IDescribe

The most significant differences are sizing, which will affect accuracy, and how well the coating is cured, which will affect smoke and smell and then the options themselves on bullet weights and profiles.

.376 is a bit narrow for a plated bullet of .356. I'd go up a thousandth or two. The real question, if you want a nice, safe, accurate round, why not shoot a 115 or 124?

Crimp for sure over-spec by .005, and probably more like .008/.009 over ideal. OP, when you are talking about a cartridge not chambering completely, and that cartridge OAL is 1.155 -- the bullet type is highly relevant.

As far as I can tell, he still hasn't told us what bullet. He has told us a manufacturer and bullet weight, but there is a HUGE difference between RN and JHP. What bullet is it?

STOP!!!! I am pretty confident that we discussed how YOU determine YOUR max OAL in a particular gun. Pretty sure the Canadian (you were probably ignoring him, he's Canadian) provided links on how to determine your max OAL. I think someone (possibly the Canadian again) said that you should not compare the dimensions of YOUR load to a factory load. That is, as they say north of the border, useless. YOU determine YOUR max OAL. There is no shortcut, and all the shortcuts you might think of are the the LONG WAY around. There is nothing faster than spending a few extra minutes to get it right the first time. That bullet does look crooked. Different problem, but I would seat ten and check that out. Maybe a trick of the lighting in the photo, maybe not. Also, referencing another comment, there is no 9mm bullet that is so big that it will make the case mouth bigger than will seat in a 9mm chamber. That Berry's is .356. I would crimp to .378 for the time being. That crimp will work perfectly well with that bullet diameter.

No, the OAL is simply too long for that chamber with that bullet. We have seen this a bazillion times, most often with CZ, but also a few others. BallisticianX touched on it. There is a maximum OAL that any bullet can be loaded to in a particular chamber before it actually touches the rifling when fully chambered. If you load longer than that, your bullet will engage the rifling, and if it's too far past that point, it will hold the gun out of battery. That is what you are experiencing. In many Western and Eastern European countries, it's illegal to have any bullet type other than RN. FMJ-RN will seat exceedingly long without engaging the rifling -- longer, in fact, than the magazine will allow. Several gun manufacturers in Europe do not account for bullet types other than FMJ-RN, and their throats are a bit shorter than guns built in the U.S., where an unlimited variety of bullet profiles is permitted. This is NOT a problem. It simply means you need to load cartridges a few hundredths of an inch shorter for a CZ (or some Tanfos, some Walthers, and so on and so on) than you would for most pistols. Perfectly normal. Just determine the max OAL for that pistol with whatever bullets you load, and load shorter than that. There are boatloads of threads that discuss how to determine max OAL. I wouldn't be surprised if one was linked to previously in this thread.

You don't need to slug your barrel to find out. Buy some Precision Delta FMJ-RN at .355 and .356 and see which your pistol shoots better. Done deal. If you slugged your barrel and it told you that you should use .355, but .356 ran better, would you run .355 anyway because that's what slugging told you? Of course not. Just buy the two different bullets from PD, same manufacturer, and try them. And for the record, the worse of the two won't be terrible, so it's not like you'll be wasting bullets. The lesser of the two will still be usable.

Nevermind. I see now that you don't mean that it's a reformulation OF Bullseye, but that it's supposed to duplicate Bullseye's performance with some new characteristics.

It depends on what you mean by reformulation. BE-86 and Power Pistol are the same basic compound as Bullseye, with different particle sizes and shapes and different additives and coatings and whatnot to create different burn rates and different desired characteristics. I have seen nothing about this being the case with Sport Pistol.

Not ACME, but I have used it with 147gr BBI coated. It was great for 9mm minor, but I steered toward other powders. AA2 and American Select are (in my mind) the two great 9mm minor powders very few people talk about.

