End of Trail World Championship, Nickel vs. Brass Cartridges

End of Trail: The SASS World Championship in Phoenix

The crew rolled into Phoenix for a weekend that covered two separate events. Mark shot the Wild Bunch match starting Monday, an offshoot of traditional cowboy action that runs semi-auto pistols alongside the lever guns and shotguns. Thursday kicked off the main event: the SASS Cowboy Action World Championship, End of Trail, where Jeff and Mark got to share a posse for the first time in roughly a decade.

The posse was genuinely international. Germans, Czechs, Finns, Austrians, Canadians, and a few others who had no business speaking English as well as they did. Mark made peace with the fact that men who grew up speaking German and Italian learned the language more properly in school than he did natively. That kind of multilingual nonchalance was apparently common among the top-ranked European shooters, who treat End of Trail the way the rest of us treat a serious regional match.

The stage format gives you a clear picture of how demanding this competition is. A shooter starts with two single-action revolvers holstered and loaded, walks to a table for an unloaded shotgun, then to a second table holding a lever-action rifle with 10 rounds chambered. On the beep: draw, fire five from the first revolver, holster, draw, fire five from the second, move to the shotgun and load two rounds from the belt, shoot, then move to the rifle and fire 10 rounds in a prescribed sequence. Twenty-two aimed shots. Single-action revolvers require a manual cock for every single pull. The lever gun too.

Jeff ran the timer for one stage when Mark had to step away. He called the stage for Hellhound, one of the top-ranked German competitors, and watched the man complete the entire string in 10.82 seconds. The shotgun sequence alone, loading two shells off the body and getting rounds downrange, was happening so fast it registered as a single blur of motion. Watching shooters at this level is a reminder that cowboy-action at the world championship tier is less a hobby than a discipline, one that requires the same kind of locked-in focus from the loading table to the unloading table as any other serious shooting sport.

One category worth noting: Olly the Kid, shooting cap-and-ball, won his division outright. Black powder competitors are easy to spot on the line. You hear a thud instead of a crack, a plume of smoke rolls out, and the smell drifts across the bay a second later. It is as close to frontier-era shooting as you will find in a competitive setting, and the men running those cap-and-ball revolvers fast enough to win a world championship are doing something that takes years to get right.

Nickel-Plated vs. Brass Cartridges: What Reloaders Need to Know

Caller Richard from the airport raised a question that comes up more than people expect: what does nickel plating actually do for a cartridge case, and does it matter? The short answer is yes, but the trade-off depends entirely on whether you reload.

Nickel-plated cases are slick by nature. They feed smoothly, extract cleanly, and do not develop the greenish oxidation that brass sometimes shows in leather belt loops or storage boxes. That is why defensive ammunition manufacturers favor them. For a round that will be loaded once and fired once, nickel plating is a reasonable choice.

The problem surfaces when you start running cases through a press. Nickel plating makes brass brittle. Where an unplated brass case will stretch and spring back through multiple firing and resizing cycles, nickel cases crack and split after only a handful of reloads. Jeff shoots .45 Colt almost exclusively, and when he is handed nickel cases he converts them to dummy rounds for display rather than run them through his dies. For any serious handloader, nickel brass is effectively single-use. If that is the application, it works fine. If you are building up a case stock to reload through a season of competition, stick with plain brass.