IDescribe

Randy, from 1.1 to 1.16, you might need to adjust powder charge by .2-.3gr to maintain the same velocity. But if you want to get scientific, then get scientific. There's no reason you should be tuning OAL for accuracy, but not velocity. In other words, maintaining the exact same velocity should not be the goal. You should be trying to find the right combination of OAL and velocity for the particular bullet in the particular gun. If you're trying to find ONE OAL that's most accurate in both guns, you're most likely wasting your time, so you should be planning on coming up with two different loads for the two guns, as well. And if you want to make one general purpose round for both guns, but still want to improve accuracy, stop shooting plated.

Roze Distribution/Zero Bullets is great for jacketed and swaged lead. Top notch. RMR's new 124gr JHP, which they call the MPR (multi-purpose round) I have not used, but the few people I've seen discuss it who have used it were very pleased with accuracy in 9mm, and they're as cheap as PD. I'm going to buy a few thousand here shortly. As to credit cards, I am pleased to hear about the one-use numbers. Will look into that with my bank. I have had mine nailed twice, both times after purchasing from a few reloading component suppliers at once. I excluded PD because the second time it happened, I had not purchased from PD since getting a new credit card number after the first incident. It matters no longer, though. Single-use CC numbers from now on for me.

GregInAtl A primer imparts enough force to knock the bullet out of the case. If you're not clearing these rounds and having the bullet and case apart and powder falling out, then the primers are NOT going off. You've got about three options: Bad primers High primers Weak mainspring That's it. It's one of those three things.

Depends on what you want to do in Steel. If you want to tie in Steel with USPSA Production or IDPA, where there's a minimum PF of 125, AND you want to stick with 147gr bullets, then I'd recommend a coated lead bullet around 147gr. I'd specifically recommend ACME, either the 145 RN or 147 FP. If you want keep it tied in with USPSA Production/IDPA but you don't particularly care about sticking with 147, I'd recommend a switch to coated lead 124/125gr, either from ACME or BBI AND if you don't care about keeping your loads the same as USPSA Production/IDPA, and you want to treat Steel Challenge as its own thing, then I'd buy ACME or BBI 115, buy a weaker recoil spring, and load them down to bunny farts.

With the faster powders I use for 9mm minor loads and 124gr bullets, a .02 shift in OAL is worth about 0.1gr of powder in terms of velocity.

N320 is the cleanest of the bunch from the above list. Not on the list, but appropriate and clean are both PrimaV and American Select. Titegroup is filthy until you get to the top of the load window, then it cleans up okay. The tales of Titegroup's heat are overblown. Don't sweat it.

ZZT, it's the lead. They are larger in diameter and obturate better, letting less gas by, accelerating the pressure curve. It's normal for lead to need a few tenths less powder than plated or jacketed to get to the same velocity.

CZ .40 guns are not short-chambered the way their 9mm pistols are. BUT a 1911 and 2011 may be cut longer than standard, because the body and magazine dimensions are for .45. As to: There are two limits to OAL -- the magazine max, which is pretty much static, and the max your bullet will load to, which changes from bullet to bullet. If you have a practice of "I load to 1.XYZ for my TS," or any other gun, then you're leaving a step out of the reloading process, where you determine what your max OAL is with every bullet model you develop loads with.

The problem seems pretty obvious. There's a mass imbalance creating some torque on recoil, opening up the friction fits. You can fix that by evenly redistributing your bracelets between both arms.

Ha! I see now this is an old thread that got bumped. Good day, sir.

You'll likely be shooting with an extreme spread that big and will never notice the difference when you have a 4PF swing from one round to the next. Don't get tricked into thinking chasing the PF floor is going to help you. You'll never notice the difference after the shot timer chimes. Pick your bullet and powder and work up a load to somewhere between let's say PF 130 and 138, looking for the most accurate load. And that's your best load. That's your pet load -- not the softest, but the most accurate in a reasonably soft range. Recoil management comes from grip and stance, and grip, and stance, and a little more grip. Shaving off a few foot-pounds of muzzle energy will give you a false sense of accomplishment in the short run, and it's great for impressing your shooting buddies "Feel this. Ooooh.... aaaahhh...." but it's worth diddly squat under the clock.

Correct. WITH a power factor floor, you'll get softer recoil at a given power factor with a heavier bullet (not that that is worth pursuing to the degree to which many of us do), but when there's no power factor floor, you can achieve the softest loads with the lightest bullets you can get for your caliber, though you may need to re-spring the pistol to get it to function with the mousiest of mouse farts.

