I use two different color bullets to indicate major (black) and minor power (blue) factor loads. I’ve loaded a fair number of red bullets as well. I just noticed that Eggleston Munitions has 16 different colors available now:
Wow. What to do with another color (or 13)…. Maybe white for extremely low power loads for new shooters. But what about the rest? Christmas presents for the kids?
I couldn’t find Ballistics Coefficients on the Black Bullets International web page so using data from my chronograph over the range of 0 to 25 yards I made some estimates for the .40 caliber 180 grain and 200 grain bullets.
I came up with 0.199 for the 180 grain bullet and 0.179 for the 200 grain bullet. Yes, the heavier bullet has a lower BC.
I’m a little skeptical of this although I suppose it could be possible. The two bullets look like this with the 180 grain bullet on the left.
The lube groove on the 200 grain bullet may increase the drag enough to account for the unexpectedly low BC.
Does anyone else have data that verifies or refutes my estimates?
As I reload almost all my centerfire pistol ammo I have not paid much attention to new ammunition. Hence, even though it has been out for at least three years, I had not heard of Federal Syntech Action Pistol until about 10 days ago when I got this email:
Hi Joe!
My name is McKenzie, I’m a fellow USPSA shooter (though not a very good one — haha!) and I also work for TargetBarn.com. Your post the other day about the Segway shooter had me cracking up and wishing my club had better footing for some Segway shenanigans!
I’m sure you’ve heard about the relatively new Federal Syntech Action Pistol line, which is the USPSA’s official ammo. It is on USPSA’s Certified Match Ammo list, with the .40 and .45 flavors meeting major PF. It’s been a huge hit among our customers so far and there are always shooters using it at my local match.
Now I know you load your own rounds, but I wanted to see if you’d be interested in trying out some of the Syntech Action Pistol. I’ve enjoyed reading your insights on your own loads, and thought it would be interesting to hear how you think this line stacks up, especially since it’s touted as a major PF load.
If you’re interested, I’d be happy to send some out to you. Of course, there’s no pressure and no worries if you’re not interested!
Thank you for your time, and thank you for your work in bringing new shooters to the range!
Best,
McKenzie
TargetBarn.com
It turns out Federal makes it in 150 grain 9mm as well as .40 and .45.
I accepted the offer for some .40 S&W:
I was very intrigued with the 205 grain bullets. I had never fired 205 grain bullets in .40 caliber. With a similar margin for making Power Factor the 205 grain bullets would yield a lower velocity than the 180 grain bullets I almost always use. The lower velocity would spread out the recoil impulse and give a more comfortable recoil. I had sort of considered it but another shooter I know said he was never able to get 200 grain bullets to shoot accurately. And here was 205 grain bullets intended for use in matches. And in 20 years I never tried it for myself.
I took it to the range yesterday and shot it through three different STI guns. I fully expected to see some keyholing at more distance ranges. I also expected it to be marginal in Power Factor for one of the guns. One gun, with the same length barrel, consistently gets lower velocities than the other two.
I was wrong.
I shot 20 rounds in each of the three guns. The Power Factors were 175.93, 179.72, and 179.89. The muzzle velocity standard deviation was outstanding: 7.1, 7.6 and 8.4 fps.
These are a little hotter load than what I normally shoot for Major Power Factor. With such consistent velocities I would not run these hotter than a PF of 170. But these guns all had barrels five inches long. If you were using a gun with a shorter barrel you would want the extra powder in these load to make sure you were reaching Major PF velocities. But even with the greater PF there was no significant difference in recoil from a new load I was test with a PF of only 168.5.
There was no keyholing. I put five rounds though each of the guns at a 25 yard target. Here are the results:
The accuracy was as good as my handloads. These are the 20 shots fired for velocity testing at a range of 10 yards. Some, or perhaps all, of the flyers were shooter error. With this many rounds I could feel some fatigue during the strings.
DVC Limited:
Edge:
Eagle:
The Eagle has never been as accurate as the other two and I don’t blame the ammo for the greater dispersion.
