brewer12345
Member
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2015
- Messages
- 2,751
I am starting to reload metallic cartridges with 38 special. I have a pound of HP38, a bunch of resized and primed brass and 158 grain RNFP lead bullets. I am in the process of stumbling my way through the loading process with the first 50 rounds, but I thought I would ask about something weird in the load data. Hodgdon says that this combination should be min. 3.1 and max 3.7 grains of powder. They list pressures associated with each end of the range and the upper end is well short of the SAAMI limit at 14k and change. My Lyman manual says that HP38/231 is the most accurate powder with this combination, but they say that 3.7 grains is the minimum and you should not go over 4.0 grains. The pressure given for the 4.0 load is right up at max pressure. Who is right? Why the difference? As a practical matter, I only own .357 mag firearms so I have a large margin of error here, but I did wonder why there is such a big difference between two reputable sources.