TagStraight Wall Cartridges

Straight wall cartridges are the ones where the brass case has no bottleneck. The exterior body walls run exactly parallel (or near as much) from the rim to the case mouth.

Several calibers and versions of straight-wall cartridges are available (as you’ll see below), especially in the black powder and lever-action world (think .38-55 Winchester and .444 Marlin). Options increased dramatically after hunting regulations changed across the Midwest, and states like Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Iowa put limitations in place that allowed only centerfire rifles chambered in straight-wall ammunition that met very specific case-length and caliber restrictions.

Examples of straight-wall rounds include the .350 Legend, .360 Buckhammer, .400 Legend, and such classics as the .45-70 Government, .44 Remington Magnum, and .444 Marlin. Not all of those are for hunting, mind you; some of their cases are too long for states that cap case length at 1.8 inches. Don’t equate “straight wall” with “legal to kill something I want to eat.” The two are not always synonymous.

(More) Modern Straight Wall Cartridges

Among the more popular and modern straight-walled cartridge options (granted, modern is a relative term) are the .350 Legend, .360 Buckhammer, .400 Legend, and .450 Bushmaster. Most of these and their cousins fall within the hunting constraints mentioned earlier, e.g., usually a .357-inch minimum caliber in cases ranging from 1.16-in to 1.8-in.

Most of these hunting cartridges (deer hunting cartridges, specifically) were developed in response to changing whitetail laws.

Modern (~ish) Straight-Walled Cartridge Examples

• 350 Legend: Winchester formally introduced the .350 Legend cartridge in 2019. It’s built on a modified .223-dimension rim to allow use with standard 5.56 AR15 bolt faces and actions and engineered for low recoil and a flat intermediate trajectory.
• 360 Buckhammer: The .360 Buckhammer cartridge was developed and introduced by Remington Ammunition and Henry Rifles in early 2023. It’s a rimmed lever-action-focused round built on a (straightened) .30-30 base, designed for use with traditional tubular magazines. It’s intended to deliver .30-30 ballistics and trajectory for use in those bottleneck-o-phobic places.
• 400 Legend: The .400 Legend (50 more than the .350) was introduced by Winchester in 2023. It was designed as a “timber” or “bush” cartridge, built to operate off a 6.8 SPC bolt face while pushing a heavy-grain (like .400 diameter) projectile with moderate recoil.
• 450 Bushmaster: The .450 Bushmaster round, developed by Tim LeGendre, was brought to market by Bushmaster and Hornady. It’s a big-bore option built on a rebated-rim casing, intended to dump significant terminal energy into targets like black bear, feral pigs, and certain Cryptids (like Searson, Houtekamer, and Pike – though one might be better off using something a little bigger when hunting a Duty).

You can read more about them in our articles below.

Other Cartridges (That Aren’t…Straight)

If you were wondering (and even if you weren’t), other cartridge types include bottleneck cartridges and tapered cartridges, with such case head and rim geometries such as Rimless, Rimmed, Semi-Rimmed, Rebated-Rim, and Belted (Magnum).

Ignition mechanism types will obviously be Centerfire or Rimfire. You might not have been wondering about that either, but lucky you, we told you anyway.

P.S. No, the term straight walled cartridge isn’t a euphemism for sexual preference or anything, but thanks for checking.