Yesterday I invited people to guess what this was:

chiefjabboby, using some rather flowerily language, got it right. Drew Rinella was more straight forward with a more complete, and correct, answer.

Below, on the left, is a normal primer which has been fired. The primer above is in the middle below. Most of what is left of the case is on the right. The rest of the case is stuck in the chamber of my STI DVC Limited (chambered in .40 S&W).

I strongly suspect I got a double charge in one of my reloads. I didn’t think it was possible. It’s true, as I told myself when I started using this load, that a double charge would not allow the bullet to be fully seated. But I didn’t actually try it.The bullet compresses the double charge and the powder pushes the bullet part way out. But it’s only about 0.040 over the usual overall length (OAL). So, it’s quite possible I overlooked this during my final inspection.

The magazine was blown out of the gun and forcibly disassembled. This was essentially all I could find of the pieces. Note the spring is all crooked. What doesn’t show up is that the feed lips are quite a bit wider than a normal magazine.

There was some damage to the gun. I had to hammer it to get the slide open and the ripped apart shell casing out. I suspect the slide is beyond repair. The ejector pins were sheared off but it’s possible they were broken before the incident. The extractor was loose in the slide and the metal below the head of the extractor was pushed down and slightly torn:

I was not hurt but there were strange smoke patterns on my hands where gases came out of all the gaps between the slide, frame, and grip:

My face got peppered with tiny bits of something and stun for a few minutes but it did not break the skin. I had a slightly shadow on my face around my safety glasses giving me a bit of a raccoon appearance.

I disassembled the gun to examine everything carefully. Here is what a mostly disassembled STI DVI Limited looks like:

I plan to reassemble it and ship it off to STI to see if they can repair it. And before I use any more of  that ammo I’m going measure the OAL on every cartridge (I think I can use a case gauge). I have a backup gun which I used at a USPSA match today. And I expect I will be using is for a quite a while. STI is notoriously slow in turn around time and I may have to buy a brand new gun. And the last time I checked the wait times were quite long for new guns.

I put about 45,000 rounds through it. This is more than the approximately 40,000 rounds I got out of my STI Eagle 5.1 before it had a serious failure and became my backup gun.

It’s probably time for me to buy another gun regardless of whether the DVC Limited can be repaired or not. Heavy sigh…

I reloaded 2396 rounds of .40 S&W last month. It was all 180 grain Montana Gold JHP to be used for practice at indoor ranges. I just brought home another 7,500 of these type of bullets as I was getting really low.

This is the most number of rounds I have reloaded in a single month all year but it’s about 400 fewer than I reloaded in August of last year.

This brings the rounds for the year to date to 8,928. I hope to break 10,000 rounds for the year this month and maybe get to 16K by the end of the year..

This brings my lifetime reloaded ammunition totals to:

223: 4,813 rounds.
30.06: 756 rounds.
300 WIN: 1,591 rounds.
40 S&W: 87,093 rounds.
45 ACP: 2,007 rounds.
9 mm: 21,641 rounds.
Total: 117,901  rounds

I reloaded 1193 rounds of .40 S&W last month. It was all 180 grain Montana Gold JHP to be used for practice at indoor ranges.

This is just two rounds short of the maximum number of rounds reload in a single month all year. Still, it only brings the rounds year to date to 6,532. By this time last year I had reloaded 12,712 rounds. I probably will make it something over 10,000 rounds for the year but it will be a lot less than the 23,356 I did last year and the 18,265 I reloaded the year before that.

This brings my lifetime reloaded ammunition totals to:

223: 4,813 rounds.
30.06: 756 rounds.
300 WIN: 1,591 rounds.
40 S&W: 84,697 rounds.
45 ACP: 2,007 rounds.
9 mm: 21,641 rounds.
Total: 115,505 rounds

After reloading 300 rounds of .223 I started reloading .40 S&W to practice for Steel Challenge and USPSA matches. I reloaded 750 rounds before Boomershoot consumed all my spare time.

This brings my lifetime reloaded ammunition totals to:

223: 4,813 rounds.
30.06: 756 rounds.
300 WIN: 1,591 rounds.
40 S&W: 81,080 rounds.
45 ACP: 2,007 rounds.
9 mm: 21,641 rounds.
Total: 111,816 rounds.

