BUG/CCP Match and Ammo Talk

Well, the BladeTech Southern Regional BUG / CCP Match held last Saturday was great fun! It had rained Friday and overnight Friday night. The rain was pretty much gone by match time Saturday morning, but it was still vera muddy.

I was my own worst enemy when it came to arriving on time. I left the house plenty early, but 20 minutes down the road, noticed I had left my wallet at home. So, 40 minutes added to trip. Caught at the railroad crossing on the way out the second time, so 5 more minutes there, though it always feels longer. Then as I neared the range, I lefted when I should have righted and didn't realize *that* for 15 minutes, so 15 extra minutes added. I arrived at the gate shortly after the shooter's meeting, and the range is still 15 minutes from the gate. Still, I got there, parked, registered and caught up with my squad and got inspection and stage description before the first shot, so not bad...

Two stages kind ate me up. The first was simply a matter of shooting faster than I can go. It looks good on the video but the score was pretty poor, 25 down on that one stage. One other stage had a poor score. Those two account for 2/3 of my total penalties. In contrast, the other 10 stages averaged 3 down.

Still, it was fun and I had almost no ammo issues. All rounds that saw the firing pin fired. I did have two rounds that failed to go into battery. I have gotten into what could arguably be a bad habit of racking out such failures. I think I need to develop instead the habit of bumping the back of the slide to attempt to force them into battery. With a BUG pistol at a BUG match, the stages were understandably BUG friendly, designed largely to be shot in groups of 6. Two targets get 3 each or 3 targets to two each, then move. Well, when you rack out a fail to battery, you now have only 5 rounds. You will run out before you address all 6 rounds. So, advance to cover, reload, take the last shot. *Now*, you're probably going be short for the next 6 rounds and have to stop and reload for that. Both rounds that were racked out were lost in the copious mud, so I could not check those to see if there was a dimensional issue with them.

All in all, however, it was a fun match with ammo I feel I can trust, at least for competition. This Thursday, I may get to test that load in the Glock, though Thursday is also the last day of work for my retiring spouse. I might be busy. :)

It's Not Really Science If You Change All The Conditions

I loaded up 100 rounds of low recoil 40S&W, using new Starline brass, Remington 1-1/2 primers and a slightly hotter 4.6g charge of Power Pistol and shot it from my Kahr CW40. So, other than keeping the Xtreme 180g RNFP projectile, I changed all the parameters of the test.

First, the Kahr is running it's stock spring, which is pretty stiff to judge by just a finger pull. I'm sure the smaller size of everything magnifies the apparent effort needed to cycle the slide, but the ammo never failed to extract or in any other way, fail to operate the pistol.

So long as it actually fired.

I had a few click-no-fire failures. Several, in fact. I recovered at least three manually ejected cartridges with seemingly light strikes. Upon closer examination, it appears that the primers are set deeper in the pockets than expected.

On the left is one of my previously loaded 180g rounds, with used brass and CCI primer. In the center is a light strike failure and on the right is an unfired "new" round. The really sharp observer will notice that the light strike is also a smidgen off center, but that is not generally a problem unless it's WAY off.

It may be tough to see in that picture, but the primers in both of the new rounds are noticeably set back.

Not sure if this is a better or worse illustration.

Since the previous load is in different brass and using a different primer, it's hard to compare them fairly, but the degree to which the new rounds are wrong is very clear.

Since I need to load about 200 rounds of ammo for a major match *tomorrow*, I need to resolve this tonight.

Most obviously, I will see what CCI or even Tula primers look like in the Starline brass. Before I load any, however, I will see if the Remington primers are smaller than the others and/or if the primer pockets in the Starline brass are different from the fired brass I have. The Remington primers gave me some fits anyway. They didnt want to feed reliably in the press. It seems to like CCI better. Actually, it seems to like Tula primers as well or maybe better. My hopes are very high that this will resolve the problem and I can use this load tomorrow without issue.

Using new brass was an unaccustomed joy. None of the usual QA gyrations that fired brass needs seemed to even apply. Never fired means never GlockBulged; loaded rounds dropped straight through the bulge buster without interference, so that fairly time consuming step could be eliminated. Thanks to a minor adjustment of the crimping die, they dropped into and out of the gauge block as well. I did not put a caliper on every round, but the 20 or so random rounds that I checked were all dead on 0.419" at the case mouth and OAL 1.115", +/- 0.001. That is a little short, so I will move that out to 1.120" or so. I have had some feeding problems in the Lone Wolf conversion barrel of the Glock and that will likely help.

In looking up some figures about primer pocket depth, I came across an article about the dangers of loading 40S&W with 180g bullets. The gist of the article was that since the 180g bullet is physically longer than any other weight bullet, but that we maintain the same OAL, the combination results in significantly reduce loaded case volume. This volume does indeed affect the burn rate and peak pressure of any powder in any round and the article included a scary chart showing that a variation of 0.140" in cartridge OAL and thus case volume, resulted in pressures soaring as high as 4 times the maximum SAAMI pressure for the cartridge.

The same sort of problem comes from too light of a crimp on an autoloading pistol cartridge and even more often, chambering the same cartridge over and over (like you might do if you unload and reload your carry ammo into a pistol you also compete with) can set the bullet back from being rammed into the feed ramp. At the very least, it can affect accuracy because the pressures vary from shot to shot and in the worst case, your pistol comes apart in your hand due to extremely high pressures, possibly taking your hand with it.

In my case, I think my handloading goal avoids this issue. I am not loading anywhere near full power, let alone max power. Just the opposite, in fact. I am developing the lowest power load that will meet minimum power factor for my competition and reliably operate the pistol.

Punching Holes Gently, Continued...

The 13 pound spring did seem to help operation of the pistol in general. With the stock spring, I had several issues where extraction and ejection seemed to not complete in pretty much every stage I shot. The lighter spring as reduced that greatly, but it has not completely eliminated it. Last Thursday, I still had a couple of them.

Also, the lighter spring seems to have made the pistol a little less forgiving about about case mouth tolerances and thus I had a few failures to go into battery.

In my defense, though perhaps it's not a truly warranted defense, I have found that I can have rounds that drop freely into the gauge block but close observation reveals a tiny bit of the flared mouth remains. This might not be an issue on a Glock 22, with it's native 40S&W magazines, but using the 10mm mags and a 40S&W conversion barrel might introduce enough geometric change to take up all the usual tolerances and result in a failure to go into battery.

Message received, Cody. I need to mic those case mouths. Adjusting the crimp die will be very simple and will probably take care of it.

So, with the BUG match coming up this weekend, I have two critical ammo related problems to address.

Even the lighter spring on the Glock isn't quite light enough for the current load, so I need to bump up the powder charge just a little. As I am using the Lee Pro Auto Disk powder measure, I will just go up one cavity size on the disk. I think I'm using the 0.40 cc cavity and the next larger 0.43 cc cavity should raise the powder charge to about 4.8g. This should add about 50 fps to the velocity, but more importantly, about 31 foot pounds of energy to the slide.

Of course, that whole paragraph applies to shooting the Glock. For the BUG match, I'll be shooting the Kahr, and I haven't tried that ammo at all in that pistol. The current load might work, or I might need to bump that even higher for the Kahr. I may be able to test that this evening.