BHuij
Active Member
Hey everyone—
TL;DR 1: Anyone have recommendations for Red Dot with 120gr cast bullets in 9mm? It seemed like it was getting to hot for me when I got any higher than about 3.6 grains (see attached photo of primer at 3.9gr).
TL;DR 2: Any guesses for why these rounds would cycle horribly (see: basically not cycle at all) in my friend's Beretta 92 when they generally worked perfectly in my M&P? Showing all the symptoms of "short stroking" - failure to eject, stovepipes, and even upon proper ejection, failure to load the next round from the mag. Gun doesn't seem excessively dirty or anything. Ran 100% fine with factory 115gr ammo. My best guess is bullet profile, maybe his feed ramp doesn't like truncated cones? Help me diagnose please.
I've been shooting cast bullets through my M&P 9 for a couple of years, and recently my buddy bought a Beretta 92 and we decided to get into competition shooting together. Our first match was a couple of weeks ago and we had an absolute blast. We're going again on July 11, and decided to work up some really good loads for our respective guns.
In the past I have always used the Lee 124gr round nose (tumble lube) mold. Mine is modified to drop bullets around .3585, and after powder coating, I size to .358". I've done quite a bit of tinkering over the years with Bullseye and Accurate #2, but always found myself coming back to 4.0 grains of HP38 or W231, which seems to be my MVP load.
Recently I bought the Lee 120gr truncated cone (non-tumble lube) mold, and have been working up a load there. It seems to just edge out the 124gr for accuracy with that same 4.0gr load of HP38, but it also punches much nicer holes in the target than the round nose, which actually matters a little bit in competition scoring. It also has zero problems feeding in my M&P. Both of these bullets can also be sized down to .356 for my friend's Beretta, at which point they start passing the plunk test.
So I decided to get a lot of load development done in one trip to the range. I loaded up 20 5-round groups using various charges of 4 different powders: HP38, Ramshot Zip, Accurate #2, and Red Dot.
All of these except Red Dot had easily accessible published load data for the bullet I was using, so I ran the spectrum from minimum to maximum charges. No worries there. The Red Dot data was gleaned from anecdotal stuff I read on a bunch of internet forums. My loads ran from 3.0gr to 4.2. As I was loading them, even 3.9 seemed pretty full, and 4.2 was definitely compressed. I made a mental note to watch really carefully for pressure signs as I worked up.
This wasn't anything terribly scientific. No ransom rest, arguably smaller shot quantities than we needed to draw any really solid conclusions, but it felt like a good starting point to help us do one more round to really hone things in later. From the three powders where I had good load data, no particularly surprising results. Accurate #2 is awful at everything, as has always been the case for me in every caliber and every gun I've ever tried it in. HP38 did very well at 4.0 grains in both guns. Zip did only slightly less well at its max load of 3.7 grains.
The crazy part is how well Red Dot did. At 3.3 grains, my M&P shot my best group of the day, while 3.6 proved really good for the Beretta. I suspect there's a sweet spot somewhere in that range. 3.6 felt pretty stiff on the recoil for me, so I fired only one round from the 3.9gr group and looked closely at the brass (click to expand):
Not a great picture, but that primer is pretty dang flat and the firing pin dimple looks very flowy. I usually have neither of those symptoms when shooting my old standby load of HP38, and that chronos at just north of 1k FPS with the 120gr TC bullet (mine actually weigh 125 grains after powder coating). Just enough to comfortably make minor PF.
Needless to say, I didn't fire any more of the 3.9gr loads, and the 4.2gr compressed loads never came out of the ammo box.
I could swear I read multiple accounts online of people shooting 4.2gr loads with 9mm 124gr bullets, but unless I'm overreacting to that primer and the recoil I felt, even 3.9 seems too hot for me. Groups were opening up then anyway, so I'm going to chrono some loads in the range of 3.0 to 3.6 grains on my next trip.
Who knew Red Dot was so accurate? I certainly wasn't expecting it.
The other thing that was odd is my friend's gun - it was cycling horribly. That's understandable when you're shooting minimum loads of Ramshot Zip or whatever, but even max loads of Zip and near max of HP38 weren't getting the job done even 50% of the time. My M&P cycled just fine. His wasn't jamming, just stovepiping or completely failing to eject on every shot. On the hotter end of what he shot, (particularly the 3.6gr load of Red Dot), it started to get a little better, but still bad. We checked and the gun wasn't unduly dirty or anything. Running a few loads of factory Sellier & Bellot 115gr ammo down it, those all functioned perfectly. It was the oddest thing.
My best guess at this point is that his feed ramp doesn't like the TC bullet profile, and we should try some of the round noses for him instead. It certainly seems to be shaped less forgivingly than my M&P's feed ramp. Smaller, shorter, steeper. Anything we're not thinking of that could be the culprit here?
