53 Thesis: Smallbore Heresy

[SCCY Marshal]

I shelved the 53 in less than ideal conditions after the July trip and took it back out, today. It was still uncleaned after the July session With time for dust to settle, crud to cake, gunk to set, and fouling to set in.

Twelve rounds of PPU factory ammo fired and ejected with no issue. My thumb just pressed the ejector rod and the cases dumped rought out in my other palm. Fired a couple confirmation shots at 25 yards and then went single-action to engage a squash the size of a moderate pumpkin 100 yards out. Amazingly, the first hit failed to exit as the bullet totally fragmented in the flesh and I recovered the bits and base of the jacket after tearing it open.

Then repeated same with the Contender barrel on a different loaned frame. I had let my friend take the barrel back when he picked up his first frame and play with it for a few days. He was getting hits of various targets of opportuniy to 50+ yards in a clearing on his back forty, tried an older frame, and sent it back for me to try a different generation of T/C.

Anyway, I then set the shot-up squash about thirty yards out and ran the last six rounds into it though the 53 in double-action as quickly as the front sight settled back on target.

I love this stupid gun.

[SCCY Marshal]

While tossing the jacket fragments from the post above, I noticed several bases so multiple projectiles had expanded and fragmented.

While the PPU factory load is a couple hundred FPS slower than my non-expanding handloads, I had noticed that the PPU component bullets are subtly different than those in their complete ammunition. So I ran one out of the Contender into some gallon milk jugs covered with 4 layers of T-shirt. The bullet was caught in the fourth jug, having dented the back wall and was mushroomed perfectly to about 30 caliber. The first jug was blown open like a flat sheet of plastic, the fabric went over my head and landed behind me, and the second jug sported multiple rupture points. Jugs three and four had bullet-size holes in them.

My friend re-clothed and shot the remaining water jugs with a 124 grain Hornady XTP factory load out of his GLOCK 19. It was caught in the fourth jug, having dented the rear with a rough textured but perfect flowering expansion. Far less of a splash, though.

[SCCY Marshal]

Correcting the record after transcribing my hastily scrawled water test results into the 22 Jet load book. While writing the last post, I had crossed lines from another cartridge we'd shot into jugs.

The PPU factory load penetrated three jugs, denting the back of the third enough to cause a small leak there. The first jug turned into a jagged flat sheet and T-shirt material took flight as reported originally. And the bullet expanded to about 40 caliber; high of 0.450" exactly and low of about 35 caliber.