IDescribe

Don't. There was a time when plated bullets offered a clean 'lead-free-ish' advantage over cheaper and more accurate bare lead, and it offered a price savings in lots of 250 or 500 over more accurate and easier-to-deal-with jacketed bullets. Now, if you're willing to pony up for a bulk jacketed purchase, like 2,000 or more of Precision Delta, then plated has lost the price advantage it has over jacketed. And if you're not willing to pony up for bulk jacketed and want/need to buy in smaller numbers, coated bullets offer all the advantages of plated, plus better accuracy, and for less money. Don't bother with plated.

Only #3.

Whenever people start putting a lot of emphasis on how their pistol feels, about how it's as if it's made for their hands, etc., I always wonder what they're doing with their pistol where how it feels matters more than how it shoots.

It's not a noob question, and the truth is that the advantages are so minor as to be questionable at action pistol shooting distances. This is not going to make or break anyone's score. The short version: Because a 9mm pistol's chamber is going to allow almost all FMJ-RN to load longer than the magazine will allow, even at the max of 1.169 there's a whole lot of distance between the bullet and the rifling that the loader has no control over. With a JHP, where the chamber is the limiting factor, the loader has complete control over that jump distance, all the way up to and including contact with the rifling. This control allows more options to tune during load development. A JHP has a more "perfect" base than an FMJ because in a JHP, it's the base of the jacket that gets swaged into the mould. The FMJ has the more perfect nose. Since the last interaction between pistol and bullet is between the barrel's crown and the bullet's base, the better base on the JHP is an advantage in precision. Again, not necessarily significant at action pistol shooting distances. FMJ has an exposed lead base, and some people are more comfortable exposing a JHP's copper base directly to the blast than the FMJ's lead base. Whether or not this is worthwhile is debatable. NOW, again, we're talking minor advantages here, nothing to lose sleep over the night before an aciton pistol match, nothing that's going to affect your score. But if JHP offers even the slightest benefit, why not take it? That's how I look at it. If there's not a specific compelling reason to take RN (sometimes there is), I'll take JHP every time.

To clarify a couple of things, you can't feel chamber pressure in the recoil. Recoil is energy, and it's reciprocal to muzzle energy. It's a product of bullet mass (and gas mass to a lesser degree) and velocity. It makes no difference what chamber pressure is. It's quite easy to make higher pressure loads that recoil less than lower pressure loads with the same bullet and pistol. The whole point of using faster burning powders is to get lower recoil at the expense of higher pressure. The reason lengthening OAL lowers peak pressure (which is the pressure that we want to control so the gun doesn't kaboom) is that smokeless powder burns faster the more pressure it's under, and the faster it burns, the faster pressure increases, and the faster pressure increases, the faster it burns, and the faster it burns, the faster pressure increases, and so on, and so on... It's a positive feedback loop. SO anything you do at the very beginning of the burn to increase pressure results in a geometrically higher peak pressure. One thing that increases pressures is decreasing the initial size of the combustion chamber inside the case, which is accomplished by shortening the OAL. This is why "setback" can blow up a gun. That's a general reloading reason why longer might be better than shorter. The .40 S&W has been known to kaboom with reasonably modest setback, so I'd say it's a reason worth making note of. And other reasons specific to the 2011 have been provided earlier in this thread.

As Hi Power Jack said, Precision Delta. They have a 147 RN and a 147 TC. Both would be great. There is a significant price savings for buying 2,000 or more -- $124 for 1,000, or $104/1000 if you buy 2,000 or more. Shipping is free. That's a great price on a great bullet. If you can talk yourself into dropping down to 124gr, they're $89/1,000 when you buy 2,000 or more of the JHP. That's also a great option. Good luck.

You should be looking for an accurate load that also makes minor power factor with a cushion. Minor PF floor is 125. You should load to a cushion above that for two reasons: the first, so that unavoidable variation in your loads doesn't drop you below 125PF if you get chronoed, and the second, to help you knock over steel targets, which are calibrated to fall over with good square hits at a PF of 125, and not all of your hits will be good and square. Some people DO try to cut it to 127/128, but I think you'll find most people will have a minimum of 130-133. The second thing is that you want an accurate load. It's fairly common for people to run a new load up to their personal minimum of PF13X and say "Got it." Like that's the logical end of load development. Meanwhile, an extra tenth of a grain or two of powder or some OAL tinkering would have yielded a more accurate load. The natural variation from one bullet to the next when you're loading is going to yield PF swings of 2-5 (and some people higher) anyway, and you will NEVER notice the difference yourself while shooting, so don't feel like some arbitrary average PF is right, and one or two PF higher is too high, that recoil will be too high. It's not going to play out that way. Find your most accurate load in a PF range of 131 - 136, and use it.

What people are using and what's legal are two different things. Plenty of people were using ACCU-Shadows against the rules and a ruling had to come down to prevent people from showing up with them to nationals. Here's the rule from the new rulebook: 8.2.1.3 SSP Excluded Modifications (Non-Inclusive list): A. Externally visible modifications other than those listed in the Permitted Modifications section. Milling out a slide to a take that 1911 bushing is still illegal. What a local match director allows (or even understands well enough to allow or disallow) and what's legal are, sadly, not the same thing.

