Bullet for a .45 Super 1911

[blindbernie]

I am converting a 1911 to .45 Super for whitetail hunting and am thinking about using the bullet from the MP 454-423. Do any of you have any experience with cast bullets in the .45 Super? Do any of you have this mold and would consider selling me a handful of the bullets to see if it would cycle in my pistol? I would hate to spend that much on a mold that I may or may not be able to use if the bullets will not cycle in my pistol.

[Bigslug]

Dad and I blew up a barrel many years ago tinkering with .45 Super. More recently blew a case head out with .45ACP and the 452423 - probably from a pressure excursion caused by bullet setback when the aggressive meplat hit the ramp, but it's hard to say for sure when all the evidence gets consumed. Not really too enthusiastic about either approach as a result, but if the +P+ approach of the Super is a road you plan to tread, I would stick with 230 grains, a slightly less gonzo front end than the 454423, and compensate for that slightly smaller nose with your extra velocity.

I went on quite the Odyssey with the Keith Auto Rim bullet in a wide spectrum of 1911 pistols (adventures recorded in the archives), and while it can be made to run reliably, you can tell by the feel of how the bullet struggles up the ramp that it is clearly not what a 1911 wants to eat. In the case of mixing it with the hot charges of the .45 Super, I'd be VERY nervous about a repeat of my two bad days. In contrast, the LBT 452-230LFN is a phenomenon of smooth feeding. On comparing careful measurements of some from my mold, the Accurate 45-230H is exactly the same profile with the "make life simple" tumble lube groove format I'm coming to prefer, so I'll very likely be picking one of those up soon.

Other, similar choices would be the 45-230A, 230D (conventional lube groove), 230F (stepped nose to clear a tighter throat or slide stop lever), 230FG (same thing with a gas check base), and 230FT and FU (same as the last two but as tumble lubers).

You shouldn't have any trouble on deer with any of those. Below (bullet on right) is one of the LBT cast of water-quenched wheel weight recovered from the ninth water-filled gallon milk jug in the stack:

311240

That was at GI-standard hardball speed of 830 fps. You're going with considerably more steam.

[blindbernie]

I really appreciate the info! I will look at that option. I had not thought about bullet set back issues but see that it could be an issue. The 230 would allow me to use that bullet for the .45 ACP loads as well. Thank you very much!

[Abert Rim]

Bigslug, just ordered Accurate 45-230H based on your advice for a Glock 41 with Lone Wolf barrel.

[Bigslug]

I really appreciate the info! I will look at that option. I had not thought about bullet set back issues but see that it could be an issue. The 230 would allow me to use that bullet for the .45 ACP loads as well. Thank you very much!

No worries. The .45 Super experimentation was done way back when Dean Grennell was introducing the round, and when Dad and I had A LOT less handloading experience. Looking at it with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I'd caution anyone curious to treat it like a high-performance aircraft or space rocket that is well off the reservation of safety margins that were envisioned by John Browning and Colt. I'd be putting in the Benchrest rifle / single stage press level of deliberation for that one.

My 452423 experimentation was driven by a combination of lack of understanding that Keith wasn't thinking autoloaders with that bullet, and a desire to see how much "THUMP" a 1911 could have without resorting to an expanding bullet. Even with the best combinations of mag and factory feed ramps, the lower corners of that bullet's nose would get a significant rounding off on impact with the ramp. The reality seems to be that a .30"-.32" meplat is about all a gun set up for factory .45 Auto can comfortably handle.

If you're in an area where the deer are relatively easy to engage and you can shoot them with either loading, I would be VERY curious to see if the extra 220-250 fps you're likely to attain over hardball spec makes any practical difference in terminal effect.

[DougGuy]

You can always have your 45S barrel throated and then use any boolit you choose as long as it will cycle through the magazine. Less initial pressure due to less resistance against the boolit entering the barrel, longer COA feeds better than shorter in the 1911.

I would not let the results of another member's unfortunate conquest derail your hopes of getting your 45 Super to run like a Singer sewing machine with the 454423. You will no doubt have to size it .452"

https://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?329223-Kudos-to-DougGuy These are the kind of results I would consider very successful. With the same 452423 boolit.

I ran this same 255gr LSWC in my magnaported 1911 pin gun with nary a hiccup, that was more than 30yrs ago.

[Bigslug]

It all comes down to how much an extra .02"-.04" of meplat means to you.