Today, I shot several USPSA stages at the Renton Fish and Game Club with the Federal ammo. I was pleased with how the ammo performed. No complaints at all.
Here are some videos from Federal on their ammo:
Target Barn has the ammo for $0.24/round in 9mm and $0.36/round in .40 S&W and .45 ACP.
A little over five years ago I had to replace the trigger in an AR because it would sometime double. A month or so ago I had another AR double on me. I cleaned it and tried it again. Still, it sometimes doubled.
When I took it apart everything looked good. I couldn’t see significant wear like I did with the other trigger that went bad on me. Oh, well.
Last weekend I replace the trigger group with a Timney trigger. I should have read the comments to my previous post before ordering. I have really liked the several other Timney triggers in various guns and so I just ordered another and dropped it in.
I would like Swalwell, Biden, O’Rourke, and Harris to note that what US gun owners consider play time is what a major news outlet can mistake for a major military offensive by the Forces of a NATO nation. Tell us again how resisting a tyrannical government is futile.
Carl Bussjaeger
October 14, 2019
Overwhelming Military Force
[This was in regards to what I posted about yesterday: Layers of fact checkers.—Joe]
I shot in a USPSA match yesterday and one of the guys in my squad, Loke, brought his Segway. He mostly used it to move from stage to stage. But on one stage, after shooting the stage for real, he shot it while riding the Segway. I have my own video but this is better and is already posted on YouTube with this comment by the shooter:
After owning and using a Segway Ninebot for a few months, I got to shoot one of the stages for fun on it. It was a blast. You can see me wanting to go faster but the Segway’s acceleration is pathetic. I’m sure it’s for safety reasons, so I’m ok with that.
Another shooter also had her Segway and was pulling her wagon loaded with her shooting supplies while riding it. It worked surprisingly well even when traversing uneven ground.
When you catch them in lies (or even errors) this big the correct conclusion to draw is that nothing they say can be trusted:
ABC News ‘slaughter in Syria’ footage appears to come from a Kentucky gun range
ABC aired supposedly shocking footage Monday and Sunday purporting to be from the frontline battle between the Syrian Kurds and the invading Turks. The only problem is: The footage appears to come from a nighttime machine gun demonstration at the Knob Creek Gun Range in West Point, Kentucky.
As J.D. Rucker said:
If @ABC News made a mistake, then their incompetence is startling. If they did it on purpose (and with the edits to the video, that seems to be the case), then they’re an outright evil group of bald-faced liars pretending to report the news.
This reminds me of what WSBTV did with a video of daughter Kim shooting a Boomershoot fireball target a number of years back.
In the comments Sendarius asks:
When you say “clean”, how do you do that?
Vibratory tumbler with dry media?
Rotating tumbler with wet media?
Power drill with a Brasso-soaked rag? /jkI have been using a Lyman tumbler with walnut shell dry media for years, and I am considering switching to wet solution with those tiny stainless steel rods.
Others at my club have made that switch, and their brass looks amazing.Any thoughts?
I first sort the brass using a set of these (Amazon also has them for $10 more):
This is how the brass ended up in a five gallon bucket.
There is a similar product available for less money but I have not had my hands on them so I can’t compare the quality:
Amazon sells it for the same price.
I then put the brass in an ultrasonic cleaner (I bought mine from Harbor Freight several years ago but Harbor Freight is slightly more than Amazon for what appears to be the same product):
I use Hornady One Shot Sonic Cleaner Ultrasonic Case Cleaning Solution. I tried a homemade recipe using vinegar and Dawn dishwashing detergent but this works much better. I run the cleaner for at least 24 minutes (three cycles of 480 seconds each).
After the cleaning the brass may not look that great. But most of the remaining dirt/tarnish will come off in the rinse.
I then dump the brass and cleaning solution into a colander:
I stir the brass with a gloved hand to remove most of the liquid.
I then rinse the brass in tap water:
Again I stir the brass with my hand.
I drain and rinse two more times. The final rinse is done with distilled water from my dehumidifier.