TL;DR 1: Anyone have recommendations for Red Dot with 120gr cast bullets in 9mm? It seemed like it was getting to hot for me when I got any higher than about 3.6 grains (see attached photo of primer at 3.9gr).
TL;DR 2: Any guesses for why these rounds would cycle horribly (see: basically not cycle at all) in my friend's Beretta 92 when they generally worked perfectly in my M&P? Showing all the symptoms of "short stroking" - failure to eject, stovepipes, and even upon proper ejection, failure to load the next round from the mag. Gun doesn't seem excessively dirty or anything. Ran 100% fine with factory 115gr ammo. My best guess is bullet profile, maybe his feed ramp doesn't like truncated cones? Help me diagnose please.
I've been shooting cast bullets through my M&P 9 for a couple of years, and recently my buddy bought a Beretta 92 and we decided to get into competition shooting together. Our first match was a couple of weeks ago and we had an absolute blast. We're going again on July 11, and decided to work up some really good loads for our respective guns.
In the past I have always used the Lee 124gr round nose (tumble lube) mold. Mine is modified to drop bullets around .3585, and after powder coating, I size to .358". I've done quite a bit of tinkering over the years with Bullseye and Accurate #2, but always found myself coming back to 4.0 grains of HP38 or W231, which seems to be my MVP load.
Recently I bought the Lee 120gr truncated cone (non-tumble lube) mold, and have been working up a load there. It seems to just edge out the 124gr for accuracy with that same 4.0gr load of HP38, but it also punches much nicer holes in the target than the round nose, which actually matters a little bit in competition scoring. It also has zero problems feeding in my M&P. Both of these bullets can also be sized down to .356 for my friend's Beretta, at which point they start passing the plunk test.
So I decided to get a lot of load development done in one trip to the range. I loaded up 20 5-round groups using various charges of 4 different powders: HP38, Ramshot Zip, Accurate #2, and Red Dot.
All of these except Red Dot had easily accessible published load data for the bullet I was using, so I ran the spectrum from minimum to maximum charges. No worries there. The Red Dot data was gleaned from anecdotal stuff I read on a bunch of internet forums. My loads ran from 3.0gr to 4.2. As I was loading them, even 3.9 seemed pretty full, and 4.2 was definitely compressed. I made a mental note to watch really carefully for pressure signs as I worked up.
This wasn't anything terribly scientific. No ransom rest, arguably smaller shot quantities than we needed to draw any really solid conclusions, but it felt like a good starting point to help us do one more round to really hone things in later. From the three powders where I had good load data, no particularly surprising results. Accurate #2 is awful at everything, as has always been the case for me in every caliber and every gun I've ever tried it in. HP38 did very well at 4.0 grains in both guns. Zip did only slightly less well at its max load of 3.7 grains.
The crazy part is how well Red Dot did. At 3.3 grains, my M&P shot my best group of the day, while 3.6 proved really good for the Beretta. I suspect there's a sweet spot somewhere in that range. 3.6 felt pretty stiff on the recoil for me, so I fired only one round from the 3.9gr group and looked closely at the brass (click to expand):
Not a great picture, but that primer is pretty dang flat and the firing pin dimple looks very flowy. I usually have neither of those symptoms when shooting my old standby load of HP38, and that chronos at just north of 1k FPS with the 120gr TC bullet (mine actually weigh 125 grains after powder coating). Just enough to comfortably make minor PF.
Needless to say, I didn't fire any more of the 3.9gr loads, and the 4.2gr compressed loads never came out of the ammo box.
I could swear I read multiple accounts online of people shooting 4.2gr loads with 9mm 124gr bullets, but unless I'm overreacting to that primer and the recoil I felt, even 3.9 seems too hot for me. Groups were opening up then anyway, so I'm going to chrono some loads in the range of 3.0 to 3.6 grains on my next trip.
Who knew Red Dot was so accurate? I certainly wasn't expecting it.
The other thing that was odd is my friend's gun - it was cycling horribly. That's understandable when you're shooting minimum loads of Ramshot Zip or whatever, but even max loads of Zip and near max of HP38 weren't getting the job done even 50% of the time. My M&P cycled just fine. His wasn't jamming, just stovepiping or completely failing to eject on every shot. On the hotter end of what he shot, (particularly the 3.6gr load of Red Dot), it started to get a little better, but still bad. We checked and the gun wasn't unduly dirty or anything. Running a few loads of factory Sellier & Bellot 115gr ammo down it, those all functioned perfectly. It was the oddest thing.
My best guess at this point is that his feed ramp doesn't like the TC bullet profile, and we should try some of the round noses for him instead. It certainly seems to be shaped less forgivingly than my M&P's feed ramp. Smaller, shorter, steeper. Anything we're not thinking of that could be the culprit here?
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