Linstrum
02-17-2010, 08:22 AM
I've had my Citadel copy of the Colt 1911A1 .45 ACP for three weeks and I've run a few hundred rounds through it. I pretty much know what its idiosyncrasies are now, and it has a few - BUT - I suppose what I have observed is common to most versions of John M. Browning's masterpiece, although I can't say for sure since this is the only 1911A1 I have had any extensive experience with.
First of all, I am just flat amazed at the accuracy this pistol has for being a plain off-the-shelf production item. Using the 228 grain Lee .452-228-1R boolit in front of 6.4 grains of Ramshot True Blue pistol powder, I was able to get 8 shots into a playing card at 75 feet. I kept setting up my targets farther and farther back and I still kept hitting them, and I finally got all the way out to 100 yards. At that distance I was putting all eight shots into an 18 inch circle by aiming high, which was not hard to do after firing some ranging shots first to get it right. Using the back corner of my dump truck bed as a rest and carefully squeezing off each shot, I was able to get all eight shots into an 11 inch circle at 100 yards. The math works out right since I was getting eight shots into 2.5 inches at 25 yards, so I should have been getting them into 10 inches at 100 yards, and 11 inches is pretty close to that.
About the Lee .452-228-1R (a short round-nose design) in this particular gun's chamber, I was jumping through hoops to get my cartridges using this particular boolit so they would chamber all the way and let the slide close and lock in battery. Just about every shot I had to smack the slide with the palm of my hand several times to get it to close all the way. Like all guns should be built, it won't fire until the cartridge is locked in the chamber. I found out what the problems were right off by simply measuring a loaded cartridge. This particular bullet must be inserted in the case right down to where the ogive begins and then some, and the generic over-all cartridge length for 230 grain cast lead bullets of 1.230 inches was way, way, too long. I kept running the depth in and finally at an over-all length of 1.175 inches the boolit showed no marking from being jammed into the bore. But the slide would still not lock in battery. Even though sized to 0.4525”, which is 0.002” over my particular gun's groove diameter, the boolits bulge the case enough to make it a press fit into the chamber and it requires more force than the slide recoil spring exerts to get a round bottomed out against the headspace stop. I solved the problem by taking the primer punch pin out of the cartridge case sizing die and then I ran my reloaded rounds part way back into the die to swage out the bulge. But this also squeezed down the body of the boolit where it was inside the case mouth to an unacceptable 0.445” diameter, which made it dangerously loose in the casing so it will fall all the way to the bottom and cause a potential detonation or other high pressure problem that will wreck a gun. Besides going all the way into the casing, at 0.445" it also will neither engage the rifling nor seal the bore. As expected, accuracy was non-existent. But after I re-crimped the mouths they fed and chambered great. Since the gun was useless with ammo that will not chamber or shoot accurately, it was time to do something about it. Lee's .452-230-TC is pretty popular and one that most .45 ACP shooters swear by and not at, so I ordered a mould from Midway. The day it arrived I had 100 cast up about an hour after my electric pot was hot. I use wheel weights and these cast at 0.453”, so I ran them through the Lee-style 0.4525” push through sizing die I had machined special for this gun to get the new batch of boolits perfectly round and all the same size. I usually use Lee liquid Alox and I lubed these boolits by putting them in a quart Zip-Loc plastic bag with a tablespoon of lube and doing the “shake 'n bake” routine before drying them on a paper plate out in the sun. I loaded up one cartridge and it slipped right into the chamber no problem just like the Russian ammo I had used when I first got the pistol. At the first opportunity I went to the range and ran one magazine of ammo through the gun using the new ammo I had reloaded with the Lee 230 grain truncated cone boolit and it functioned perfectly like it is supposed to. I ran another eight rounds to test for accuracy and found that the accuracy was about as good as the earlier 1R round noses and Russian cartridges I had originally used. At 100 yards it grouped a tad bit larger than the 1R type had, but that just could have been me since some days I shoot better than others.
I've never used Ramshot pistol powder before and the True Blue is working out very well for my .45 ACP loads. With a 230 grain cast lead projectile its load range is 6.1 to 6.7 grains and it burns clean at 6.4 grains. It looks like H110 but is not the same, it is more along the line of Blue Dot but is not exactly like that, either. I am using True Blue because I have a lot of it and it is not expensive. The other Ramshot powder I have used is Tac, which I use in my Swiss K38 with 147 grain fmjbt milsurp bullets. I got Ramshot powder last year when the other more popular powders were not available, and I have no complaints with cost or performance.
Kind of interesting, at the range the ground is littered with hundreds of CCI Blazer aluminum cartridge cases because nobody picks them up, even for scrap aluminum value, so I checked them out and found two types. Most of what I found are Boxer primed instead of the older Berdan primed that CCI used to make, so I picked up a few dozen of the Boxer-type to see if they have any potential for reloading. I ran twenty of them through my carbide .45 ACP sizing dies and they sized just fine without any signs of damage, so I reloaded them up and fired them. I have reloaded them five times now and they are still fine except for one that was damaged when I found it. It had been stepped on and its mouth was oval-shaped before sizing it, and that one finally split at the mouth after I had fired it four times, altogether it has been fired five times. I went back and picked up all of the aluminum cases with Boxer pockets that fit my guns and I increased my pistol cartridge supply by several hundred rounds. Even if I only get one use from them they are worth picking up, and if they prove to be reliable beyond four or five reloadings they will be a real windfall find! The one that split did not cause any problems since mouth splits are not dangerous – I've had many mouth splits over the last forty years and not one of them has caused the slightest problem. I like the Boxer primer pocket Blazer cases because they take magnum small pistol primers and I've got five times as many of those as I do large pistol primers.
