Capt Call
The three toggle link actions, 1860 Henry, 1866 Winchester, and 1873 Winchester are very old designs. They date even further back than the Henry to the original Volcanic design worked on by Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson before they started their own handgun company. The toggle link actions are never truly locked in the modern sense. There are no big metal lugs fitting into slots to lock the bolt in place. Instead tihey depend on their 'lockup' for the links of the action to be lined up straight. Exactly like the later design of the Luger. If the links are not lined up straight when a cartridge fires, they will collapse and the action will open foricibly. In addition, the frames of all three are not solid but are mostly skeletonized frames with relatively thin cross sections. Side plates cover the large side openings in the frames, but do not offer much in the way of rigid support to the action. The Henry and '66 sideplates are dovetailed into the frame, so they add a little rigidty to the structure of the frame, but not much. The side plates on a '73 are attached to the outer surface of the frame with one screw and offer no extra support at all. So in a toggle link design the thrust of recoil is transferred directly from the pivot points of the links to the relatively weak skeletonized frame. In addition to the general thinness of the cross sections of the frames, the '66 and Henry don't even use steel, they use brass, or bronze. You can get a steel framed Henry, but most are brass.
Later designs like the '86, '92, and '94 Winchesters are much stronger than the toggle link designs. The frames are not skeletonized like the frames of a toggle link, they are solid steel of heftier cross section. And the bolts are locked in place by heavy locking lugs. This is true of the 1894 Marlin, and even the Henry Big Boy. Solid steel lugs in precisely fitted recesses. The '92 is so strong that it is regularly chambered for much more powerful cartridges than we use in CAS.
Have no fear though, I don't mean to scare you. As long as you stay with Cowboy Smokeless loads in your Henry, or Black Powder loads, you will be fine. The action is plenty strong enough for that. But you must not venture into high powered loads. Mike Venturino relates a story in his book Shooting Lever Guns of the Old West about a brass framed Henry that was ruined by firing la few loads that were too powerfull for it. The brass frame was stretched and the head spacing was ruined. A friend of mine bought a used '73 chambered in .357 and had to return it when he discovered a crack in the frame. Too many high powered 357 Mag loads. But you will be just fine as long as you stick with commercial Cowboy loads, Cowboy loads from published manuals, or Black Powder loads.
Lazy K
You are correct, opiniopns are just that, opinions. My opinion is that Henry pracctices the sin of lying through omission in their advertising. Just take a look at the Henry Website
http://www.henry-guns.com/index.cfmClick on the picture of B. Tyler Henry. There is an entire page detailing the the history of Henry and his gun. It is a very nicely done page. But nowhere do they mention that they have absolutely no connection to B. Tyler Henry, or the gun he designed. How about the photo with the caption 'The Original Henry Factory in New Haven, Connecticut'? That is a total fabrication. That is a photo of the original Winchester Factory. There never was a 'Henry Company'. Henry was an employee of Winchester. At the bottom they even say that no contemporay collection is complete without a Henry. But nowhere do they mention that their gun is not the same as Henry's. They allow the reader to make that assumption. That is called Lying through Omission. It is a way of riding on someone eles's coat tails even though you have absolutely no connection to them at all. Politicians do it all the time.
How about a direct quote from the 'About Us' page?
'Today, the Henry Repeating Arms Company, a descendant of the venerable gunmaker, makes its home in a historic industrial area in Brooklyn, New York.'
That is a bald faced lie. Period. How are they a descendent of the venerable gunmaker? Where are the incorporation papers that show that? Henry was an employee of the New Haven Repeating Arms company, which later became the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The present Henry company never had any relationship at all with Winchester or Henry. There was no liscensing, no agreements, nothing. They plucked the name out of the air and fashioned their own version of history to make it sound authentic.
Let's not even talk about how they were marketing the gun as SASS legal fully two years before it was approved. How many uninformed consumers fell for their advertising hook, line, and sinker, only to show up at a match and find out their gun was not legal?
Yes, opinions are just opinions. That is mine, Henry practices deceptive advertising practices. That information has been on their website, and in their brochures for over 2 years now and they have made no effort to remove it or correct it. If you don't call that Lying through Omission, I have a bridge very near the Henry factory that you might be interested in buying.