Tag: 9mm Accuracy Loads

Some Days Are Better Than Others

By Joe Berk

Any day spent on the range is a good day, but some days are better than others.  Today…well, let’s just say that some of my other days I’ve done better.

The S&W Shield with reloaded 9mm ammo. This was old stuff that I wanted to use up (and I did).

I belong to two ranges:  The West End Gun Club up in the San Gabriel Mountains, and the Magnum Range in Rancho, California.  The West End Gun Club is good for rifle and handgun (and now, shotgun, too), and you’ve seen more than a few photos of it on this blog.  The WEGC shooting stations go out to 325 yards.

It takes about a half hour for me to get to the West End Gun Club, and as a guy who is still recovering from back surgery, it’s a bit tougher given my current (and hopefully, temporary) physical limitations.  Carrying a target frame out to the 100-yard line is just not in the cards for me yet.  Carrying all my gear to the bench exceeds my lifting restrictions.

The indoor range in Rancho is a lot easier.  It’s about 10 minutes away.  Rancho has a motorized target placement and retrieval system.  The indoor range only goes out to 50 feet, but for my handgun shooting that’s plenty.

I paid $599 for my Garmin and it was worth every cent. You can get them now for $399. That’s a hell of a deal. These are my results with the box of 50 cartridges I had reloaded several years ago (long before I bought the Garmin).

On this particular day, I wanted to use a box of ammo that was hiding in the ammo locker.  It was 9mm ammo I loaded several years ago.  The recipe had been an accuracy winner in my Model 59 and Model 659 Smith and Wessons, and that load was the 125-grain Missouri cast roundnose bullet with 4.8 grains of Unique.  It’s not a max load, but as you can see from the above photo, with an average velocity of 1043 feet per second, it’s hot enough.  The spread and the standard deviation were higher than I’d like, but I guess that’s okay.  I was using mixed older brass (which I didn’t bother policing when I was done shooting; it can get mixed in with the other spent cases and it is probably already on its way to the recycling center).

Win some, lose some. At 10 yards, I would probably still come out ahead if this was a bad guy.  But from an accuracy perspective, I was not on top of my game.

In my two other Smiths (the 59 and the 659), this was a good load.  In the Shield, not so much.  The groups were too big.  Was that me?  Was it the shorter barrel and sight radius?  Was it the ammo?   Or am I just getting older?  It might be all of the above, but I think my getting older is probably the biggest accuracy detractor.

That’s a lot of leading. Leading occurs if the bullet doesn’t seal well in the bore. Hot gases sneak around the bullet (between the bullet and the barrel) and it melts lead onto the rifling.

The good news is that I only had one failure to feed in a box of 50 rounds, and that one held the slide only slightly out of battery.  I pushed the slide forward another maybe tenth of an inch and it fired on the next trigger pull.  All the rounds extracted and ejected.  There was quite a bit of leading, which surprised me.  This load had not leaded the bores of either my Model 59 or Model 659.  As the ammo was several years old, perhaps the lead had age hardened a bit, preventing the bullet from obturating adequately.  Eh, it’s history now; this was the last box of that ammo.  More good news is that the leading came out easily.  A few passes with a stiff bore brush and it was gone.

You know, I like posting targets with tight groups clustered into one ragged hole.  But those kinds of groups are becoming harder and harder to create.  I’d be lying if I said I don’t care.  I’m bothered when I don’t shoot as well as I think I should, and it lets me know that the years are catching up with me. It’s still fun to get out on the range, though, even when the groups aren’t that tight.  Even a bad day at the range is better than sitting around in a doctor’s waiting room, which seems to be what I do a lot of anymore.

9mm Jacketed Bullet Comparo

Back in January I tested a bunch of 9mm cast bullet loads in the three handguns you see above:  A SIG P226 Scorpion, a Smith and Wesson Model 659, and the Springfield Armory 1911 Target.    For that test series (you can read it here), all the loads used the Missouri 125-grain cast roundnose bullet with different powders and different charge weights.  My cast bullet testing showed the SIG to be the most accurate, followed by the Springfield and then the Smith and Wesson Model 659.