rl737
First of all, I am just flat amazed at the accuracy this pistol has for being a plain off-the-shelf production item. Using the 228 grain Lee .452-228-1R boolit in front of 6.4 grains of Ramshot True Blue pistol powder, I was able to get 8 shots into a playing card at 75 feet. I kept setting up my targets farther and farther back and I still kept hitting them, and I finally got all the way out to 100 yards. At that distance I was putting all eight shots into an 18 inch circle by aiming high, which was not hard to do after firing some ranging shots first to get it right. Using the back corner of my dump truck bed as a rest and carefully squeezing off each shot, I was able to get all eight shots into an 11 inch circle at 100 yards. The math works out right since I was getting eight shots into 2.5 inches at 25 yards, so I should have been getting them into 10 inches at 100 yards, and 11 inches is pretty close to that.
About the Lee .452-228-1R (a short round-nose design) in this particular gun's chamber, I was jumping through hoops to get my cartridges using this particular boolit so they would chamber all the way and let the slide close and lock in battery. Just about every shot I had to smack the slide with the palm of my hand several times to get it to close all the way. Like all guns should be built, it won't fire until the cartridge is locked in the chamber. I found out what the problems were right off by simply measuring a loaded cartridge. This particular bullet must be inserted in the case right down to where the ogive begins and then some, and the generic over-all cartridge length for 230 grain cast lead bullets of 1.230 inches was way, way, too long. I kept running the depth in and finally at an over-all length of 1.175 inches the boolit showed no marking from being jammed into the bore. But the slide would still not lock in battery. Even though sized to 0.4525”, which is 0.002” over my particular gun's groove diameter, the boolits bulge the case enough to make it a press fit into the chamber and it requires more force than the slide recoil spring exerts to get a round bottomed out against the headspace stop. I solved the problem by taking the primer punch pin out of the cartridge case sizing die and then I ran my reloaded rounds part way back into the die to swage out the bulge. But this also squeezed down the body of the boolit where it was inside the case mouth to an unacceptable 0.445” diameter, which made it dangerously loose in the casing so it will fall all the way to the bottom and cause a potential detonation or other high pressure problem that will wreck a gun. Besides going all the way into the casing, at 0.445" it also will neither engage the rifling nor seal the bore. As expected, accuracy was non-existent. But after I re-crimped the mouths they fed and chambered great. Since the gun was useless with ammo that will not chamber or shoot accurately, it was time to do something about it. Lee's .452-230-TC is pretty popular and one that most .45 ACP shooters swear by and not at, so I ordered a mould from Midway. The day it arrived I had 100 cast up about an hour after my electric pot was hot. I use wheel weights and these cast at 0.453”, so I ran them through the Lee-style 0.4525” push through sizing die I had machined special for this gun to get the new batch of boolits perfectly round and all the same size. I usually use Lee liquid Alox and I lubed these boolits by putting them in a quart Zip-Loc plastic bag with a tablespoon of lube and doing the “shake 'n bake” routine before drying them on a paper plate out in the sun. I loaded up one cartridge and it slipped right into the chamber no problem just like the Russian ammo I had used when I first got the pistol. At the first opportunity I went to the range and ran one magazine of ammo through the gun using the new ammo I had reloaded with the Lee 230 grain truncated cone boolit and it functioned perfectly like it is supposed to. I ran another eight rounds to test for accuracy and found that the accuracy was about as good as the earlier 1R round noses and Russian cartridges I had originally used. At 100 yards it grouped a tad bit larger than the 1R type had, but that just could have been me since some days I shoot better than others.
I've never used Ramshot pistol powder before and the True Blue is working out very well for my .45 ACP loads. With a 230 grain cast lead projectile its load range is 6.1 to 6.7 grains and it burns clean at 6.4 grains. It looks like H110 but is not the same, it is more along the line of Blue Dot but is not exactly like that, either. I am using True Blue because I have a lot of it and it is not expensive. The other Ramshot powder I have used is Tac, which I use in my Swiss K38 with 147 grain fmjbt milsurp bullets. I got Ramshot powder last year when the other more popular powders were not available, and I have no complaints with cost or performance.
Kind of interesting, at the range the ground is littered with hundreds of CCI Blazer aluminum cartridge cases because nobody picks them up, even for scrap aluminum value, so I checked them out and found two types. Most of what I found are Boxer primed instead of the older Berdan primed that CCI used to make, so I picked up a few dozen of the Boxer-type to see if they have any potential for reloading. I ran twenty of them through my carbide .45 ACP sizing dies and they sized just fine without any signs of damage, so I reloaded them up and fired them. I have reloaded them five times now and they are still fine except for one that was damaged when I found it. It had been stepped on and its mouth was oval-shaped before sizing it, and that one finally split at the mouth after I had fired it four times, altogether it has been fired five times. I went back and picked up all of the aluminum cases with Boxer pockets that fit my guns and I increased my pistol cartridge supply by several hundred rounds. Even if I only get one use from them they are worth picking up, and if they prove to be reliable beyond four or five reloadings they will be a real windfall find! The one that split did not cause any problems since mouth splits are not dangerous – I've had many mouth splits over the last forty years and not one of them has caused the slightest problem. I like the Boxer primer pocket Blazer cases because they take magnum small pistol primers and I've got five times as many of those as I do large pistol primers.
rl737