After the final draining I put the brass on a rack above my dehumidifier. I built the rack from PVC pipe, a plastic screen, and transparent duct tape:
The dehumidifier puts out warm dry air. I usually let it run for about eight hours and I may stir the brass a time or two.
When cleaning rifle brass I may remove the primers before cleaning. This will result in clean primer pockets as well as a clean interior and exterior.
If I want really shiny brass I will first run it through the vibratory cleaner with the usual corn cob or walnut shell media and a brass cleaner additive. I then follow up with the ultrasonic cleaning.
For many years I just used the vibrating cleaner with the corncob or walnut shell media but the ultrasonic cleaner gave me a faster throughput and the cases are cleaned on the inside as well as the outside.
I considered buying a wet, stainless steel pin, type cleaner but I decided what I had worked well enough.
I haven’t reloading any .40 S&W ammo in a long time but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been shooting any. Here is a partial illustration:
This is what I have picked up of the floor after practice as the local range before I sorted and cleaned it. Maybe five percent of that is 9mm or .45 ACP that got mixed in as I scooped it up. That this bucket is full means I don’t have a place to put the brass I’ll bring home from the range this week.
It’s time to sort, clean, and put away some brass.
This last weekend I finally got around to doing some chronograph work on some (relatively) new loads I made last February. To make sure the chronograph was all set up correctly I fired some old rounds that weren’t marked but I was pretty sure what they were. The mean velocity should verify or disprove my hypothesis as well as do the function check on my chronograph setup.
The mean velocity was 3507.92 fps. I looked up the last time I had reloaded and chronographed the ammo. I last reloaded that bullet in April of 2001 and chronographed them using the same gun in May of 2001. The mean velocity from over 18 years ago was 3506 fps.
The ammo (and gun!) aged better than I expected. I like Varget powder even more than I did before.
Almost exactly a year ago Vic brought me a new shooter and I taught him to shoot a handgun and did some coaching for Vic. Then last Friday Vic brought his wife and two daughters to the range so I could teach them to shoot. Four shooters is more than I really wanted because with the range reserved for only two hours there wouldn’t be enough time to get them all through the usual material.
But, I did my best and got them through the basics with a .22 pistol (both suppressed and unsuppressed), .22 revolver (both single and double action), and we had just enough time left for each to take make a single shot with the .40 S&W.
The wife and two daughters had never shot a real gun before. One of the daughters had shot a pellet gun once.
I did the usual explanation of grip, stance, sight alignment, and sight picture, then had them dryfire until things looked solid. I added live ammo and they started punching holes in the paper from 10 feet away.
They all did well after some minor adjustments. The primary adjustment was in which hand to shoot with. All are right handed but Vic’s wife and one daughter are cross eyed dominate. They tried shooting both right handed and left handed and ended up sticking with left handed shooting. I’ve found that when new shooters are cross eyed dominate the majority end up shooting with their weak hand.
Here are the new shooters smiles:
Johannes Köpl @JohannesKoepl
Mit diesem genialen Trick kann man leicht einen Schokoriegel in ein US-amerikanisches Kino schmuggeln!
Translated:
With this ingenious trick you can easily smuggle a chocolate bar into a US cinema!
That’s very clever! I might try that sometime. However, I’d leave a round in the chamber and have a spare magazine on my belt for a quick conversion to full functionality.
If I were formally teaching self defense with firearms I would consider getting this target for my students:
It teaches the importance of getting off the line of attack as well as the importance of when to deploy your firearm. It could be a part of any number of pretty cool USPSA stages too.
Randall of xkcd.com ponders an interesting question and misses the, to me, obvious answer:
A wedding-photography drone is buzzing around above you. You don’t know what it’s doing there and you want it to stop.
Let’s suppose you have a garage full of sports equipment— baseballs, tennis rackets, lawn darts, you name it. Which sport’s projectiles would work best for hitting a drone? And who would make the best anti-drone guard? A baseball pitcher? A basketball player? A tennis player? A golfer? Someone else?