Well, you actually opened up another important detail. The LEE FCD is notorious for screwing up cartridges with lead bullets. The FCD is designed to form the entire cartridge, not just the case mouth, down to some specific dimensions, to match apparently some un-named factory in some marketer's dreams. They can end up swaging bullet bases inside the case, and that will degrade accuracy. The FCD can get your cartridges to fit some case gauge if you think that's important. And they can screw up loads with with lead sized .356 or greater. And as far as I can tell, not much else. If you tell me you're having trouble getting accuracy out of lead, and you tell me you're using an FCD, I'll tell you I'm not surprised. My honest recommendation at this point is to get a new taper crimp die that doesn't do anything more than taper crimp, which is all of them. Except the one you have. And now you should expect a sound-off from people who use FCDs and "never had a problem".

The machine was engineered for particular parts to impact particular parts in particular places. When you drop the hammer with the slide off, you now have a part striking something it wasn't meant to strike, and you have a part not meant to be struck be anything being struck. It's not worth it to try to assess the risk with every pistol. It's best practice to simply avoid it as much as possible.

I don't use Dillon dies, but I am pretty sure Dillon has a reversible anvil, where one side is flat/solid, and the other side is hollow/concave. The flat side presses down against the nose of the bullet, and the hollow side contacts below the nose of the bullet on the ogive. Since most variation in the length of the actual bullet (just the projectile itself) occurs at the nose and OAL is measured to the nose, the flat side of the anvil (that seats from the nose) will produce the most consistent OAL, and the hollow side the least consistent. That's something for you to check. IF it turns out that you are seating with the hollow side of the anvil, keep it that way. The hollow side, while having less consistent OAL, will create a more consistent jump distance from the bullet shoulder to the rifling, AND a more consistent seating depth. Those two things have real ballistic effects. OAL, the distance from the headstamp to the nose, does not. If you are already seating with the flat side of the anvil, I would recommend you pull the cartridges after the seating die and measure them before running them through the crimp die to see if the crimp die is moving the bullet. If it's not, I would recommend readjusting your seating die. Not just the anvil, the whole die -- back it out a little and readjust the anvil to where you want it. I've seen that be a problem. I couldn't figure out WHY it was a problem, but backing the seating die out a little fixed it.

ALWAYS more effective than a site's search engine. Just click into a thread to make sure you have root address.

You really need a history with the pistol to judge primer flow. I have a pistol that when stock, the firing pin was particularly small relative to the hole in the breech face through which it passed. It would show primer flow with loads that I was confident were under SAAMI max. It concerned me at first, when I had no idea what might cause that other than exceeding safe pressure limits, but I learned to live with it. Then, I swapped in an extended firing pin, and the primer flow disappeared. I guessed what had happened, and when I measured them, the new extended firing pin was a couple thousandths larger in a diameter. Mystery solved.

Use Google with a site-specific search. Copy and paste the following into Google: site:http://forums.brianenos.com e3 10mm/40 Replace 10mm/40 with another subforum title if you want a different caliber.

With accuracy that poor, you might be over-crimping. Measure right at the mouth. A lot of people will do .377/.378. I typically go .379 with coated lead, sometimes .380. You may also find that the bullets shoot more accurately at a different average muzzle velocity. My CZ-75 ShadowLine, for example, almost always sees groups with 124gr/125gr bullets tighten up with an average muzzle velocity somewhere between 1060 and 1080. With some bullet and powder combos it's closer to 1060, others closer to 1080, but as I test loads, things almost always tighten up somewhere in that range with 124/125gr bullets.

I would: Check to make sure primers are fully seated on problem cartridges. If they are not, they can restrict extractor movement and cause jams. If primers are fine, remove, clean, and reinstall extractor and channel, then try again. The extractor must be able to move as the bullet is feeding, and if it has lost its full range of motion, that can lead to jams, possibly only with the occasional cartridge where dimensions have stacked up just right to make it happen. If still a problem, I would break down the bullets, reload the brass exactly as they were before, paying extra attention to get a full ram stroke on re-sizing. And test again. If still a problem, I would break down the bullets, adjust my sizing die so that there was but a paper's width between the die and the shellplate/shellholder at full ram-stroke, reload, and try again. If still a problem, seat them a full .020 deeper and try again. If still a problem, I would break them down and reload them with a different bullet entirely. If still a problem, junk those brass.

Bayou has "new" 124gr TCG? They're not on the website that I can find. Just the 120 TCG.

Yes.

Not for nothing, but Sport Pistol data shows it doing 9mm minor and .40 major perfectly.

Like in the pic above. Slightly bent, and rotate the elbows outward, which serves to clamp your hands down on the grip of the pistol even harder.

It's not the ring that the case mouth made that's the problem. It's that when the rifling engraves across that groove, it will tear and displace copper unevenly.