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Thread: 10mm 200gr Hardcast Load

  1. #61
    Deadeye Dick Clusterfrack's Avatar
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    10mm 200gr Hardcast Load

    Quote Originally Posted by GJM View Post
    A few thoughts.

    1) I carried Underwood .40 for most of a summer in AK, for similar reasoning, until I realized the load was not reliable in my OEM or KKM barrels when shot from compromised positions with partially filled magazines.

    2) if a body shot dissuades a bear, great, but I wouldn’t count on breaking a bear down with shoulder shots with a semi auto 10/40, like you would with a heavy rifle or Brenneke slugs. The brain is the only high probability quick way to incapacitate a bear with a service pistol.

    3) I value reliability over bullet performance, and the Lehigh penetrator is the sweet spot for my use in a service pistol. I carry hard cast in my revolvers.
    I completely agree about reliability. I've done a decent amount of testing, and I'm confident that I've got a reliable G20 hardcast load. But I sure wouldn't carry anything that I hadn't personally tested.

    What happened in your .40? Was it bullet profile or ?

    My plan is not to shoot at a bear at all, but if that fails, I know I'll be aiming hard at the brain. But would you say that it is a lower but reasonable probability that a heavy wide meplat handgun bullet (.44 or 10mm) strike to the shoulder could slow/stop a bear? That's really the only reason I can see to carry anything other than a 9mm with Lehigh.

    Another question: do you carry your bear defense load when you return to civilization, or do you swap in a more conventional defense load?
    Last edited by Clusterfrack; 06-02-2019 at 03:37 PM.
    "You can never have too many knives." --Joe Ambercrombie
    Shabbat shalom, motherf***ers! --Mordechai Jefferson Carver

  2. #62
    Quote Originally Posted by Clusterfrack View Post
    Thanks for posting. If you have time, can you describe your grizzly encounter in more detail?

    Your reasoning about the trade-offs between recoil and terminal ballistics makes sense, and it's great that you have measured your performance with the different options. What were your splits with the different loads?

    I considered carrying 9mm with Lehigh XP because of the advantage in capacity and shootability. However, because grizzlies are fucking terrifying I decided to go with the heavy, fast 10mm load that could (in theory) be effective for a shoulder hit if I missed a head shot.
    On the encounter: Bear and I were coming down a narrow stream coming off a glacier, but on opposite sides. Because of the brush and terrain and deeply cut bank, visibility was limited. Very strong wind coming off glacier and down stream. I was walking upstream, bear was coming down stream. Maybe 20mph wind directly into my face. Thankfully I had stopped to drink some water, have deep thoughts, some shit like that. I was standing against a rock wall, maybe a bit out of the sun, and boom there's a massive burly male grizz, strutting down the stream like a linebacker. I've seen tons of grizz in the wild; for an interior bear this guy was old and big. Just from body language, he gave no fucks.

    I realize I am probably inside, or maybe at the edge of, his "oh shit what's that I'm charging" zone. I consider moving, slowly stepping forward, but he is so goddamn close that even that seems like a massive roll of the dice. It's not like running into a bear at a salmon stream where they aren't really that territorial.

    I have a 5" (cutdown) super red hawk in a chest harness with 300 hardcast something or other. I shoot this gun ALOT, both with full power loads, but also doing PPC type drills with reduced loads, dumping 6 rounds into an index cards at 10 yards, etc. I feel very comfortable with it, up close, out long, high speed, low speed, whatever.

    It is immediately apparent that this gun is a peashooter. My caveman brain is screaming "long gun long gun long gun," 375, 338 mag, anything.

    I stay frozen. He continues down the stream toward me. To make a long story short, I basically reverse stalked him. Every time his head went behind a bush, I moved to a better position of cover/shadow. Puckering continues because as he gets closer to me (like 10-15 yards at one point), he smells something interesting in my direction (maybe a ground squirrel or something), and begins to meander around the stream bank. He does not smell me--the wind direction is strong and constant. So nothing good is really happening. There is no way to make myself known without risking getting charged.

    I have my revolver out but it's pretty useless, I realize. I am unable to visualize any situation in which I have time for more than one shot with this 44 mag.

    This bullshite goes on forever. There is something very interesting to this bear around this area of the stream bank, he keeps circling back and forth (it wasn't me, because later he smelled me and gave a little woof).

    Finally he gets on past me, I follow him at a distance (100-200 yrs) to make sure I'm not going to run into him on my way back to my campsite, then he turns up the mountain going the other way.

