This has probably happened to you, right? I was stuck on the LA freeway system, trying to eat a Mexican-style fish taco while listening to an explanation of the resurrection of the 50-90 rifle cartridge over a tinny hands-free phone speaker when — WHAM! — I remembered my high school alma mater:

"Hail to thee, our alma mater

Hail to Overton High!"

Which is apropos of nothing, of course, except to continue my moderate obsession with antique rifles in general and the Martini-Henry in particular. I have recently come to the conclusion that at least when it concerns the most important things in life — women, guns, cars and adult beverages — men are only slightly more intelligent than unicellular organisms. While that other sex, women, grow, change and evolve, men apparently have their critical circuits fused at an early age. I could tell you this story about jerking sodas in my grandfather's drugstore in Memphis and this really hot girl in a poodle skirt and ankle bracelet… but I won't.

Instead, I'll use that sleazy tease to explain why I'm crazy about Martini-Henry rifles. The falling block, self-cocking single shot Martini-Henry protected the British Empire from the 1870s until the turn of the century. They were big, ugly brutes, lobbing 577-450 bullets behind a huge load of black powder at the Empire's enemies around the globe. You're probably the most familiar with Martinis from the 1964 movie Zulu! (complete with exclamation point), starring Michael Caine, where 1,000 British soldiers with Martini-Henrys held off some 4,000 incredibly good Zulu warriors at Rorke's Drift in Natal Province, South Africa.

So anyway, at some formative time in my life I see Zulu!, and the single-shot rifle circuit fuses shut on "Martinis." I'd been prepped for this moment by over-exposure to the old Frank DeHaas book on single-shot rifles, Single Shot Rifles and Actions, which I'd poured though with the intensity that only a young male primate who has not yet discovered the opposite sex can. My theory was that since I had never even seen a Winchester High Wall or Low Wall in any of the Tennessee gunstores — the early 1960s were hardly a high-water mark for single shot rifles — and all the Remington Rolling Blocks and Trapdoor Springfields were beat to crap, a Martini-Henry, or at the very least, one of the Cadet Martinis, the training versions in .310 Greener, was within my reach.

I spent a lot of time planning, plotting, outlining caliber conversions… and then I discovered girls!

Flash forward to the more-or-less present. My first reentry into Martini World was a couple of years ago when I stumbled into master gunsmith Vic Samuel, who builds flawless little gems out of Martini Cadet actions that he travels all over the world to scavenge. I had him build me an homage to all the Cadet converted to .357 "crow guns" back in the early 1960s… you can read the whole story on the Cadet at the DOWN RANGE TV.

That still left me jones'ing for a full-size Martini-Henry… which is where I still am, but two important things have changed:

1) There's a flood of full-sized Martini-Henrys on the market, thanks to the unearthing of the Kathmandu armory described in Christian Cranmer's book Treasure is Where You Find It. Essentially, military arms "treasure hunters" got permission to "mine" a collapsed Nepalese armory in Kathmandu, where they discovered an incredible treasure trove of cannons, knives and small arms, including thousands of well-preserved Martini-Henrys in various flavors. All of a sudden the relatively obscure guns are available all over the place for bargain prices.

2) Richard Pumerantz of Ten-X Ammo thought it might be a cool idea to shoot one of the old guns. Now that's more complicated than you might think. The 577-450 loaded ammo was for the most part as dead as the dodo; brass availability was sporadic and of wildly varying quality; the paper-patched bullets were notoriously hard to reload and accuracy typically resembled shotgun patterns. What the heck, Pumerantz thought.

He talked Starline into producing modern-quality 577-450 brass, then launched into a quest to create a bullet and load combination that was both safe and accurate in the mid-1800s guns. He ended up with 3-shot 100-yard groups dangerously close to MOA out of his two guns (yes, yes… your results may differ). He then sat down with Dillon Precision and created a Frankenstein combination of the Dillon 900 shotshell reloader and the metallic cartridge 650 reloader to actually manufacture the 577-450 rounds on a commercial basis.

So last weekend I went out to a range in Southern California and through the smoke launched a bunch of brand new 577-450 rounds through a long-lever Martini-Henry, and, hey, it was everything I thought it would be. Big booms; lots of smoke; large holes in the target… no doubt my high school teachers, who imagined "big things" in my future, would be proud…