Grump

Apologies if my search skills puked on this one. I got a GREAT load using CFE-BLK in the .30 BR…and I’m almost out of W-W 296 for the .357. Since CFE- BLK is in that middle zone between standard pistol powders and fast-medium rifle powders, has anyone here used it in these two pistol cartridges? thanks!

Been gone a while but I can recommend the known accuracy load of 6 grains of Power Pistol with the Hornady 115 XTP. OR adjust the charge for their 124s. HAP bullets IME are just as accurate but my best 9 does only 2- to 2-1/2 inch groups at 25. you might clang a few without tipping them over, but I am a BIG believer in knowing how far away you can hit 2 out of 3 on any particular target.

Oh, and I thought that OpenOffice had pretty much died because no one wants to work on security issues any more. I'm using LibreOffice, even on my crappy work computer it seems as stable as Office 6 was. https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/

Huge thanks for sharing the data. It's quite refreshing to have actual experience and measured results. "Shoots fine" and "must be the same velocity as factory XYZ because the recoil feels the same" are disappointingly vague and the evil-opposite of this. Our world is a little bit better place because of you and I wish good Kharma your way and downstream to everyone who uses this.

I have seen no correlation in accuracy from 1,000 fps up to 1270 with 115-gr bullets of various types. If the bullet is decent and the load is tuned to the gun, it seems that 2 inches at 25 yards is always attainable.

Finally got some data after Hodgdon's site was on the fritz for a few weeks and returned ONLY some sub-1,000 fps cowboy style loads for 125-gr bullets. After being quite pleased with it in 9mm (see below), I just tried it in .357 Magnum in a 6-inch revolver and my speeds are on the order of 200 fps slower than "advertised". Anyone have any experiences to report??? I'm most interested in 125-gr JHPs, but anything is more real-world info than I have now. QuickLOAD still doesn't have AutoComp (nor CFE Pistol and a few other newer ones that seem popular around here), so I worked up some 9mm loads and had to exceed "book max" to come in about 75 fps or so slower than the max load is supposed to get from a shorter barrel than mine. So I ran a propellant table, found a powder that almost matched, and tweaked it just a little to track my 115-gr bullet speeds at 3 or more charge weights. So I run QuickLOAD (before I found the "official" load data, using the powder characteristics tweaked for 9mm. Wow, Way slower than QL predicted, like 244 fps, and the QL prediction was very, very close to what Hodgdon's 10-inch barrel load would get from my 7.6 inch (cylinder included). So with my own chrono data, I run a charge weight propellant table and find that some completely different powders most closely match what I got. One is Vihtavuori N105, Blue Dot takes more powder and AA #5 takes almost a full grain less. I am not surprised that a powder would behave differently in a much larger case...Now I have some data points.

Go too long and the casemouth can't grip the bullet properly during feeding. Don't remember how long I went, but with Hornady XTPs I was still not touching the lands or the leade by the time the bullets were getting cocked on feeding and accuracy went to 4 inches or worse at 25 yards. That was a LONG time ago, and now that I think of it, a different gun (two actually, both no longer here). Short of that point of being overly long, I never detected an accuracy difference from loading longer or shorter, from 1.05" out to 1.19". That includes a lot of testing the past two years chasing "9mm Hardball" loads for EIC competitions that I did not wind up shooting in. Doing reality checks with JHPs showed that my results with FMJs (Hornady and Sierra) were just not panning out.

Mind sharing your 147 load? Starline .38SC brass, 3.5gr of Bullseye, 147 XTP seated 1.21 with a medium taper crimp and a Federal SPP. Takes a light spring to run it in a comp'd gun. Feels like a paintball gun to shoot. Getting about 930 fps and a PF of 136 or so???

Ummm, this is all fine and good so long as the resistance to rotation is caused purely by the bullet contacting the leade. It will never happen if the case is the source of the "sticktion". Then you run the risk of chasing ever-shorter bullet seating all the way into unsafe pressures. UNlikely to blow the gun or the case the first 5 or 50 or 5,000 times, but I wouldn't want to go down that rabbit-hole. I suggest your isolate one variable at a time. With some chamber/case/bullet combinations, going too short on seating will compromise feed reliability by letting the case tip up too sharply, the bullet nose doesn't hit the top of the chamber, and the case wall on the bottom jams on the feed ramp. YMMV, of course, as this is very dependent on the details of the chamber and ramp. But I *have* seen it happen more than once, and going back a bit longer is exactly what fixes that feed problem.