    With the benefit of hindsight, I still don't know if I'd done anything differently. If the bear had been a tentative looking female, I think I would have made myself known immediately? Maybe? But when you're 30 paces away, it's a hard call. This dude was the baddest mother on the mountain. And when he finally did smell me (when he was maybe 100 yards past me, and I'd started to relax, and the wind was finally blowing from me to him), he froze, whipped his head around to look directly at me (I don't think he could see me, he just sensed from the wind), and woofed. Then continued he continued to amble slowly down the stream.

    Split times with my 44 mag and hot 300grainers...I dunno. Maybe measured in seconds? Hilariously slow.

    Splits with the G22 and 200gr hardcast, from memory they were slower, but not that much slower than 9mm, maybe .25?

    Splits with the hotter 200gr, again I can't quite remember but maybe .45-ish? That also might be an average in a long string. For me a lot of grip milking happens if I'm shooting long strings with my G20 and hot loads. I guess for my size and hand strength, a G22 with 200gr at 950 doesn't cause any real milking of the grip, my POI doesn't really change even in timed/rapid fire.

    Long post, again, thanks for all the info. Just food for thought.

    Also, the Underwood/BB 200gr hardcast is utterly reliable in both my G22s (Gen 3 and 4) and with a KKM 40 cal barrel. As boringly reliable as ball. However, the met plat is much smaller than the beartooths you are using. Guessing there's a pretty direct relationship there, wound channel vs good feeding.

    My G20, like yours, always had *some* issue when I fed it very hot loads. It was perfectly reliable up to a point and then as stuff got hotter, reliability dropped off steeply.

    Okay I'll sign off to avoid being the talkative FNG. Thanks again.
    Last edited by CTX44; 06-02-2019 at 03:17 PM.

  3. #63
    Deadeye Dick Clusterfrack's Avatar
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    Thanks for the detailed and helpful post, @CTX44. I'm glad it worked out for you and for the bear. It sounds like you did the right things. And welcome to P-F. You seem like the kind of FNG we want around here.
    Last edited by Clusterfrack; 06-02-2019 at 03:16 PM.
    "You can never have too many knives." --Joe Ambercrombie
    Shabbat shalom, motherf***ers! --Mordechai Jefferson Carver

  4. #64
    I have some Underwood hardcast rounds coming in tomorrow I plan to shoot in some clear gel, the 200gr .40 is one of them. I'm curious how it will do.
    We could isolate Russia totally from the world and maybe they could apply for membership after 2000 years.

  5. #65
    Man...I have only killed black bears. Pretty similar to deer. Some of my AK buddies have killed grizzlies but it was always from a distance, and the bears died without drama.

    I don't think if you missed the braincase, that a hit to the shoulder, from the front, with any handgun, would stand any chance of slowing down a big grizzly. These animals are f-ing huge and seriously juiced up if they are charging you. But I'm just theorizing. I think the only thing that really slows them down is center mass hits with a medium bore rifle.

    Maybe if with your pistol, you miss directly low but stay centerline and put one through the heart...that has obvious long term value, at least later in the fight. I think the common mental landmark is the nose if you're charged, then the neck if the animal is past you and you're still in the fight. I kill big feral pigs with neck shots all the time; even nicking the spine pancakes them for a second or two, then you can quickly follow up. This is true even with a 17hmr. Shouldn't be true, but I've done it several times. I think it's like getting hit in the jaw for us.

    If I'm in the lower 48, but outside of grizzly country, I carry a 5 shot SW 44 mag with 240gr XTPs. Pretty much good for everything and I can take a shot on a game animal from pretty far out if I need to. Ie it's not just a defensive arm. Also I realize I am speaking heresy, but I have not seen hardcast pistol bullets on deer or hog sized animals do anything but pencil through and do (to my eyes) unimpressive damage. I use some kind of expanding bullet if I'm in deer/pig/mountain lion/small bear woods. Obviously, for grizzly, hardcast.

    Again, the above are just my theories...reasonable people might differ.

  6. #66
    Quote Originally Posted by Clusterfrack View Post
    I completely agree about reliability. I've done a decent amount of testing, and I'm confident that I've got a reliable G20 hardcast load. But I sure wouldn't carry anything that I hadn't personally tested.

    What happened in your .40? Was it bullet profile or ?

    My plan is not to shoot at a bear at all, but if that fails, I know I'll be aiming hard at the brain. But would you say that it is a lower but reasonable probability that a heavy wide meplat handgun bullet (.44 or 10mm) strike to the shoulder could slow/stop a bear? That's really the only reason I can see to carry anything other than a 9mm with Lehigh.