Right. A tuned P-09 trigger is not going to be as good as a tuned 75/85/97/SP-01/P-01 trigger, but a properly tuned P-09 trigger is still quite good. You would not be disappointed in one. Exceedingly accurate bushingless slide/barrel. Great pistol.

Made by whom?

Just goofing.

How many brass per case?

This means nothing to a gun other than yours. He could just as easily move to whatever your reliable bullet is and find that bullet unreliable. This is the first I've heard of someone having an issue getting the BBI 125gr bullets to feed, and it should be taken with a grain of salt insofar as it might indicate problems in another pistol. There's no reason to suspect it will.

There may be. BUT if you don't provide the details of your load, no one knows what they know that applies to your situation. If I were asking this question, I would at minimum include this data: Pistol Used Bullet Make and Model, to include weight and profile Powder and Powder Charge OAL Crimp measurement and crimp die used So for me, it might look something like this: The pistol was CZ-75 Shadow. The load was a Precision Delta 124gr JHP loaded with 3.9gr of Bullseye. OAL is 1.110, and crimp is .378 with a Redding taper crimp die. That gives people a starting point. If you are using plated bullets, and you don't know what your crimp is, I already know the answer. Same for coated lead. Or it could be that you're using plated, and the FMJ bullets Blazer is using are simply better bullets, and you're never going to see equal accuracy from plated. Or it could be that you've done no tuning, and you're in a velocity range that's going to produce bad accuracy in that specific pistol with that powder. Or it could be that you're using coated lead bullets with a Lee FCD. Or it could be that you're using undersized bullets like Blue Bullets, and they don't fit your barrel well. It could be ALL sorts of things. But if you don't tell us what your load and pistol are, there is no way for us to speculate.

Right. In 9mm, .355 is standard for jacketed, but some pistols do better with .356. In lead or coated lead, .356 is standard, and some pistols do better with .357 or .358. People will tell you to slug your barrel. I find it easier to just shoot both in a pistol to figure out what the pistol prefers.

This question can't be answered definitively. But it can't even be half-ass attempted if you don't provide the details of your load.

What type of bullets are they? 180gr what?

As I sit here and think about it, I guess it's possible that you could catch the slide or the front sight on the holster as you were putting the pistol in place and push the slide slightly backward out of battery, but it seems unlikely someone would be holstering the pistol with enough force to do that. I just don't see catching that front sight, then powering through it to get the pistol into the holster.

There's a video on youtube of a guy with a P320 whose slide would hang just out of battery if he sort of slid the slide to that point then let it go, but when firing it, it worked fine. Or if he let the recoil spring drive the whole way, it worked fine. Sounds similar to your situation. He called Sig and wanted to send it in for them to fix. He said that at first, they were resistant taking it back, but ultimately agreed, and when it was returned to the owner, the slide would no longer hang at that point at all. The work order said they had "honed slide". So they did a little polishing for him. He never said specifically what they said when they were resistant to taking it back to fix, just that it happened, but I suspect they advised him to fire a few hundred rounds through it. It was probably something that would have worked itself out as it broke in. As to firing out of battery, most pistols will fire a little out of battery. Whether or not this issue with the 320 is likely to lead to that, I have no idea. But I DO know that lots of people are out there loading their own ammo who have no idea that they can load certain bullets long enough to engage their rifling and hold the slide just out of battery, so that would be my first suspicion for an OOB detonation.

I've seen where Ayoob has commented that it has stand off capability. I've seen nowhere where he connects that stand off capability to the slide being slightly out of battery. Are you sure you're not making an assumption about that connection? The slide should all the way into battery after each shot. Also, does it hang slightly out of battery every time when firing the pistol? Or does this happen when you insert a mag and lower the mag down to battery by hand? If you slingshot the slide and let the spring slam it forward, will it still hang slightly out of battery?

...which doesn't mean you fully understand them or contextualize them properly. The warnings you are reading, as someone pointed out, are about lubing ammo after it's manufactured. Those warnings in manuals predate carbide sizing dies. That means that near 100% of the ammo at the time these warnings were originally written had their cases sized with lube, which in turn means that no one should interpret from those warnings that lube shouldn't be used in sizing. Again, those warnings are about lubing ammo after it's manufactured, which is not part of this thread. What you're posting has nothing to do with the sparing application of case lube to assist in sizing.

I find my short-throated 9mm CZ pistols have to take bullets about .03 shorter than my longer throated 9mm pistols. I load that ACME 124gr RN to 1.06 for my ShadowLine, so 1.09 for an M&P is right in line with that. For the record, I've shot plenty of the new mould ACME 124gr RN through my ShadowLine, and while 1.06 is pretty darned short, it feeds reliably. No issues.

You know you want to buy a TS Orange. Buy a TS Orange.

Did Bayou Bullets discontinue the 124gr TCG? Anyone know why this happened?

I thought about it before I wrote. Get rid of 9mm shooters, and you get rid of the whinging and whining. Problem solved.