DougGuy's throating will give some more room for the SWC band, and provide some additional space to play with increasing the COAL, which, I will grant, MAY assist getting the bullet up the ramp in a cleaner fashion by allowing a slightly higher strike on the way forward out of the magazine. There may be new concerns with that front band encountering the slide stop in the mag- can't say - not a road I've tread. My experience with the bullet with the band at or slightly in front of the case mouth was a perceptible delay in feeding as the bottom edge of the meplat crashed into the feed ramp and got either its 6:00 or 4:00 and 8:00 corners rounded off (depending on the exact gun - tried original GI, modern Springfield, a new-ish Gold Cup, a ramped barrel Para, and IIRC, a Commander and a 3.5" compact Springfield), then finished the trip into the chamber. The controlled feed characteristics of GI-profile tapered feed lip magazines minimized that impact better than others I tried, but even there, it was still a thing.

My ultimate take-away was that the shape of the LBT and similar bullets make your unaltered gun think it's feeding the hardball the gun was designed for (truthfully, the LBT may be even better - it feels like it's closing on an empty chamber), while giving an acceptably destructive nose, and even at comparatively pokey hardball speeds, needs almost six feet of water to bring to a stop. Given that the 423 made the guns feel like they were nearing the edge of choking on the feed ramps, I felt no serious disappointment in moving that mold to the revolver side of the house.

[DougGuy]

It all comes down to how much an extra .02"-.04" of meplat means to you.

DougGuy's throating will give some more room for the SWC band, and provide some additional space to play with increasing the COAL, which, I will grant, MAY assist getting the bullet up the ramp in a cleaner fashion by allowing a slightly higher strike on the way forward out of the magazine.

The controlled feed characteristics of GI-profile tapered feed lip magazines minimized that impact better than others I tried, but even there, it was still a thing.

My ultimate take-away was that the shape of the LBT and similar bullets make your unaltered gun think it's feeding the hardball the gun was designed for (truthfully, the LBT may be even better - it feels like it's closing on an empty chamber), while giving an acceptably destructive nose, and even at comparatively pokey hardball speeds, needs almost six feet of water to bring to a stop. Given that the 423 made the guns feel like they were nearing the edge of choking on the feed ramps, I felt no serious disappointment in moving that mold to the revolver side of the house.

The 45 Super if I am correct uses a fully supported chamber, so the breakover at the top of the feed ramp is farther rearward toward the breech face than a standard 1911 barrel which has somewhat of a looser feed ramp profile and may not have full support all the way back to the extractor groove. Feeding would be smoother in the standard barrel and more like the path to the chamber that JMB designed, so magazine timing will be critical in order to smoothly feed a barrel with a fully supported chamber.

Remember the days gone by now when the 1911 barrel really didn't have the pie faced feed ramp they all have now (unless the barrel is ramped) and just enough of a bevel put on the bottom of the chamber to help rounds go up into the chamber? How many milsurp barrels have you seen that made you think "This thing actually ran like this?"

[Bigslug]

The 45 Super if I am correct uses a fully supported chamber, so the breakover at the top of the feed ramp is farther rearward toward the breech face than a standard 1911 barrel which has somewhat of a looser feed ramp profile and may not have full support all the way back to the extractor groove. Feeding would be smoother in the standard barrel and more like the path to the chamber that JMB designed, so magazine timing will be critical in order to smoothly feed a barrel with a fully supported chamber.

Remember the days gone by now when the 1911 barrel really didn't have the pie faced feed ramp they all have now (unless the barrel is ramped) and just enough of a bevel put on the bottom of the chamber to help rounds go up into the chamber? How many milsurp barrels have you seen that made you think "This thing actually ran like this?"

Back in the early days at least, the answer to the unsupported case head was thicker-webbed brass made by cutting back .451 Detonics or even .308 Winchester hulls.

The whole exercise was for me an interesting study in 1911 feed dynamics - notably in that the amount of damage the nose took from the ramp varied significantly depending on its number in the stack. If I remember correctly, it was the first round that took the biggest hit, and the last that took the least. When the slide's feed pawl strikes the case head at its 12:00, the nose of the round takes a slightly downward dive, and the geometry of the stacked rounds allow the early rounds to dive more and hit the ramp harder. The tapered GI feed lips allow the nose to rotate upward easier than the parallel types, and those noses got munched a little less.

The LBT-ish profiles are striking on the ogive, not the nose, so the impacts are much more oblique and you don't get what I called the "hitchy-kerchunky" feel in the feeding cycle.

It's been a while, but on bending my brain to the problem a little more:

You COULD do your throating cut, which would allow the 423 to be seated with a longer COAL. This would get the nose out of the mag sooner and onto the feed ramp higher, BUT. . .

. . .you MIGHT run into the aforementioned slide stop contact if you do, AND. . .

. . . your COAL will still be shorter than something more tapered because you can only take that monster nose so far forward in a mag designed for round nose hardball.

