I bought Lee 358-158-RF recently for my Ruger GP100 MC which seems to work great and will probably replace my Lyman 358446. Out of my alloy powder coated they run around 163-164gr sized to .3575. At the same time I started running into posts of people using heavy 160-165gr RN bullets in 9mm. Running subsonic 165gr in 9mm apparently creates really soft shooting gun as suggested by some so I was wondering if I could use this 358-158-RF in 9mm case.
Just to see what that would look like so I loaded one dummy round. I was expecting bad bulge on the case since this projectile is so much longer and had to be seated so much deeper but it didnt. For some reason this buller design has little bit of a boat tail like design (not a GC shank) which helps in this case. Pulled bullets were still at .357 which is great. It was probably really close though since I had to use more force then usual when seating these. Since these were cast for up to mild 357s these are cast out of alloy thats about 12bhn and water dropped after powder coating so these are little bit harder which worked out great in this case as they didnt get swaged down.
At first my rounds were sticking in the chamber I'm assuming they were right against rifling in my sig p320. Loaded to the top of the crimp grove and FCDed lightly I got them to chamber correctly without sticking. So its a close window to work as far as length is concerned but they appear to cycle fine now.
Now of course is the matter of case volume, powder selection and pressure. This long bullet cuts down case volume considerably so here is where I need to be careful to make sure I dont cause bad pressure spikes. Since I still play around with many different loads I have more then couple pistol powders that might work here so I'm trying to figure out which one would work best.
For pistol powders i have HP38, Titegroup, WSF, WST, Unique, HS6, Trail Boss. Trail boss and WST are out because I dont have enough case volume for those powders. I'm thinking HP38 or WSF might work well here. I'm afraid that TG (titegroup) might be prone to pressure spikes since it burns so quick but I know people used TG too with decent results. I would like to try HS6 or Unique but I dont think i have enough case space for those.
So what do you guys think? Is this worth exploring?
Pics vs my standard Lee 356-125-2R