Bmt85 wrote:Jorgescar69 wrote:I have a bunch of "cowboy copper plated flat points " that I would like to try at loads that won't kick my fillings loose.
Do not use plated pistol bullets in the 450 Bushmaster. Plated bullets (along with some other pistol bullets) usually have a low velocity rating, which the 450 will surpass on a starting load. Doing so may lead to pressure issues. Hornady XTP’s are another pistol bullet to stay away from. Xtp mags are fine though.
Those bullets I pictured are not plated. They're definitely cup and core. You cant roll a cannelure in plated bullets as their walls are too thin. I have some plated, (TMJ) truncated round nose bullets. The thinness of those walls make it hard to get enough resistance to compression to provide adequate neck tension that this caliber needs. The bullet needs to push back against the constricting case when you're applying the taper crimp. If it just yields, the crimp is weak. The first ones I tried, you could push them back into the case after applying what I considered to be a healthy taper crimp. That was the kiss of death when I was playing with the idea of trying them a couple weeks ago. Experiment cancelled. Still, I had loaded up three of them to see what they would do and took them to my range trip yesterday, to shoot when I was done testing. I gently hand loaded them into the chamber, one at a time and shot them. No hangfires nor squibs but they didn't fly well at the 100 yd target board. Two made it to an 8x10 target but one went MIA along the way. The larger backing board was too shot up to tell where its hole fell. No surprise there. I just wanted to get rid of them to save pulling them down. No harm, no foul.
Anyway, once crimped,the cannelured jacketed bullets did not push back into the case nearly as easily as the plated ones with their smooth, polished surface. That's a quick test every reloader for this caliber should always perform with this caliber. My experience has been that aside from solid copper bullets, most .451 bullets have a handicap compared to .452 bullets in that you're already starting out down in crimp resistance due to the case having to travel further inward than your die is normally set to, in order to grab onto them. The challenge of adequate neck tension is more critical, the less the bullet weighs, thanks to Newton's 1st law. Heavy bullets, while more of a challenge in keeping from moving during chambering when the neck tension is too light (pulling), don't have their velocity as severely impacted as a function of neck tension. Different issue.
The other bullet I referred to that I was testing was the Lehigh Defense 250gr solid copper Xtreme Penetrator bullet:
Like their 245gr brass brothers that I previously reviewed, their velocity SD's and groups were like night and day, compared to those 220gr cannelured bullets. I'll provide more details when I write them up but one charge weight had an extreme velocity spread of only 4 fps! That's like unobtanium in this caliber and yielded a 3-shot single hole at 100 yards. That quite a testimony if you gauge your reloads by their precision performance. Of course that comes as no surprise in the light of the old adage that "you get what you pay for." At $1.04 per bullet, I'd expect better performance than a bullet that goes for 19₵.
Again, more on that later.
Hoot