The Golden Saber .45acp JHPs had a strange red-brown goo on the nickel cases,
.
The Golden Saber bullets looked uneven & poor quality.
For $28.00 I expected a
lot more.
I remember when for some reason I used to think of the Rem HPJ/BJHP Golden Sabres would all come with pristine nickel cases and bright, shiny polished brass jackets.
Then, after seeing bins of them (cases emptied and dumped into range training & duty ammo bins for ease of use), I had more than ample opportunity to see many ten's of thousands of them offer a lot of variation.
Nowadays, seeing some dark/mottled brass jackets, "stained" nickel cases and variable amounts of the case mouth sealant (black goo) having oozed out onto the bullets and case mouths being about as common as not ... it's no big deal. Kind of like how things changed when your second child arrived, and you just weren't quite so fussy about some things.
Now, an occasional mangled/crushed case mouth, short-loaded powder charge, inert/hard/damaged primer or overly long trimmed case (which won't chamber and let the slide/barrel go into battery)? That's still annoying, but I've had to see pallets of cases of ammo used in order to see a handful of those things come through. (Much the same with the other major ammo companies, too.)
I don't have much in the way of the 125gr .38 +P GS loads left (from a brief period when they were available for the right price for qual ammo), but I'll continue to rotate through it for carry ammo & practice ammo until it's used up. It's a bit too costly to buy at "over the counter" prices to use in great quantities for regular practice ammo, granted, but I'd still try some to check for any signs of bullet pull in any of the Ti/Sc/PD snubs that come with a recommendation to check such things when deciding upon carry ammo. The OAL of the GS .38's seem to take up more cylinder charge hole space than some other loads.
I don't have the notes here at this desk, but I remember when I saw an attendee (cop) at a hosted gel event back about the time the Speer 135gr +P load was first released. He pulled a lint-laden 360PD from his pocket, loaded with some really grungy 125gr +P GS loads, and tried them in the same 4-layer denim/gel block test as the new Speer 135gr load had been used.
I was pleasantly surprised to see pretty similar results in the way of penetration and expansion compared to the new Speer load. Maybe if we'd fired a few hundred of each load we'd have seen less consistency for robust expansion from the GS load compared to the new Speer load. Dunno. No guarantees in these things, anyway, right?