Seen it MANY times in here. Poor bullet to barrel fit and overcrimping cause all sorts of accuracy problems if not outright tumbling. This isn't 600 meter rifle with jacketed bullets and super slow powders with tall powder columns where pressure builds slowly and let you tune it with an extra thousandth or two of crimp. It's superfast burning pistol powders in stubby little cases whose pressure curves don't respond to that and where all your extra crimp is doing is denting the bullet surface, and the case of coated lead and plated, damaging the surface. AND again, as has been said in these forums thousands of times -- extra taper crimp does NOT hold the bullet any better and prevent setback. Neck tension holds the bullet in place, and like any straight piece of metal, if you bend it inward at the top, it bows out beneath that point in response. Taper crimping past flush can REDUCE neck tension and INCREASE the likelihood of setback, not decrease it.

It's not just different strokes. This will cause outright problems with some bullet types. This can damage coating for coated lead, as well as thin copper plating. There is no advantage to crimping past flush, and again, the penalty is bullet damage and reduced accuracy.

Are Shadow 2 barrels melonite? I thought that was P-09/07/10.

No one should do this. This is not how taper-crimping works. Taper-crimping to a .003 indent is nuts.

The dust acts as dry lube and does not interact with powder. It's a good thing. ALSO, just buy crushed walnut pet bedding at a pet store. MUCH cheaper than buying something made by gun/ammo company.

There is taper crimp and roll crimp. They are both crimp. Taper crimp though, should not take the crimp past flush. It should take the crimp TO flush. Crimp should be .380 or less, per 9mm spec. .376/.377 is common for .355 bullets, and .377/.378 is common for .356 bullets. There is no advantage to crimping more the necessary, and the penalty for crimping more than necessary is damage to the bullet. Roll crimping into a cannelure can hold onto the bullet for an extra fraction of a fraction of a moment and alter the pressure curve. For taper crimping, it's not going to make a difference. You could set you crimp die for .378 or .379 and forget about it forever.

Yes, you CAN. You'll likely do better consolidating on her .356 bullets for both guns. At the end of the day, you can work up loads for both pistols with both bullets and test it yourself. Guns quite often do better with bullets oversized by a thousandth or two.

Additional reading: About staying above/below the sound barrier, or more specifically about the transonic range, you can google "ballistic co-efficient," "transonic range," or "bullet coefficient of drag" and get peer-reviewed info. It is also discussed in Fryxell's guide to casting bullets: From Ingot to Target -- the first place I read about it. Also, you should look for sites where pistol accuracy is THE thing. Generally speaking, competitive shooting is the sport where your competition will do everything they can to help you beat them. If you want to know about action shooting, this forum is the place to go, but accuracy is not king here. If you want to ride the coat-tails of benchrest rifle shooters, Accurateshooter.com is the place to go. If you want to learn about bullet casting, Castboolits is the site to browse. And for ANYTHING pure accuracy PISTOL-related, I'd recommend you browse and read at the Bullseye-L forum first, and TargetTalk second. Any time you're reading forums, you need an eye and ear for who to pay attention to, but these sites are treasure-troves for learning. There are people shooting bullseye who will test a particular bullet in particular guns with different powders, multiple times, varying crimp, varying OAL, case trimming or not, uniforming primer pockets and flash-holes, or not, mixed brass or not, EVERYTHING you can think of all tested on a ransom rest, and discussing what accurizing measures work and are worthwhile. Transonic range is not tied directly to nodes. For some reason (clearly, it's magic), some guns will tighten precision/groups with certain bullet/powder combos when the average velocity falls into certain ranges. I will tell you that my CZ-75 ShadowLine is most accurate with every 124/125gr bullet I've tested when the average velocity falls between 1060 and 1080. Don't know why, but it has been repeatable this far regardless of combination. My VP9, on the other hand, doesn't seem to care about velocity. It cares about other things, like bullet to barrel fit, but I don't see velocity nodes. I suspect velocity nodes is mostly about finding the right velocity for the right bullet at a particular twist rate, but we are into the realm of magic with that. Can't tell you WHY anything in that regard. Part of velocity nodes with rifles is about barrel harmonics. I have no idea what kind of impact that has with 3.5 to 5-inch pistols barrels at action pistol distances, but with 29-inch barrels at 600 yards, it matters. Regarding your Edit: Lighter bullets do not need more powder than heavy bullets to make the same velocity -- they need less. What they DO need more powder for than heavy bullets is reaching the same power factor. Big difference. Slow powders make 9mm minor velocities just fine. It's just that they take more powder to do it, and they do it with very inefficient burns. It's a dirty wasteful path, that involves marginally more recoil, though you won't notice the recoil difference on a stage. Plenty of people are using CFE for 9mm minor. You can do it. But the fact that people are using CFE for 9mm major is a good indication that it's not ideal for 9mm minor.