I still did a lot of prepping of .223 brass this month but I also did a fair amount of reloading. I reloaded 1195 rounds of .223. I’m going to do a little more .223 then I have to switch back to .40 S&W as I am running out of practice ammo.

This brings my lifetime reloaded ammunition totals to:

223: 4,513 rounds.
30.06: 756 rounds.
300 WIN: 1,591 rounds.
40 S&W: 80,258 rounds.
45 ACP: 2,007 rounds.
9 mm: 21,641 rounds.
Total: 110,766 rounds.

In somewhat related news a co-worker told everyone at the team meeting today that if there were a zombie apocalypse he was going to find me. As he is about 6’ 6” tall, smart, and regularly practices martial arts I could see there being some potential for their being a mutually beneficial relationship in such an event.

This month I only loaded a 180 .223 rounds. Part of that was because I spend a long weekend visiting Xenia in Kentucky and part is because I finished up most of my new .223 brass and started in on my used brass. The used brass needs more prep and with my hand powered tools it took a lot of time. The new electrically powered tool helped a bunch and I have been been prepping brass and, essentially, not reloading as I go through the backlog of used brass to clean and prep.

This brings my lifetime reloaded ammunition totals to:

223: 3,318 rounds.
30.06: 756 rounds.
300 WIN: 1,591 rounds.
40 S&W: 80,258 rounds.
45 ACP: 2,007 rounds.
9 mm: 21,641 rounds.
Total: 109,571 rounds.

I decided to use up a bunch of the rifle reloading components I have laying around and quickly found I was spending way more time than I wanted. Using hand powered tools trimming the brass to length and cleaning the primer pockets was taking, on average, about a full minute for each round. Also, my hands ached after about 100 rounds and I would have let them recover for an hour or more before continuing. With many thousands of rounds in my immediate future I decided I needed another solution.

I purchased the Frankford Arsenal Platinum Series Case Trim and Prep System (see video at the link):

This cut the one minute down to about 15 seconds. I can still get an ache in my hands if I’m not careful to mostly press the brass when trimming rather than trying to grip it tightly. But if I pay a little bit of attention it hasn’t been a major problem.

I have processed over 1000 rounds with it now now I am very pleased.

This month I reloaded some .45 ACP for the first time. I bought the dies and supplies years ago after I got the Para Ordinance Gun Blog 45 pistol. I ended up not shooting it very much and finally stored it as a “Safe Queen”. I still had all the equipment and supplies for the ammo so, mostly to clear out space, I decided to go ahead and assemble the ammo. I reloaded 500 rounds and ran a few rounds over the chronograph to verify the expected velocity and functionality.

I also reloaded 1699 rounds of .40 S&W this month. 1400 rounds were 180 grain Montana Gold JHP for practice at indoor ranges and 299 were 180 grain Black Bullets International bullets for USPSA matches. This finished off all the bullets I have in these types.

Year to date I have loaded 20,781 rounds.

This brings my lifetime reloaded ammunition totals to:

223: 2,424 rounds.
30.06: 756 rounds.
300 WIN: 1591 rounds.
40 S&W: 79,486 rounds.
45 ACP: 500 rounds.
9 mm: 21,641 rounds.
Total: 106,378 rounds.

A while back I made up some .40 S&W loads with “Gold Dot® Short Barrel®” bullets (it appears they have been discontinued) and then did velocity and milk jug penetration tests. I was very pleased with them.

A couple days ago I received an email from Drew Rinella. Here is part of it:

I met you very briefly a couple/few years ago at a Boomer shoot, so it was cool to find your site while researching low velocity results for speer gold dots. I saw that people were giving you shit in the comments about your low velocity 40 s&w gold dot SB loadings. I want to let you know that my terminal performance testing results have so far been great with loading the standard 147 gr 9mm gold dot at a low velocity.

I like the properties of the 147 grain 9mm gold dot bullet but I have always been frustrated by the challenging recoil impulse and inconsistent accuracy with their factory loading at nearly 1000 fps muzzle velocity, so I’ve been experimenting with loading at lower velocities. Despite the fact that they do not yet market a SB version of this bullet, I received an email back from that factory recommending a minimum of 850 fps for consistent expansion.

