When I made my first trip to Kenya in 1971, Len Bull, the manager of Kenya Bunduki, a prominent gun shop in Nairobi, gave me the run of his gun vault. The rifles I selected to send home were primarily bolt action repeaters, thus easy to rebarrel, but almost without exception the rifle bores suffered from cartridges loaded with cordite, which burns at a much higher temperature than modern rifle powders and for that reason causes much more erosion of the chamber throat, an accuracy killer at long range in target rifles, but less so for shooting at closer ranges. The accuracy of my high power target rifles often started to trail off around 2000 rounds when throat erosion began to be noticeable. Setting the barrel back and rechambering it made it good for another 2000 rounds.

The nice thing about a 450/400 3 1/4" is that it can be rebored and rechambered to .450 NE, if the accuracy is disappointing.