
Someone at Ruger began looking at a way to exceed the power of any .44 magnum load ever conceived while at the same time keeping things "manageable," if you will. They wanted to outwork the .44 magnum while keeping recoil below that generated by either the Casull or any of John Linebaugh's cartridges. Enter the .480 Ruger.