4.3 grains of Silhouette gave me 885 fps from a Glock 17. This was the most accurate and softest shooting load I tested which gave me the min recommended velocity. With this velocity I get consistent penetration of 4 water filled milk jugs, with the bullet puncturing a small hole into and bouncing off of the 5th jug. Assuming a 1.8x ratio of water to ballistic gel this slightly exceeds the FBI standard of 12″ ballistic gel.

Test #1: 2 layers denim

Penetrated 4 full milk jugs; bullet fully intact with signs of stress on the petals Expansion 0.525″

Weight 147.5 grains

Test #2: 4 layers denim

Penetrated 4 full milk jugs; one petal ripped off and stayed in first milk jug; signs of stress on remaining petals Expansion 0.563″

Weight 143.8 grains

As soon as the kids can drink more milk I’ll be testing with more materials including quilted denim, metal, wood, wallboard, and glass. I hypothesize less expansion and deeper penetration through these barriers based on observations of online video testing of factory loadings with this bullet, which I don’t necessarily consider to be a bad thing.

Silhouette was one of the few powders my thrower was able to throw consistently at these low charge  volumes, and gave me a small red fireball with some yellow sparks in low light shooting. CFE Pistol (my favorite powder for nearly everything else) wouldn’t throw consistently. Titegroup accuracy was very poor. AA#2 & 5 were consistent but wouldn’t give me the velocity I wanted without going into +P or +P+ territory.

Hornady XTP 147 grain at low velocity wouldn’t open up and looked like I could reload it and shoot it again. I definitely think Gold Dot is the way to go when downloading self defense rounds.

I figured there had to be other powders which would give the desired velocity so I went looking through all the sources on my book shelf. Here is a complete list of the powders for 9mm, 147 grain bullets, which yield velocities in the range of 850 feet per second.

Powder weight is in grains. Expected velocities are in feet per second. Some of the data is quite old and you should verify it with your own loading manuals or online to make sure the data is current and I have not made a catastrophic typo.

I was out of town (and out of the country most of the time) for almost three weeks last month. That drastically reduced my reloading opportunities. I still managed to load 1015 rounds of .40 S&W. It was all Montana Gold JHPs over 3.9 grains of Bullseye. These are for new shooters at indoor ranges. They are accurate bullets with a minimum powder charge.

This brings my lifetime reloaded ammunition totals to:

223: 2,424 rounds.
30.06: 756 rounds.
300 WIN: 1591 rounds.
40 S&W: 77,787 rounds.
9 mm: 21,641 rounds.
Total: 104,199 rounds.

Year to date I have loaded 18,582 rounds. I’m still on course to reload about 20,000 rounds this year for a lifetime total of over 105,000 rounds.

In September I only loaded .40 S&W. It was 1875 rounds of Black Bullets for USPSA matches, 93 rounds of Acme Bullet Company’s 180 grain “Lipstick Bullets” (I’m probably going to replace The Blue Bullets with these for steel matches), and 95 rounds of Montana Gold bullets over 3.0 grains of Clays for some “powder puff” loads for new shooters. This is a total of 2063 rounds this month.

I had a revision of some numbers on 300 Win Mag ammo. A few years ago I made some ammo for a friend and didn’t count the rounds. I put them in zip lock bags and gave them to him. In my log I just entered estimates of 300 and 100 rounds for the two different reloading sessions.

Then… earlier this month I was visiting him and found out he still hadn’t shot them. I counted them and found I had reloaded a total of 299 rounds. Whoops. That changes things a little bit. I corrected my log file so that shows up in the numbers below.

The corrected and updated lifetime reloaded ammunition totals are:

223: 2,424 rounds.
30.06: 756 rounds.
300 WIN: 1591 rounds.
40 S&W: 76,772 rounds.
9 mm: 21,641 rounds.
Total: 103,184 rounds.

Year to date I have loaded 17,567 rounds. I’m still on course to reload about 20,000 rounds this year for a lifetime total of over 105,000 rounds.