Some months ago I loaded a few rounds of 9mm Luger using a 90gr Hornady XTP with the idea that a light bullet would work well as a short barrel load. The idea seems to have some merit and there are factory loads available from Wilson Combat, Double Tap and others that are loaded with the same idea in mind.
Well, for whatever reason, I never got too far with the 9mm XTP experiment. Not that it didn't show promise but I didn't have a decent quantity of these bullets to load and test in gel, test for accuracy at various distances, etc. And I didn't feel like buying a box or two of these bullets just to satisfy some curiosity.
What I did recently buy was a bag of 250 pulled Barnes 80gr bullets from American Reloading. I bought some rifle bullets and figured I'd order up a bag of the Barnes to play with since they were cheap.
Hodgdon shows data for this bullet on their Reloading Data Center with some of the highest velocity and lowest pressure coming from 572 powder. I loaded five of these bullets to the listed max using Federal cases and primers. These were seated to the listed overall length.
Yesterday I took these out for a trial run. I fired all five bullets into a 10% organic gel block from a Ruger 9mm Officer's Model. The gel was shot from a distance of ten feet. Two rounds were fired into bare gel and three rounds were fired through FBI heavy clothing.
This load, from the 3.6" barrel, had an average muzzle velocity of 1,274.33 feet per second. The muzzle energy for this load is 288 foot pounds and the standard deviation was 24.58. Recoil, as expected, was very mild and the load was completely comfortable to shoot. The downside is that the load is so mild that the gun will not run reliably. Several rounds stovepiped and the slide did not lock open on the last shot.
In gel, the clothing barrier appears to have had little effect on the bullet's performance. All five bullets penetrated between nine and 9.5" and opened perfectly. The only noticeable difference is that the bullets fired into bare gel seem to have petals that folded back toward the shank of the bullet a bit more than those fired through clothing.
Retained weight was 80 grains, plus or minus a tenth, as was expected. Barnes bullets seem to be tougher than pretty much anything and respond well to high velocity.
I'll have to bump the load up a bit and see if I can get reliable cycling without resorting to changing a recoil spring. It will be interesting to see what happens when this bullet is pushed to even higher velocity. Will it open that much faster and penetrate less or will the additional speed help the bullet penetrate closer to the FBI minimum of twelve inches? And will it be possible to push the bullet hard enough to meet the minimum spec? My gut says no.
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Originally Posted by 5pins
