Gone Lookin' for Trouble

[BLTsandwedge]

Friday afternoon.....one more report to issue and then home. Rainy this weekend which means range-time.

This past weekend I went looking for .38 Special problems. I shoot tons of 358091, 401638, 429421 and 452389......but I ran out of 358091. Never happened before. Ever. And I didn't have time to fire up the pots and rectify the situation. I did come across a box of 356637 9mm sized to .355 that I made about a hunnert years ago. In the cases they went- on top of 3g of Clays- the same charge I use for the wadcutter. I was positive I'd do nothing more than waste a half-box of perfectly good small pistol primers but I had to shoot someting out of the S&W 14 or face withdrawal issues.

With 3g of Clays the 358091 goes into 3" offhand all day at 25 yards (don't laugh, that's good for me) when put through the S&W 14 6". Wonderful SD on this load. I expected the 9mm rounds to lead the barrel and produce more-or-less 11 foot groups at the 25yd line as they're seriously undersized (.355 as opposed to .358 for the 358091). What I got from the 9mm round was a series of 3.5" offhand groups at 25yds out of the S&W 14- that has a groove diameter of .357 exactly. And zero leading from 50 rounds- Lee stick lube. It should'na done that. I wonder what gives- each gun is different but what, then, is 'seriously undersized?'

[9.3X62AL]

One should not gaze too long into the mouth of the gift horse of good fortune. Murphy was off having a beer during your range time.

[Edubya]

BLT, have any idea what BHN those undersized boolits were?
It seems to me that the .38 caliber is the most boolit friendly gun. Shoot 300 rnds, pull a clean bore snake through it, wipe it down with your favorite gun cleaner and put 'er to bed.
EW

[MT Gianni]

The joy of a model 14 is that it shoots. Reread what Al said.

[Bret4207]

You got lucky. IMO you hit a balance point where the boolit was fitting. A little slower, a different powder, change something else and you may have had football sized groups.

Don't worry, be happy!

[Buckshot]

You got lucky. IMO you hit a balance point where the boolit was fitting. A little slower, a different powder, change something else and you may have had football sized groups.

Don't worry, be happy!

............That and I suppose the lands were displacing enough lead to fill the grooves possibly.?

..............Buckshot

[Bret4207]

............That and I suppose the lands were displacing enough lead to fill the grooves possibly.?

..............Buckshot

Gotta be something along those lines. In my mind I picture tiny ridges of boolit alloy griping the barrel. Who knows why sometimes something that shouldn't really work does? That's the art part of this game.

[Echo]

My guess is that the alloy was soft enough so that the boolits expanded into the throat nocely, then expanded again into the forcing cone, then swaged down nicely into the bbl, and LO! Good groups!!

[376Steyr]

Back in the late 80's I found that soft swaged 9mm 125 gr round noses, over a moderate charge of Bullseye, was a marvelous plinking load in my K-38. Knowing nothing at the time about balancing pressure and BHN, I was quite perplexed when I couldn't duplicate the performance with commercial "hard cast" LRN slugs.

[swheeler]

BLT you were holding your mouth just right, next time who knows?

[BLTsandwedge]

swheeler, I was holdin' somethin' right anyway.....these were reasonably hard pills. I'm sure they were 20 to 1 ww/sn. Can't say what Bh but that's the same alloy I use for fast moving objects propelled with W296 and the like. I won't be doing a repeat performance- fairly useless load. But it is interesting- you really don't know unless you try stuff like this with your own gear...

.....thanks for the feedback gents....

Tom