Well, I've sold MILLIONS of each. I make jacketed bullets but I've been blessed to use both and troubleshoot thousands of issues from customers. My conclusion is that plated bullets are indeed inferior to FMJ bullets in almost every way. That said, plated bullets are perfectly fine for about 90% of applications. Just think of plated bullets as 85 octane gas. You'll never get the most performance from them, but they will work for just driving around town. For example, we now have several people using our jacketed bullets to shoot 2600+ fps out of a 350 legend. This would be impossible with a plated pistol bullet. While plated bullets can stay together past 1200-1300 fps I've basically come to the conclusion that with some exceptions you will start to lose accuracy performance at about 1200. The way plated bullets are made is not conducive to consistency. Plated bullets have to made undersized and then "restruck" to fit a die. You can't make them oversize and then restrike them because the plating will stretch and crack. Almost all American plating companies use the old way to plate bullets which is prone to enbrittlement of the copper. Basically, it's hard copper which cracks when formed. So, they have to try to plate the core to near the exact diameter so that it won't stretch too much nor squish down too much when it gets restruck. This makes for a somewhat inconsisten base from bullet to bullet. The base of a pistol bullet is where you get 90% of your accuracy from. They're pretty good at it, but it tends to produce a TON of 2nds or undersized bullets. We have literally sold millions of 2nds from various plating manufacturers. We used to sell a lot of 2nds from one company in particular but found that what they used to call 2nds were then being sold to customers as firsts. Not sure what they are doing now. That was a couple of years ago. Plated bullets also suffer from being soft. I can't tell you how many customers have had tumbling issues because they crimped too hard or they used the Lee Factory Crimp die to make sure their ammo would chamber. Plated bullets will resize in the casing. You can start with a 9mm bullet that is .355 and end up with one that is .350 if you crimp wrong. For plated bullets I do not recommend the LFCD. I'm not sure if it is a problem with the die or if the people who use it are just not as well versed in proper reloading, but ALL of the tumbling problems are usually solved by removing the LFCD. Our testing has shown that most plated companies are generous with their plating thickness claims. Plating thickness with be highest around the nose and base of the bullet. Where it matters most is the body where all the crimping and rifling is going to go. Most are .004"-.006" thick with a few getting up to .008"-.010" at the body. This can be an issue when shooting from revolvers that have a really sharp forcing cone or when timing is off just a little bit. I've seen revolvers that will shave off one side of the plating. I've also seen where the plating fails to adhere to the lead and the rifling cuts it off and the bullet hits the target with one strip of copper cutting nice little lines in the paper.
On the other side of the coin we have jacketed bullets. The way they are made is simple enough. We take a copper alloy of 90% copper and 10% zinc which is known in the metal industry as commercial bronze. Some companies use 5% zinc and others use 20-30% zinc and make their jackets out of brass. We've tried both. Brass is way cheaper than copper so that's the reason you see a lot of companies making brass jackets these days. We've mostly stuck with copper because the color is nice and we've developed a following with our bullets looking a certain way. In application there really isn't any difference. I've had guys tell me that brass will wear out a barrel faster, but I seriously doubt it. On the hardness scale they're pretty similar. Anyway, we take that strip .023" and make a coin. That coin gets turned into a cup. The cup is trimmed and then a lead core is inserted. Then pressure is applied to them all and the bullet goes through three different stations where it is formed, base folded, base tamped, and then sent through a sizing die and out the bottom. There is virtually no possible way for a bullet to come out undersized with the way we make jacketed bullets. In fact, unless something is REALLY REALLY wrong with the lead cores, all our bullets will have pretty much the exact same diameter. All of our bases will be uniform and consistent from lot to lot. The wall thickness ends up around .020." This means that the bullet can handle much more abuse before it will deform or come apart. The way we use our lead to form the jacket pretty much bonds the lead to the jacket so it doesn't seem to have the issues of other jacketed bullets where the lead spins inside the jacket. Anyway, I could type a whole book if I had the time, but then everyone would know my secrets and I really don't have the time!! There are really only a couple downsides to jacketed bullets. They can't be made quite as fast, and they are more expensive to make. This usually translates into more expensive ammo. Though right now jacketed bullets can be had for about the same price (or less if you're willing to wait in line at our shop) as plated. In the last year we've made some pretty huge strides in jacketed bullet making. We now have two machines that can make them at 260 bullets a minute each. We can run them long enough to out produce a plating line now. Granted, HP bullets can't be made that fast, but regular FMJ can. With all our machines together, we were producing 500k bullets a day until the copper shortage hit us. Apparently there is a shortage of all metals in the US right now and the mills are running several weeks behind. So, though we can still make bullets at the regular slow speed, our faster machines will be silent for a couple weeks while we wait for more copper. Super frustrating because we were making HUGE strides in our backorder times. We would have been caught up on all our FMJ orders by the end of this month.
One last thing. There are some who believe that jacketed bullets will cause leading in compensators. I'm not sure which brands that seems to be true for, but I've got about 5000 rounds through one of our compensated guns and I get carbon deposits but not much lead. So, I cannot confirm this issue.
We've had a customer return 30,000 bullets to us once because he said he was getting lead poisoning from loading our jacketed bullets. We shipped him some plated bullets to try and his lead levels continued to rise. So, we traced his lead exposure. He was getting exposed to lead in SO many other places that the bullet was the least of his worries. Primers are usually made with lead compounds that get in the air and on your hands when shooting. If you shoot competition, you will be asked to reset targets and steel which are COVERED in powdered lead. Many ranges don't have good hand washing stations. Keep this in mind when handling food at the range. Also, if you clean your gun it will have primer residue on it as well and coupled with solvents you can easily get lead inside of you. If you wet tumble your brass, that water is filled with particulate lead. Same with corn cob or walnut. Trust me when I say that the bullet is the LAST place to be concerned about lead exposure. I have been loading, packaging, producing, and touching lead every single day for the last decade and more. My lead levels were really low. They did not start to go up until I started shooting matches with regularity. Even then, my blood only tested at 13 (which the doctor says 5 is acceptable). For reference, the guy who owns the indoor range tested at 60 but all he does is clean the place and empty out the bullet traps.
I paid about $400 for several vitamin drip/chelation therapy sessions (they're really cheap now and you can get them at like a chiropractor's office along with a vitamin drip IV therapy) but I didn't get my blood rechecked because corona hit America and nobody was going to the hospital. Anyway, I highly recommend a vitamin drip (I felt pretty great after my treatments and you can get chelation therapy added to it). I'm just going to consider it another cost for shooting matches.
