Many #5 rollers were chambered for the 7x57 Mauser. I am not aware of separate loading for rollers vs say the Mauser bolt rifles. Being a forged steel action, it was considered to be considerably stronger than the old cast actions. With that said, be sure to have a competent gunsmith familiar with rollers inspect any action prior to use. Lots of well meaning people may have made an unsafe modifiction prior to the next owner who shoots it.

I possess an early model #5 in 7x57 with the sliding extractor. I had heard the tales of excess headspace all my life & so immediately checked mine when I received it. Imagine my surprise & happiness when I discovered that the rifle's headspace was just fine! And this is a WELL-used rifle, not a GOOD used rifle, bore very dark but rifling is still stong. I originally bought it for the action but it could easily become a shooter in the original calber & barrel if I ever get one of those tuit thingies & take it down offa the project wall.

I've never personally seen or heard of a roller action that was blown up. Kinda like Mauser blowups, I know that they're possible but have never actually seen one do anything but stretch, except in Ackley's old blowup tests of the '50s. With rollers, I'm more concerned with case separations due to the action's built-in spring & flexure. IMO any factory load is safe in most of the older loadings e.g. 7x57, 30-40, 257 Roberts, 8mm Lebel, 8x57, 9x57 etc. It's when the shooter starts reloading that the trouble becomes really possible due to case stretching and overloading. Of course some of the modern +P loads have higher pressures but IMO this shouldn't be a problem in factory loads with brand-new brass & proper headspace.

Questions: have any of you ever seen a blown-up roller? If so, will you describe it for us? Have any of you ever actually checked your 7x57 headspace with gauges? I've talked with at least one person who has checked his rifle's headspace & found it to be normal, have not talked to anyone who has actually found excessive headspace in their #5. Makes one wonder, no?
TIA, Joe

BTW the opinions expressed above are worth exactly what they cost ya. Good luck, Joe

A few years ago, at Friendship, IN at a black powder cartridge silhouette match, I had a chance to examine a Remington Rolling Block actioned rifle that had failed. Examination showed that the barrel had apparently failed sometime before the action (cracked) as there was evidence that it had been fired some time before the final failure. No idea what precipitated the failure. 

Anything can fail and often does when pushed beyond design limits. I would think that it would be prudent to remember that any Roller action would be in the vicinity of 100 years old and many things could have happened between the years of manufacture and today. I would personally not be interested in shooting ANY roller with loads that exceed 40,000 lbs PSI.

Frankly, I think that a #5 Roller is such a perfect candidate for a BPCR Silhouette rifle, that I doubt that I would use anything but pure black. Black powder is not necessarily an "inferior" powder, you know

Dale53

I've been hoping to get a No. 5 from Lone Star, but wonder just how much "reserve" the action has for the .30-40.  Not that I need to go beyond factory performance, but as a reloader, I like to have some room for error.   

Dave H. reported this as to a 7 mm he owned:

[quote]Last year I had an original 1901 military 7MM rolling block let go with factory loads. When I retreived the parts I discovered that the bottom of the receiver ring had an old crack that ran two thirds of the way from the rear toward the front of the receiver. That was one of the cleanest and tightest 7MM I have seen. Needless to say, I survived the ordeal but it ruptured my left eardrum and it took several weeks to get all the shrapnel out of my left arm.[/quote]

The Lebel is one fat cartridge (0.54") and the modern CIP pressure spec for it is a whopping 50,000 (as measured with their crusher arrangement, which differs from SAAMI's).  If a sound roller can take a steady diet of that, it ought to take the .30-40 with ease, but are modern Lebels and rolling block Lebel's the same?   

I wonder.  There are many different performance figures available for the 8 Lebel.  Sharpe said the WW-I stuff (and the rollers were made for WW-I) ran 198 gn at 2370 in a 31.5" barrel.  I cranked this through QuickLoad, and it figures a rating of about 45 ksi with powders about as fast as Reloder 7, which I think was about as slow as they got then.

On the other hand, maybe the rollers were fed only surplus ammo made for the earlier Lebel rifles, which had lower performance -- but faster powders.   

I do wonder how much reserve there is in a modern roller...

Dave, I guess I gave the wrong impression. I wasn't doubting that rollers blow up, I was mainly looking for specific info on exactly HOW they fail. From the replies posted so far, it appears to me that many roller failures can be assumed to be caused by either old cracks or barrel failures. Modern barrels aren't likely to fail with normal loads, and old cracks can be ID'd by various tests. So using these old rifles is still a viable option if we use a little common sense.

Over the years I've seen a number of blown-up bolt action rifles and they generally fall into two categories, the stretchers (e.g. Mausers, high # Springfields) and the shatterers (e.g. M70s, low # Springfields, 1917 Enfields). Of course a barrel failure will cause a stretcher to shatter, so the failure mode must be considered. It was my belief that the rollers are stretchers rather than shatterers except they stretch at a lower pressure than most, but the descriptions above may tend to show otherwise except that we don't know the exact circumstances of each. Still looking for more info.
Regards, Joe

PS BTW the two rifles I've NEVER seen blown up are the Ruger No 1 and the Rem 600/700 series. Not saying they can't be blown, just saying I've never seen or heard of it. Have seen many 700s with blown case heads and the bolt literally brazed to the receiver, but they were fine after cleaning. In one of Ackley's Handbooks there's a picture of a Win M70 receiver after a blown case head, it's in many many pieces. Go figure.

Waterman,

  I see God loves you too!  I'll bet a thread called "Things I have done and lived to tell about" would make for some hair raising tales.

PETE

Years back, I had a Bannerman catalog from the early 1930s that listed military-surplus rollers in 8mm Lebel for sale.  Also, the English-language translation of "Military Rifle & Machine Gun Cartridges" by Jean Huon lists the 7 x57 rifles we know about, plus 8mm Lebel for 1915 Remington Rolling Blocks, 7.65 x 54 Mauser for 1902 Remingtons and 8x58R Danish Krag for rollers made in Norway, Sweden & Denmark.  Huon goes on at length about the 7.62 Moisin-Nagant, but does not say anything about rollers.  He lists the 7.62 M-N as a chambering for "1915 Winchesters" which were 1895 Winchester muskets, not single shots.

Sharpe (The Rifle in America) does say that Remington made rollers in 8mm Lebel and 7.62 Russian, but he does not say that Remington also made Lebel and Moisin-Nagant rifles, and maybe that is where some of the confusion originates.  Look at the Remington listing in Flayderman's Guide.

Sharpe also says that if your roller is marked Remington-UMC, it was made after 1910.