In the strictest sense, I did not have a reliability problem since I only recall one gun and mag combo that was unable to get that fireplug of a bullet into the chamber, but the evidence of nose damage on the fed-by-firing then manually extracted-for-inspection rounds, coupled with the rough feel of the impact, coupled with the one blown case head, was sufficient for me to label it a Jurassic Park undertaking: yes you CAN; this does not mean that you SHOULD.

If the 423 could be gotten into the chamber smoothly and without the nose damage I was experiencing, it's a dandy. But if you consider that in rounding off the edges of that big .34" meplat with the ramp strike, you're making a lopsided reduction in frontal area to something closer to the LFN-style anyway, and those feed slick as greased eel boogers. Before I started shifting more toward 9mm, production of .45 ACP was a mass-production affair for multiple guns - some of them antiques - so altering the lot of them for a bullets the 1911 was not intended to shoot was never in the cards.

Now, all that said, Doug's chamber throating makes decent sense for a .45 Super even if the 452423 is not used. The reason for this is the same as why the U.S. military opted for a longer rifling leade on the 5.56 than what is seen on the commercial side in the .223 Remington - less chance of dangerous pressure spiking on takeoff with a hotter load.

[charlie b]

I would try to duplicate these:

https://www.buffalobore.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=397

or these

https://www.buffalobore.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=79

[DougGuy]

If I remember correctly, it was the first round that took the biggest hit, and the last that took the least. When the slide's feed pawl strikes the case head at its 12:00, the nose of the round takes a slightly downward dive, and the geometry of the stacked rounds allow the early rounds to dive more and hit the ramp harder. The tapered GI feed lips allow the nose to rotate upward easier than the parallel types, and those noses got munched a little less.

One of the most overlooked points in the 1911 feeding cycle is the strength of the magazine spring. The part that people overlook is that the front of the round UNDER the top round (as it is being stripped from the magazine) has to push the rim of the case up the breech face and under the extractor hook.

If you load up a magazine, 7 or 8 rounds, push down on the front of the stack and see how robustly it springs back up. If it doesn't spring back up with some force, and it is meh so so about pushing the stack back up, you will definitely have trouble with feeding until you get a stout spring in there that will forcefuly push the stack back up, and you strip a round out of the magazine, push down on the stack, strip another round, etc, it should be snappier to return the stack back to it's position as you strip rounds from the magazine.

The heavier the boolit, the stronger the spring needs to be. A double stack is even more critical that the spring push the stack up with force, considering the 2nd round down has to push the rim of the top round up the breech face, the spring has to push the whole stack up to accomplish this.

When Para Ordnance frames started showing up in the US I immediately bought a couple and built pin guns with them. The very first issue I ran into, was the rounds in the magazine nose diving and staying in the depressed position. I went to gun shows and bought milsurp Thompson 30rd magazines and stole the springs from them, I shortened them and curled the top so that it pushed up on the front of the follower, and this cured it from failure to feed. The rounds would SNAP back into place when you strip a round out of the magazine. SNAP SNAP SNAP SNAP SNAP!!! The guns ran like a Singer sewing machine after this.

[Bigslug]

When Para Ordnance frames started showing up in the US I immediately bought a couple and built pin guns with them. The very first issue I ran into, was the rounds in the magazine nose diving and staying in the depressed position. I went to gun shows and bought milsurp Thompson 30rd magazines and stole the springs from them, I shortened them and curled the top so that it pushed up on the front of the follower, and this cured it from failure to feed.

We might be bordering on thread drift here, but it does get us into the delicate balancing act that is the semi-automatic pistol.

The recoil spring, hammer spring, friction with the rounds in the mag stack, and friction of various small parts (i.e. disconnector) will slow the rearward velocity of the slide.

Going forward, the recoil spring needs enough chutzpah to overcome feed-lip and feed ramp resistance, extractor tension, and the same mag stack and small parts friction.

The mag spring has needs enough steam to present the next round in time for the slide to feed it.

Most of this is barely an issue with a single stack 1911 shooting hardball spec .45, but the "design committee" still seems to be ironing out the mags and ideal combination of springs to balance the 2011 fatbody 9mm's. With the .40, I saw a lot of tired recoil and mag springs result in a condition of "slide too fast/mag too slow" failures to feed.

A relevant take-away for this thread (I think), is that .45 1911's fully to military code and 9mm duty guns - both running common spec ammo - are about as reliable as the proverbial stone axe. Things like the typical early .40 pistols that were barely modified 9mm's, or the 452423 in 1911's fall under the heading of "Exceeds design specifications" - they can be made to work, but it usually involves a deeper dive into studying the cycle of operations than you figured on going in. No harm in undertaking such projects - just realize there's little sense in criticizing equipment that ran fine until you tried to do _____ to it.:lol: