A 110-grain Python Load

I’ve owned three Colt Pythons.  Back in the ‘70s I had a blue 6-inch Colt Python and another 6-inch nickel-plated one (they were only about $250 back then, and I could buy them for even less through the Post Exchange).  Both those Pythons went down the road, and yeah, I’m sorry I sold them. Who wouldn’t be?

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These days, I have a 6-inch bright stainless Colt Python, the new model, and I love it.  It’s the one you see in the photo above.  I’ve been to the Colt factory to see how they are made, and both the Python’s design and its production are impressive.  I’ll let you in on a secret:  The new Pythons are better guns.  I shoot my Python a lot.  In the last few months I’ve been hitting the range with it at least a couple of times every week. I’m old school, I guess:  I prefer a revolver to a semi-auto, and I prefer .38 Special and .357 Magnum over 9mm.  Your mileage may vary.  I know what I like.

I remembered that back in the day I found a 110-gr jacketed hollow point bullet with 10.0 grains of Unique (the max load in the Hornady manual in the 1970s) and it was extremely accurate in my blue steel Python.  I mean, like one-hole accurate.  Accurate enough to keep that load in my memory for five decades.

Fast forward 50 years and you’ll find me scrounging for reloading components on a fairly regular basis.  On one of those scrounging expeditions Rick Phillips (of Phillips Wholesale) had Accurate No. 5 propellant in stock.  It’s a handgun powder, and Rick told me that Accurate No. 5 has a burn rate about like Unique.   Hmmm.   Unique, huh?   That stuck in my mind, mostly because I had some 110-grain .357 pistol bullets in my components stash:  I had Winchester jacketed hollow points, and Hornady jacketed hollow points.  I bought a bunch of the Winchester bullets during the Obama years when everything was scarce, and I was down to one unopened bag of 100.   I had an unopened box of the Hornady 110-grain bullets, too.

I loaded the last of the Winchester bullets recently using some junk 357 brass.   I have Unique, but I wanted to see if I could get good results with Accurate No. 5.  Rick’s comment about Accurate No. 5 being about like Unique stuck in my mind.  The max load on the Accurate site for 110 grain bullets is 11 grains, so I loaded some at 10.1 grains and some at 10.5 grains, both with magnum CCI primers.

Winchester shorted me on that last bag of 100 grain bullets.  The last bag I had was unopened, but it had only 85 bullets in it.  I wrote to Winchester customer support, and they responded with an answer that was left blank.  I wrote to Winchester again after receiving the above non-answer for an answer, but I’m not holding my breath.

The results with both the Hornady and Winchester bullets were great.  Here’s a 5-shot group at 50 feet with 10.1 grains of Accurate No. 5 and the Winchester bullets.  This was the best group this morning, but they were all good.

The 10.1 and the 10.5 grains of Accurate No. 5 loads shot about the same from an accuracy perspective, but the 10.5 grain loads made the primers flatter, so I’ll load the 10.1 grain load the next time I reload this ammo.  No sense burning up more powder and stressing the gun and the brass if there’s no accuracy improvement.  It’s already excellent at 10.1 grains.

The Winchester bullets looked cruder than the Hornady bullets but I think they maybe had a slight accuracy edge.  I went online to buy more, but I learned Winchester discontinued them.  One of my buddies had two bags and he gave them to me, but the odds of me ever getting any more are slim.  Hornady, Speer, and Sierra all make JHP 110-grain bullets, but nobody has any in stock.  I have 85 left of the Hornady bullets (I used 15 of the Hornady bullets to make up for the ones Winchester shorted me) and now, an additional 200 Winchester bullets.  You still owe me 15 bullets, Oliver.

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