If I could have any sports professional to clear the skies around my property of private drones I would engage Kim Rhode. Some number 7-1/2 shot, launched at a fairly high angle, wouldn’t be much of a risk to neighbors or their property but it would permanently neutralize small drones.
Yesterday I participated in a USPSA match at the Marysville Rifle Club. One of the stages was a first for me in a couple ways. The first part of the stage was fairly ordinary. You started in a shooting box and upon the start signal you drew your gun and shot three targets partially hidden behind a picket fence. From there you had to go maybe 75 feet forward and around a corner where a second set of targets became visible.
This was the most interesting portion of the stage:
There were two targets in the open, one on the extreme left of the picture above and the edge of one almost visible on the extreme right of the picture above. There were two targets visible behind the green door (no relation to the movie), and two targets visible from underneath the barricade to the left. Still nothing particularly unusual.
The interesting part of the stage are the targets in the distance on the right. There are three paper targets behind a sheet of black plastic (soft cover). In front of two of the targets are Mini-Poppers*. These targets are about 25 yards away. You can’t see most of the paper targets because of the soft cover, you have to shoot the steel targets down to get good access to the paper targets, and you have to shoot these fairly distant targets from below a barricade. Going prone left you with the problem of shooting the two targets to the left at almost a 90o angle and while prone I was unable to get enough elevation to hit the distant targets and still be stable. I, and many others, squatted or kneeled to shoot below the barricade. Being a tall person this pushed my aging flexibility to the limit and a little beyond. My back felt a little odd for the rest of the day but is almost normal now.
I have never shot a stage where soft cover was the only way to get good hits on a target. I have never shot a stage where my flexibility was a limiting factor. Also unusual was that I was also the only person, out of 70 shooters, to get all 26 A-Zone hits.
My time of 29.98 seconds put me at 6th place out of 20 shooters in my division and 33rd out of 70 shooters overall.
Here is how the stage (and match) winner shot it in Open division in 19.30 seconds:
* See here for a picture of one. Official dimension are as below:
I recently received an email from Robert Z. asking three questions:
I have a couple of coworkers interested in shooting and I wanted to get your advice:
1) I have an orange gun – do you teach them the basics (grip, stance, 4 rules) before going to the range or you do it there?
2) most of the time you seem to have a private bay, is this something for VIPs only or any regular Robert can reserve? I live in Redmond, too, and I think it is well worth the money as you may end up with someone shooting some cannon next to you and the new shooter will start flinching from that.
3) how do you select what firearms you start with?
Here are my answers:
1) If I have the chance I teach them with my blue gun before going to the range. But most of the time I don’t have that opportunity.
2) I have an early Platinum membership which allows me to reserve Bay 3 at West Coast Armory (Bellevue) a couple times a month at no charge. The present day Platinum memberships don’t have that benefit. I think, with some membership types, you can still reserve it for a price. I think it’s something like $80 for two hours. Call to find out for certain.
3) I always start them out with a .22 pistol (when available, suppressed). I do this even with people that have some firearm experience. It makes it easier for the student as well as the instructor. You both have a much better chance of seeing the shooter jerk the trigger and other common beginner mistakes. And with new shooters they can concentrate on the stance, grip, sight alignment, and trigger pull without the recoil. The recoil will dominate their attention instead of the other things. Once they have the fundamentals working fairly well let them have a few shots with a centerfire to experience the recoil. Handling recoil is its own topic and should only be worked on after the student has the fundamentals as almost second nature. They can get there with dry fire or they can shoot a similar number of rounds (a few hundred) with a .22.
On August 2nd Ry brought Henry, his nephew from Illinois, to the range. Henry had shot a fair amount with Airsoft guns but never a real gun. As usual, I started him out with safety rules, grip, stance, and sight alignment on a suppressed .22 from about 10 feet away. This was his first shot (from a video by Ry):
Most of the time he was able to keep them on the target. He tended to have a bimodal distribution of his shots. They were either good or way off. I gave him the gun with an empty chamber when he expected the gun to be loaded. The bobble of the gun showed both of us he was not holding the gun steady as he squeezed the trigger. More dry fire helped.
