The Thompson/Center Ugalde, or TCU family of

wildcat cartridge A wildcat cartridge, often shortened to wildcat, is a custom-made cartridge (weaponry), cartridge for which ammunition and/or firearms are not mass-produced. These cartridges are often created as experimental variants to optimize a certain ballis ...

s, was developed by Wes Ugalde of

Fallon, Nevada Fallon is a city in Churchill County, Nevada, Churchill County in the U.S. state of Nevada. The population was 9,327 at time of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Fallon is the county seat of Churchill County and is located in the Lahont ...

, by necking up .223 Remington brass to accept larger bullets. The cartridges were developed for the

Thompson Center Arms Thompson/Center Arms is an American firearms company based in Rochester, New Hampshire. The company was best known for its line of interchangeable-barrel, single-shot pistols and rifles. Thompson/Center also manufactures muzzle-loading rifles a ...

Contender

single shot In firearm designs, the term single-shot refers to guns that can hold only a single round of ammunition inside and thus must be reloaded manually after every shot. Compared to multi-shot repeating firearms ("repeaters"), single-shot designs ha ...

pistol, and are widely used in

handgun A handgun is a firearm designed to be usable with only one hand. It is distinguished from a long gun, long barreled gun (i.e., carbine, rifle, shotgun, submachine gun, or machine gun) which typically is intended to be held by both hands and br ...

metallic silhouette Metallic silhouette shooting is a group of target shooting disciplines that involves shooting at steel targets representing game animals at varying distances, seeking to knock the metal target over. Metallic silhouette is shot with large bore rif ...

competition and handgun hunting.

History and motivation

The Contender pistol, with its

break action Break action is a type of firearm action in which the barrel(s) are hinged much like a door and rotate perpendicularly to the bore axis to expose the breech and allow loading and unloading of cartridges. A separate operation may be required for ...

, provides a very versatile platform for experimenting with cartridges, since all that is needed to change calibers is to change barrels. While not as strong as bolt action designs, such as the

Remington XP-100 The Remington XP-100 (from eXperimental Pistol number 100) is a bolt-action pistol produced by Remington Arms from 1963 to 1998. The XP-100 was one of the first handguns designed for long-range shooting and introduced the .221 Remington Fireball, ...

, the Contender is capable of handling medium power cartridges, and many wildcats appeared based on cartridges such as the .30-30 Winchester and the .223 Remington. The TCU family is formed by necking up the .223 to the new diameter, and fire forming to reduce case taper and increase shoulder angle. The 7 mm version first appeared around 1980, with the .25 caliber appearing in 1987. The larger calibers provide more downrange energy, and resist wind deflection better than the original .22 caliber (5.56mm) bullet, and the moderate case capacity of the .223 Remington works well in the short pistol barrels.

Variants

The cartridges in the TCU family include: *6 mm TCU (.243 caliber) *.25 Ugalde, also known as .25 TCU (6.35 mm) *6.5 mm TCU, also known as 6.5×45 mm (.264 caliber, really a 6.7 mm bullet) *7 mm TCU (.284 caliber) *.30 TCU (.308 caliber)

Popularity

The TCU family of cartridges is still going strong in competition, with top shooters at the 2007 IHMSA championship shooting 6.5 mm and 7 mm TCU from both Contenders and other pistols.

Methodology

Generally, only new, unfired .223 Remington brass is used for handloading TCU cartridges to avoid the premature case neck splits that can occur when resizing previously-fired .223 Remington brass with TCU reloading dies. Done this way, TCU sized brass generally becomes as reliable for multiple reloadings as any other handgun cartridge case.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Thompson Center Ugalde Cartridge families Wildcat cartridges