50AE with Berry's bullets

My brass is pretty clean, I am using CCI350's too. I was just getting some unburnt powder grains in the barrel.

I am putting a tapered crimp on my rounds and just enough to leave a mark on the plating with out denting it fully. You will need to sacrifice afew bullets to the bullet puller to find the perfect crimp.
 
Which die do you use? I have hornady custom nitride something that were supposed to work without lube but don't. I got lazy having lee crimpers for all my calibres.

I haven't had any unburnt grains, no matter the charge. I'm kind of tempted to move to a different lot of powder (I have h110 and win296, which are the same powder but from 2 different lot numbers), just to see if the one I'm currently using is deficient or something.
 
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Ok, so just checked, and there isn't any unburnt powder in any of the 50AE cases (compared to fired 9mm or 45acp brass, they're a lot more dirty though). I don't think a bit of humidity would keep the powder from burning completely, it gets pretty hot and there's a lot of pressure in there. It could possibly change the weight per volume if the powder has absorbed a lot of humidity, but once it starts burning, that humidity will be vaporized.

I keep my powder in a small safe with an humidity absorber, so mine is always super dry.
 
Just loaded some test rounds for my range trip Thursday. Will check them for accuracy and over pressure too.

x10 33.5gr
x10 34.0gr
x10 34.5gr
 
Alright, lemme know how that goes. If you have overpressure it'll probably mean that my lot of powder is underpowered or something else is wrong with it.
 
Went out today and no signs of overpressure even with the 34.5gr load. I did notice the 7th bullet in the mag was pushed back in the casing from the recoil of the previous rounds.

I will have to back off be expanding die and maybe add bit more crimp with my seating die. I fired it and even that showed no overpressure signs lol.





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Pull these out of the sand, they held up perfectly with no plating separation from firing. The few cracks you see are from the impact bulging the plating.




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Cool, you even see the rifling on some of them. My range hasn't been cleaned in 40 years, I'm basically shooting more lead into a pile of lead; I could never find my own bullets.

I pulled one of those bullets with a pair of vise-grip, and although the bullet is now vise-grip shaped, the plating didn't break. I think these bullets can take a lot more crimping than they look.

The fact that we're both quite a bit over the maximum load from reloading volumes without any sign of overpressure (and that I'm not seeing anywhere near the posted velocity) is still puzzling me. Maybe powder has got less powefull with the years?

Any unburnt powder in the 34.5grn?
 
Yeah that one bullet had 100% case capacity from being push in and still no over pressure. Am going to try it next with more crimp to solved the in seating issue and see if that effects the pressure.

I was still getting some un burnt grains is in the barrel even at 34.5gr. Not a big deal and more crimp may help that too.
 
Ok, so I tried applying more crimp, I added 1/4 of turn on the die, and it seems to have helped quite a lot. I'll repeat the numbers from my previous session (and try to place them in an HTML table, let's see if this works):

33.81306.655.63
34.01311.034.99
34.21311.224.60
34.41374.815.37
[td]Charge (grn)[/td]
[td]Velocity Average (ft/s)[/td]
[td]Velocity StdDev (ft/s)[/td]

And these are my results from today, applying a bit more crimp (1/4 of turn on the die)

33.81320.232.46
34.01336.613.22
34.21349.437.17
34.41369.418.30
[td]Charge (grn)[/td]
[td]Velocity Average (ft/s)[/td]
[td]Velocity StdDev (ft/s)[/td]

So it seems to behave more normally with more crimp. The velocity increase as the charge increases, and the Standard Deviation also is a bit less (increases 30% if there's less crimp). I've had 2 bullets clock past 1400fps, one at 34.2 clocked at 1401 and a bullet at 34.4 clocked at 1400 flush. It means I'm getting close to my objective of a 1400fps average.

I've got only 11 bullets left. I means only 2 series of tests. I'm tempted to try 34.4 again to get more datapoints and 34.6, or 34.6 and 34.8. Then a trip to the range for only 11 shots is kind of a waste...
 
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Okie, so I went to the range again today, with still hotter loads. Not exactly what I expected. I'm gonna re-port the whole table

33.81320.232.46
34.01336.613.22
34.21349.437.17
34.41369.418.30
34.6138736.17
34.81383.224.52
[td]Charge (grn)[/td]
[td]Velocity Average (ft/s)[/td]
[td]Velocity StdDev (ft/s)[/td]

The velocity doesn't seem to increase much (15-20 fps), but the recoil felt was tremendous. It was quite hot today at the range, and H110 is notoriously sensible to temperature, so it might make a difference. In any case, when I fired, I thought the gun was gonna jump out of my hand, kinda like when you let a small girl shoot a high calibre for the first time and she's surprised. After a few shots I thought my trigger finger was gonna bleed. So for now at least I'm gonna settle for a 34grn load on H110; powerfull enough that you know it'll always cycle, yet you've got enough margin to account for lot-to-lot difference and temperature difference.

The standard deviation with H110 is also really high. I was chronying 9mm with titegroup and the std dev was less than 0.5% (like 5fps stddev with an average of 1080fps) and rifle rounds with IMR4064 and h4895 (std dev was 0.5-1% for the rifle rounds). With H110, the std dev is about 2%. I use the same equipment for all these reloads so that's not the issue.

Next I'll try Alliant 2400. I already have the powder, but I'll try with the 44magnum first I think.
 
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Awesome post! Thanks for sharing that data :)

I am still trying to solve my bullet set back issues. I need to buy some Speer bullets that mic at .500 rather than my .49 berrys. Also need to mic my expander die and see if it's over sized. Unfortunately am away from home right now.
 
Dsiwy said:
Awesome post! Thanks for sharing that data :)

I am still trying to solve my bullet set back issues. I need to buy some Speer bullets that mic at .500 rather than my .49 berrys. Also need to mic my expander die and see if it's over sized. Unfortunately am away from home right now.
Click to expand...

I'm using the same expander (Lee) and don't have that problem. The expander will expand more if the die is screwed deeper, so you can unscrew the die and then screw it back little by little until the bullet just barely fit. Maybe you just got a bad batch of bullets.
 
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