Saturday, May 14, 2016

Super Mega Chrono Nerd Post

Six different .357SIG loads from Lucky Gunner had their date with the chronograph yesterday. The MCF&G range was still swampy in places, but there were more dry spots than wet ones in the bays. You wanted to watch where you walked in sneakers, though.

First, the full metal jacket practice ammo from the major domestic manufacturers:
Remington 125gr MC
LO: 1338
HI: 1369
AV: 1355
ES: 30.73
SD: 8.88
American Eagle 125gr FMJ
LO: 1326
HI: 1361
AV: 1344
ES: 35.66
SD: 12.80
Winchester 125gr FMJ
LO: 1335
HI: 1358
AV: 1349
ES: 22.62
SD: 7.14
As you can see, they're as alike as three peas in a pod, ballistics-wise, and all of them steamier by a hundred feet per second than the Speer Lawman FMJ I tested a week or so ago. Given the extra bright muzzle flash, I would have supposed the Remington to be noticeably faster than the others, but it was not to be.

I have to note that the consistency displayed by all three loadings bordered on freakish, with the Remington being especially a surprise. I may have to run another string from that lot number just because...

For defense ammo, I tried two pretty conventional .357SIG loadings from Winchester and Federal, and a wild card from Hornady. Remember that the .357SIG is, in design intention at least, a one-trick pony: It's intended to emulate the 125gr .357 Magnum rounds that had such a mythical rep for "stopping power" in law enforcement circles in the Eighties and Nineties. Putting Hornady's deep-penetrating 147gr bullet, normally operating at subsonic velocities from a 9mm pistol, atop the bottlenecked .357SIG case is unusual.
Hornady 147gr XTP
LO: 1169
HI: 1203
AV: 1188
ES: 34.18
SD: 11.78
Winchester Elite 125gr PDX1
LO: 1326
HI: 1369
AV: 1346
ES: 42.90
SD: 14.00
Federal Tactical 125gr HST
LO: 1339
HI: 1380
AV: 1356
ES: 40.62
SD: 13.63
As you can see, the XTP is well and truly supersonic when launched from the 4" Glock 32 and should probably come close to matching the claimed box-flap velocity of 1225fps out of a 4.5" Glock 31 barrel. What this does to terminal performance awaits the arrival of some jello to discover.

Because I can't math so good, after firing the sixty rounds for the chronograph strings, I finished the remaining forty rounds in the Remington box and then fired a dozen more rounds of Winchester, giving me a total of 112 rounds for the morning instead of the 102 I'd meant to fire. There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

That makes 680 total rounds fired since the firearm was last cleaned or lubricated, with three failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126) and three failures to feed (#221, #224, #282). 1,320 rounds left to go.
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