Michael Tinker Pearce
Member
- Joined
- Oct 23, 2016
- Messages
- 1,576
The gold standard these days is gel-testing- shooting ballistic gel through four layers of denim. The FBI arrived at a standard of 12-18" of penetration- enough to get to the good stuff, but not enough to be likely to overpenetrate. You can spend days watching Youtube videos of people testing ammo to this standard. Most modern of current cartridges have been tested to a fair-the-well, but a lot of old cartridges haven't been. We have a vague idea of how these cartridges performed in the past, almost entirely anecdotal. Modern ammo for many of these old-timers tends to be loaded very light; as they are designed to not break the worst guns ever made in those calibers. I short we don't know what these cartridges really did, or can do now.
I'm going to change that. The Chronograph arrives today, and as the budget allows I'll be getting gel from Clear Ballistics. I'm going to chrono and gel test .32 S&W, ..32 S&W Long, .32-20 Winchester, .38 S&W and .450 Adams for starters. In each case I'll try to come up with a good approximation of the original black powder loading to test, then modern factory ammo and then hand-loaded ammunition. The handloads will all be standard-pressure- no hot rodding! Whenever possible I'll shoot from both short-barrel and service-length guns.
Should be interesting... and I'm pretty sure it will be fun!
I'm going to change that. The Chronograph arrives today, and as the budget allows I'll be getting gel from Clear Ballistics. I'm going to chrono and gel test .32 S&W, ..32 S&W Long, .32-20 Winchester, .38 S&W and .450 Adams for starters. In each case I'll try to come up with a good approximation of the original black powder loading to test, then modern factory ammo and then hand-loaded ammunition. The handloads will all be standard-pressure- no hot rodding! Whenever possible I'll shoot from both short-barrel and service-length guns.
Should be interesting... and I'm pretty sure it will be fun!