I promised an update with jacketed bullets to assess accuracy and functionality of all three handguns (and to find favored accuracy loads for each).  It took a while, but I finally got around to making good on that promise this past week.  The six different loads I tested for the jacketed 9mm test series are summarized below:

Actually, the term “jacketed” doesn’t really apply to the Xtreme bullets (they are copper plated, not copper jacketed).  The Armscor bullets are brass jacketed.   Both the Winchester and Speer bullets are copper jacketed bullets.  As you can see from the table above and the photos below, the Xtreme, Armscor, and Winchester bullets were of the roundnose configuration.  The Speer 147-grain bullets were jacketed flatnosed bullets.  I didn’t try any hollow points in this test series; I prefer roundnose bullets in my 9mm handguns.  They are reliable.

All groups were 5 shot groups.   I shot a total of 360 rounds in the two test series (both the jacketed and cast bullet accuracy tests).

Winchester jacketed bullets.
Xtreme plated bullets.
Armscor brass jacketed bullets.

While I was shooting last week, I was a little disappointed.  I thought I had done a lot better with the cast bullets back in January.   I thought my jacketed groups were larger when I eyeballed the targets, but you never really know until you measure the groups.

9mm jacketed bullets on an Alco target. I like using the Alco target that has four mini-silhouettes on a single target. All testing was at 50 feet.

When I returned home, measured the group sizes, and tabulated the results, I was surprised.   The results of the jacketed and plated bullets were not too different from what I had achieved with the cast bullets almost a year ago.  Take a look:

The most surprising finding, for me, was that the average results with the jacketed bullets (versus the cast bullets) were almost identical.  Here’s that data extracted from the above, shown in a table that makes it a little easier to make the comparison:

My testing showed essentially the same results for the three handguns I tested whether I used cast bullets or jacketed bullets:  The SIG P226 Scorpion is the most accurate (it is a magnificent handgun), followed by the Springfield Armory 1911, followed by the Smith and Wesson 659.   It doesn’t matter whether it’s with cast or jacketed bullets:  The averages are eerily similar for each gun, with a very slight accuracy advantage going to the cast bullets for the SIG and the 1911, and a very slight accuracy advantage going to the jacketed bullets for the Smith 659.  But the differences between jacketed and cast bullets are so small they can be ignored.  Cast bullets are usually a lot less expensive than jacketed bullets, so this is good knowledge.

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Coming Up: A 9mm Comparo

I’ve been lusting over the SIG P226 Scorpion for some time now, and after a little bit of brushing up on my negotiation tactics, I pulled the trigger (figuratively speaking) on one this morning.

I like the looks of the SIG, I like that it is an alloy-framed handgun (I’m not a big fan of the plastic guns), and I like that it is a SIG.   Good buddy TJ told me he believes these are the finest handguns available today, and he’s a guy who knows handguns.  The US Army recently made their sidearm decision and it’s SIG.  That’s a strong endorsement, I think.

I bought my SIG Scorpion at Turner’s, the gun will be in the store this Thursday, and that’s when I get to start the PRK (Peoples Republik of Kalifornia) 10-day waiting period.

My tried and trusty Model 59, the gun that got me hooked on 5.0 grains of Unique and a 125-grain cast roundnose bullet.

I’ve got a boatload of 9mm ammunition reloaded and ready to go, but that got me to thinking:  What load might work best in the new SIG?  I’d found in the past that 5.0 grains of Unique and a 125-grain cast roundnose bullet provided great accuracy in my Model 59, but then I got lazy and I stuck with that as my standard 9mm load in everything.  I’ll be the first guy to tell you that to find the best load in any gun, you need to experiment and develop a load specifically for that gun.   I have a couple of other 9mm pistols (a Springfield Armory 1911 and the Model 659 Smith and Wesson that I’ve blogged about before), and I’ve simply used my 5.0-grain Unique/125-grain cast roundnose in all of them.  Is there a better load for each of these handguns?

The 659 with my 125 grain cast roundnose reloads.
The Springfield 9mm 1911. It seems to like the 5.0 grain Unique/125-grain roundnose load, too.

So here’s what’s coming up:  I’m going to do a load development comparo for the 659, the 1911, and the P226 to see where the accuracy lives for each gun.  I’m thinking Unique, Bullseye, Power Pistol, the 147 grain Speer, the 125 gr cast RN Missouri, and maybe a 115 full metal jacket or hollowpoint bullet.  I’m looking for inputs, so if you have a favored load for your 9mm handgun, let me know and I may throw it into the mix, too.  Please add your suggestions to the Comments section here.   I’ll keep you posted.

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