I moved him on to shooting multiple targets. One shot per target. After he seemed have that down fairly well I removed the suppressor and brought out the timer. The pressure of the timer showed and on nearly every run of five shots he would miss one of the targets.
I told him each miss was a three second penalty, as it is in Steel Challenge matches and told him to remember the mantra, “Trigger prep, sight alignment, squeeze, follow-through”. The hits got better and then his times improved with some strings being in the mid fours.
I moved him on to low powered .40 S&W loads. At first he did almost as well as with the .22. Then there were more and more wild shots. More dry fire was required. After he seemed back in control I turned him over to Ry as I prepared to leave (Barb and I were headed to Mount Rainier that evening). Ry had his own set of toys and Henry started out with a fully equipped 9mm:
I picked up my brass and gear and left while Ry and Henry finished out the last 20 minutes or so we had the bay reserved. Ry later send me video and a picture he had taken of Henry with an AR:
The next day, while Barb and I were hiking nearly over 6500 feet above sea level on Mount Rainier, I got a message from Ry, “Thank you for yesterday. Henry can’t stop talking about it.”
Another shooter has joined the community.
This is way late but better late than never.
Last month daughter Kim and her husband Jacob had some friends visit Idaho from Utah. Most of them had never shot a gun and wanted to learn. Kim was thrilled I was going to be working on Boomershoot stuff that weekend and brought them to me to learn to shoot.
A couple locals had more gun experience and also showed up to participate. I originally expect people would arrive around 4:00 and maybe leave by 6:00. They arrived about 1:30, but, whatever. That worked for me as well.
It was a hot day and we put up a small shelter to give us some relieve from the sun:
I did the usual by starting them out with safety rules, grip, stanch, and a suppressed .22.
As you might expect, one of the more experience people needed a little more coaching to unlearn bad habits. The only pistol she had ever shot was a 9mm. She confess that when she pulled the trigger she always closed her eyes. Her hits on the target reflected this. With a little extra dry fire and coaching we got most of that cleared up and her targets looked much better.
Via Eileen to the right @10Sgirl61:
It’s a little over stated. I figure I lose about 20 IQ points as soon as the buzzer goes off. Hence, my plans for the stage are made such that the average first grader should be able to follow it without too much trouble.
I kept forgetting to make a post about my reloading activities. Partially because there hasn’t been much. But it was greater than zero and I intended to make my usual posts. Oh well.
March
80 rounds of match grade .223. This was four sets of 20 using various weights of CFE 223 powder. Even the hottest loads, showing some minor high pressure signs, were almost 20 fps slower than previous loads with Varget which showed no pressure signs. Varget is one of Hodgdon’s Extreme Rifle Powders which is extremely consistent from lot to lot and extremely temperature stable (actual test with 308 Winchester):
CFE 223 is not part of their Extreme product line.
April
125 rounds of match grade .223 using the previously tested Varget loading.
May
216 rounds of match grade .223 using the previously tested Varget loading.
2509 rounds of .40 S&W.
175 rounds of these were a load which tested hotter than expected. They resulted in a Power Factor of 182.7. My previous tests indicated this load should result in about a 175 PF. I was quite perplexed at this until I looked at my data closely. This velocity measurement was done when the temperature was 80F. My previous velocity measurements had been at a lower temperature. I verified this by cooling some of the ammo to 35F. The velocity was over 25 fps slower which was equivalent to a powder charge of 0.1 grains less. I put these rounds aside for a match in Idaho on a cold day.
The remainder of the .40 S&W rounds were of the load I wanted to use for USPSA matches when the temperature is 60 F or warmer.
June
61 rounds of match grade .223 using the previously tested Varget loading.
This brings my lifetime reloaded ammunition totals to:
223: 7,439 rounds.
30.06: 756 rounds.
300 WIN: 2,126 rounds.
300 Savage: 50 rounds.
40 S&W: 100,872 rounds.
45 ACP: 2,007 rounds.
9 mm: 21,641 rounds.
Total: 134,891 rounds
Over 100K rounds of .40 S&W! That’s kind of cool.