    Another question: do you carry your bear defense load when you return to civilization, or do you swap in a more conventional defense load?
    If you study the long term statistics on bear encounters, handguns, even in service calibers, are actually a bit more effective than long guns in stopping bear attacks. On the face of it, that seems preposterous, given the difference in power between long guns and handguns. The reasons for this are, I believe, twofold. First, handguns are easier to maneuver and fire multiple shots with in a FUT, and bears don’t like to be shot. If you had to kill a bear to stop the attack, the statistics would be much different, and the bears would be way out on top.

    All of this is for defending yourself and doesn’t contemplate hunting a bear with a handgun, where of course you want the heaviest possible bullet. My personal strategy is to do everything possible to defuse the situation. With a handgun, if that is not successful, and I have time, I am going to fire a warning shot. If that works, that is your most effective handgun round ever. If that doesn’t work, and I have time, I am going to shoot the bear somewhere in the body. The reason is that bears don’t like being shot, and there is a reasonable chance that a shot anywhere painful will cause the bear to discontinue the attack. If none of that works, I am shooting for the brain, until the attack ends or I can’t shoot anymore. The best part of all of this is the marksmanship challenge gets progressively easier as the attack progresses.

    One of the things I figured out early on as a pilot, and later as a pilot in Alaska, is the ideal way to learn, is from the mistakes of other people. I literally spent fifteen years trying to make wide meplat bullets feed in semi auto service pistols. Sometimes I figured out they wouldn’t work in hours, sometimes in days, and at other times it took me a whole season to learn the lesson. I have yet to find a single wide meplat hard cast load that would work to my reliability standard. As I have reported over the years, I tried so many Glock 20/29 combinations of barrels and recoil springs that I lost track, the Glock 22, the S&W 3rd Gen 10mm pistols, none of which worked. The HK USP FS and HK45C are the only pistols that have met my heavier load reliability, and even still I am launching Underwood Lehigh because I value reliability first. It is kind of hard to go warning shot, body shot, and brain shot when you have a stoppage.
    Likes pretty much everything in every caliber.

  7. #67
    Very informative post. I haven't had that many encounters with grizzlies, maybe around two dozen, i.e. not much compared to folks who live in Alaska. So far never had to use spray or fire a shot, and I always have both spray and a pistol.

    I will definitely try the 200gr underwood with a half loaded mag and a weak grip. I do not even remember remote signs of hiccuping, but I will definitely try it this week. I am crossing my fingers as I say this.

    GJM: this is the 140gr Underwood/Lehigh load? Does it shoot lower than the heavier stuff?

  8. #68
    Quote Originally Posted by CTX44 View Post
    Very informative post. I haven't had that many encounters with grizzlies, maybe around two dozen, i.e. not much compared to folks who live in Alaska. So far never had to use spray or fire a shot, and I always have both spray and a pistol.

    I will definitely try the 200gr underwood with a half loaded mag and a weak grip. I do not even remember remote signs of hiccuping, but I will definitely try it this week. I am crossing my fingers as I say this.

    GJM: this is the 140gr Underwood/Lehigh load? Does it shoot lower than the heavier stuff?
    I carry the Underwood 200 grain 45 Super load in my USP FS and HK45C:

    https://www.underwoodammo.com/produc...eme-penetrator

    However, I have shot the Lehigh xtreme bullet in so many different 9, 40, 10, and 45 pistols, and never had a stoppage, that I am confident that the combination of the FMJ bullet profile and moderate velocity of the Underwood loadings is conducive to reliability. It has been a while since I shot the 10mm Underwood Lehigh, and I don’t recall exact POI. yes, it was the 140 in 10mm.
    Likes pretty much everything in every caliber.

  9. #69
    Deadeye Dick Clusterfrack's Avatar
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    Thanks George. I appreciate all of your help and experience.
    "You can never have too many knives." --Joe Ambercrombie
    Shabbat shalom, motherf***ers! --Mordechai Jefferson Carver

  10. #70
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    Myself and a good friend have worked quite a bit loading the the 10mm in the Glock platform. We both have pushed it over 1200 FPS with the 200 grain bullet. What we have found is that 1100-1150 is the optimal FPS with the 200 grain bullet as far as full power reliability. We also tried different bullet in the 200 grain range while maintaining that 1100-1150 and reliability was good.

    What we settled with was a 200 grain Montana Gold CMJ bullet loaded with Longshot powder in Starline brass. That bullet has a very hard jacket and it is of match quality. This load is accurate with 2” groups at 25 yards with 4 different G20s both gen 3 and gen 4s. We both have shot this load in the thousands to include shooting our duty quals which require some SHO other SHO and malfunction clearance drills. We both live in Alaska and carry the G20 with this load often.

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