^^^^ THIS ^^^^ I dump hundreds of cases onto a bath towel after cleaning. I spray them lightly, bunch up the either end of the towel in each hand, pick it up with my cases suspended in a giant bath towel pouch, and tumble them around like I'm polishing a bowling ball or milking a giant cow. This will distribute the lube around the cases. Then you let the liquid evaporate off overnight, and you are left with dry-lubed cases. And the residual dry lube won't interact with your powder. Easiest thing in the world, and no post-cleaning necessary.

As others have said, you should start with every new bullet by determing your max OAL without rifling engagement upon chambering. Regarding seating depth: There are many factors that affect peak pressure at a given charge weight, which is what we try to control from a safety standpoint. Among those factors are bullet weight, bullet diameter, surface area of the shank/bearing surface, friction coefficient between the bullet's surface metal and the barrel, hardness of the bullet surface in terms of how well it obturates (fills in the rifling grooves) and contains gas (and thus pressure), AND the initial size of the combustion chamber, which is a result of how deeply the bullet base is seated into the case (aka seating depth). We don't measure seating depth directly, however. We calculate it with the measurable OAL, where seating depth is case length + bullet length - OAL. Since the remaining volume leftover in the case to hold the powder is measured between the bullet base and the bottom of the case, it isn't necessary to measure every case length individually. It's best to just have a single measurement per caliber so that you are comparing apples to apples from one cartridge to the next. For 9mm, .750 is going to be within a few thousandths of every case, and it's easy to do math with. If you have two bullets of the same/similar surface metal and of the same diameter and same weight, BUT different bullet lengths, you are going to get velocity closer by matching seating depth than by matching OAL. When bullet lengths are different, the same OAL will produce different seating depths. When you are looking at load data, and the load data is with a different bullet than the one you are actually using, just using the OAL in the load data by default may in fact produce significantly different seating depths and thus different results. By the same token, you will have new reloaders start with FMJ or plated RN, loading out to 1.160, then they load their first JHP or FP, find out they need to load down to 1.080, and they will react to that every time -- "OMG! That is so short!" It can make people nervous. But in reality, the seating depths may be much closer than the .080 difference in OAL. They may only be .020, .030 difference, which is less dramatic. In these cases, the difference in OAL is the distance from the bullet shoulder to the nose, which has no effect on internal ballistics. With a pistol and powder I am familiar with, I can use seating depth to predict with reasonable accuracy what velocities I will get at what charge weights by comparing seating depths to my own load data I have already produced with other bullets of the same type and weight. And to be clear, none of this is NECESSARY. It's just another data point and another way to control your load development. In all but extreme cases, if you are using load data for a bullet of the same weight AND type, using the published load data's starting load protects from dangerously high peak pressure, so long as you're respecting the max velocity of the published load data as the ceiling. Hope this helps.

If you are using enough lube for it to be a problem, you are using WAY TOO MUCH lube.

No case trimming for 9mm or .45. Sort cases by length, yes. Trim cases to the same length, no.

If you had a table at a gun show, you could put out boxes, and there would be enough dull-witted foot traffic that you would sell some at stupidly high prices. Other than that, you are not likely to get enough eyes on it to sell outdated ammo for much of a premium. You could always hold onto it for another 20 years, then donate it to a museum, and take a $100,000 deduction on your taxes.

I suspect polygonal barrels do well with leading when it comes to coated bullets. My Glock and HK don't lead at all with coated. My CZs will IF bullet to barrel fit is poor.