Sarge: I want to supplement QuickLOAD. By itself, it's not the be-all, end-all of load *estimation*. Like many other things, like driving on snowpacked roads, adding your own informed observations and intelligence is essential. Among other things, I am aware of the safety margin element--which is why factory so-called +P .38 Special loads don't even reach velocities in real guns that should be quite safely attainable with regular-pressure loads using the correct powders. And that safety factor is why I won't be trying to make 9mm Major in a 4.4-inch barrel. I still want to find the true velocity limits for some of these non-1911 guns. But to explore my gun's theoretical limits before I try to work up TOP loads using AutoComp or CFE Pistol or BE-86, I'd really like to explore modifying powder profiles from other ones which appear to load about the same (by charge weight) with the same bullet weight. And THIS forum is one of the best, if not THE best, for getting first-hand reports from people who are smart enough to play by the Big Boy Rules. After all, it's been like 20+ years since I heard a contemporaneous-ish report of anyone getting "Stupid Face" from trying to make Major with a .355-.357 bore and a 5-inch barrel. Like everyone who has mentioned it here says, powder choice makes all the difference. Though I would rather add something like BE-86 to my expanding list of pistol powders (before the first shortage, I had standardized on two for almost everything, but both became Unobtanium for many months at a time), if it winds up being HS-6 then so be it. Especially if HS-6 is low(er) flash. Now I guess I'm off to dig up some reports on flashiness for BE-86, CFE Pistol, and HS-6...I'd just stick with Power Pistol if it wasn't a W-W 296 emulator as a handgun flashlight maker.

Even though I've never laid eyes on BE-86, can someone tell me how "flashy" it is in 9mm and .357? That's part of my interest in AutoComp--less flash than Power Pistol.

Except they sprinkle "copper eraser dust" into the CFE. Yeah, pretty sure that majick dust is some tin compound or elemental tin. IIRC, the US military played with that either before, during, or after WWI. Before my time, I just read too much. The latest QuickLOAD powder database has neither AutoComp nor CFE Pistol. Thus my question. Herco results match what I get from my pistol better than WAP or anything else available. I also understand that sometimes two powders might match very closely through one range of reloading (light, medium or full-power loads, for example) but won't match very well at all at another power level. Thus my inquiry being focused on top end 9mm loads rather than light "plinking" loads.

Specific to the 9mm. More specifically to the 115-gr JHP family. I'm a QuickLOAD junkie. But even the September 2015 update doesn't have Win AutoComp in the database. Still has Winchester Action Pistol and Ramshot Silhouette though, with barely any differences in the various numerical values for each... Anyway, I have looked closely at my own load/chrono results in 9mm using WAC, including properly entering case capacity and barrel length data. Based on charge weights, WAC with burn rate adjustments matches okay in loads predicting 26,000 or more PSI, but drifts farther from reality in downloaded settings. Alliant HERCO seems to match my actual results much better, based on charge weights and velocities. So has anyone played around enough to know what powder most closely matches AutoComp in the 9mm??? Starting with my own speeds and charge data, and assuming similar throats, it appears that a LOT of WAC loads trying to reach Major are right at the bare ragged edge of safety, staying barely under max pressures mainly because of being loaded longer than 1.1 inch... So, can anyone can help with this???

More often, the *case* cannelure is cosmetic, not deep enough to help resist bullet setback, and sometimes not even near the base of the seated bullet. Used to visually identify different types of loads by the manufacturers. Years ago, I think it was Remington put one of those marks about .20 inch from the case mouth on their .38 Special full wadcutters. Regardless of which load, there were others with the cannelure well back from where the bullet base lay. In college, I could pick out different types of .22 match ammo that was loose in the bottom of the can that way, but I don't remember any more which ones had the marks where. In both CF and RF rounds, I have seen TWO cannelures. Definitely for identification. In a factory-loaded, round, look how DEEP the cannelure is. Only the deep ones are used to resist bullet setback.

Thanks, all. Will look into the powder article. But here, V-V powders are more rare than powder itself. In fact, I don't believe I have EVER laid eyes on any of that particular one. I am actually interested in maybe using the SIG in Conventional Bullseye, where you really want to have a 2.5 inch group at 50 yards. That group in my Avatar is with a tuned .45 at 50 during some load development last year, iron sights, bullets I cast myself. So, I know that I can identify an accurate load off of the sandbags with irons. My reject bullets get shot at brown and at steel, usually 25 yards and closer. Do a few Bill Drills once in a while, need to do some reload drills, and of course my slow draw. But hey, I can get a D hit or better at 100 yards from the buzzer in like 3.5 seconds... No head shots that far away though with the handgun.