Michael Tinker Pearce
Member
- Joined
- Oct 23, 2016
- Messages
- 1,576
9mm defensive ammo and bullets as reloading components have gotten a bit scarce these days, and I got to thinking about maybe making my own. My favorite LGS had some Xtreme Bullets 115gr copper-plated hollow points at a reasonable price, so I snagged a thousand of them. These are fantastic bullets; very consistent with great accuracy. The copper plating is thick enough it acts like a thin metal jacket. What they don't do is expand at 9mm velocities, and maybe not at all. Fair enough, these are a purpose-built target bullet, and the manufacturer says they aren't made for self-defense.
My first attempt to swage these into defensive ammo resulted in the bullet fragmenting and leaving the 85 gr. core to travel about 19" deep in a 20" block of Clear Ballistics gel. OK, it was better than ball ammo; it didn't over-penetrate and did more damage than ball, but it wasn't what I was looking for. At the suggestion of a friendly forumite I found a 5.56/.223 decapping die on eBay and snagged it. I modified and shortened the decapping pin to produce the desired sort of cavity and after some fiddlin around got it set to the right depth. I mounted a home-made pusher-plate in my reloading press's ram, and I just set the bullet in the middle and run it into the die.
The second photo above shows the original Xtreme bullet next to the re-swaged hollow-point. The hole is larger, deeper and is shaped like a convex cone.
The set-up allows me to crank out re-swaged HPs quite consistently and pretty quickly. I loaded a bunch and took them to the range, and got good accuracy out to 25 yards with no key-holing. So far, so good. I set up the re-cast 4 x4 x16" Clear Ballistics Gel block in front of about ten inches of tightly packed cardboard, backed up by pine 4x4s and two sheets of 3/4" marine plywood. I draped four layers of denim across the face of the block, and fired into it from ten feet with my Sig Sauer P6 from ten feet away. The results were interesting.
The first bullet exited the block of gel, bounced off the cardboard and spun out from between the cardboard and gel. It had expanded to an average diameter of .504", weighed 115.4gr. and made a pretty straight path through the block. The second bullet also exited the block, and I found it lodged in the third, fourth and fifth layers of cardboard. It had also created a pretty straight wound-track, expanded to an average diameter of around .441", and weighed 111.7gr., so weight retention was pretty good. But both bullets expanded asymmetrically in exactly the same way.
I'm not sure what happened to cause this. Maybe these bullets are riding the ragged edge of stability and yaw when they hit the denim? I just don't know.
After all of my .32 S&W Long tests the block was too torn up for me to get good pictures of the wound channels, but I can describe them. The bullets expanded immediately on penetration, producing a wound-track approximately 3/4″ to 1″, which extended 6-7″ deep in the gel before gradually reducing to about .4″ at 12″ of depth, and they never fully streamlined before exiting the block. Despite the asymmetric expansion that is not too shabby. While not a perfect result there is no doubt in my mind that these would be effective. No, they aren’t a +P Speer Gold Dot, but they beat the hell out of ball ammo and rival many commercial products. Not bad for a bloke in his home work-shop.
The load I use with these is 4.9gr. of Universal over a Federal magnum small pistol primer; standard small pistol primers are hard to come by around here right now. They average around 1170 fps. for 350 ft./lbs of energy.
Anyway I'll keep fiddling with these and see if I can't improve on these results, but honestly I'm happy, and a little surprised, that it has gone this well.
Let's not get into the 'reloaded ammo for self-defense' argument here; this is just an experiment to see what I can do.
My first attempt to swage these into defensive ammo resulted in the bullet fragmenting and leaving the 85 gr. core to travel about 19" deep in a 20" block of Clear Ballistics gel. OK, it was better than ball ammo; it didn't over-penetrate and did more damage than ball, but it wasn't what I was looking for. At the suggestion of a friendly forumite I found a 5.56/.223 decapping die on eBay and snagged it. I modified and shortened the decapping pin to produce the desired sort of cavity and after some fiddlin around got it set to the right depth. I mounted a home-made pusher-plate in my reloading press's ram, and I just set the bullet in the middle and run it into the die.
The second photo above shows the original Xtreme bullet next to the re-swaged hollow-point. The hole is larger, deeper and is shaped like a convex cone.
The set-up allows me to crank out re-swaged HPs quite consistently and pretty quickly. I loaded a bunch and took them to the range, and got good accuracy out to 25 yards with no key-holing. So far, so good. I set up the re-cast 4 x4 x16" Clear Ballistics Gel block in front of about ten inches of tightly packed cardboard, backed up by pine 4x4s and two sheets of 3/4" marine plywood. I draped four layers of denim across the face of the block, and fired into it from ten feet with my Sig Sauer P6 from ten feet away. The results were interesting.
The first bullet exited the block of gel, bounced off the cardboard and spun out from between the cardboard and gel. It had expanded to an average diameter of .504", weighed 115.4gr. and made a pretty straight path through the block. The second bullet also exited the block, and I found it lodged in the third, fourth and fifth layers of cardboard. It had also created a pretty straight wound-track, expanded to an average diameter of around .441", and weighed 111.7gr., so weight retention was pretty good. But both bullets expanded asymmetrically in exactly the same way.
I'm not sure what happened to cause this. Maybe these bullets are riding the ragged edge of stability and yaw when they hit the denim? I just don't know.
After all of my .32 S&W Long tests the block was too torn up for me to get good pictures of the wound channels, but I can describe them. The bullets expanded immediately on penetration, producing a wound-track approximately 3/4″ to 1″, which extended 6-7″ deep in the gel before gradually reducing to about .4″ at 12″ of depth, and they never fully streamlined before exiting the block. Despite the asymmetric expansion that is not too shabby. While not a perfect result there is no doubt in my mind that these would be effective. No, they aren’t a +P Speer Gold Dot, but they beat the hell out of ball ammo and rival many commercial products. Not bad for a bloke in his home work-shop.
The load I use with these is 4.9gr. of Universal over a Federal magnum small pistol primer; standard small pistol primers are hard to come by around here right now. They average around 1170 fps. for 350 ft./lbs of energy.
Anyway I'll keep fiddling with these and see if I can't improve on these results, but honestly I'm happy, and a little surprised, that it has gone this well.
Let's not get into the 'reloaded ammo for self-defense' argument here; this is just an experiment to see what I can do.
aggressive? 
