Reloading for Handgunners. Patrick Sweeney

Harder bullets in this instance will only make it worse, as the bullet flame-cuts just the same as the soft one did.

      The solution is twofold: larger diameter, to match the throat if at all possible, and soft enough to obdurate at the pressures involved. “But, you can’t send a .456-inch bullet down a .452-inch bore.” You can if it is soft enough. And properly lubed. (In this instance, fat chance of finding a .456-inch bullet. You’ll have to cast your own.)

      Or, use a lubed, hollow-base bullet and let it bump up to fill the throat and then squeeze down to fit the bore. As a final option, a new cylinder, reamed with throats of the correct diameter. This was a last resort choice, but done in the old days when there were more (typically for the Colt SAA) cylinders available, and fewer factory-new choices.

      To diverge slightly, the solution was to take a leading-prone and oversized-throat .45 Colt, find an inexpensive .38 Special cylinder, and have the charge holes/chambers reamed out to .45 Colt and correct throats. Then the new cylinder would be fitted to the gun (setting back the barrel if need-be) and all was hunky-dory. It ended up costing twice as much as a new gun, but the accuracy was typically top-notch.

      Lead bullets are not just cast, they can also be swaged. In swaging, lead wire is cut to proper lengths, and then the bullet maker uses hydraulic presses to simply squish the lead wire segments into bullet shape. Then the bullet is coated (usually with a dip or wash) with lube, boxed and sold. Obviously, a swaged bullet is a lot softer than a cast one, and thus more suited to low-pressure uses.

      Plated bullets are truly full metal jacketed, but the nomenclature is either “plated” or “total metal jacket.”

      The basic, century-plus old lead round nose, next to a jacketed hollowpoint.

      JACKETED

      Jacketed bullets won’t flame-cut, but they are not all that keen on obdurating, either. They will, but the pressures involved are typically a lot more than with lead bullets. Jacketed bullets offer many advantages – no leading, controlled expansion, higher potential velocities – but they do so at higher cost. Not always, but often.

      Jacketed bullets come to us via two manufacturing methods: cup-and-core and bonded. In c-c bullets (jhp, soft point, and fmj*), the lead wire, as with swaged bullets, gets cut to length then slammed into an open copper or gilding metal (95 percent copper, five percent zinc) cup. The bullet is pummeled, squeezed, shaped and given a finish slam to keep things together, and that’s it. In an interesting aside, the last step of manufacture of cup-and-core bullets is to hydraulically press the core into the jacket. You see, gilding metal is springy, but lead isn’t. So, if you finish-size to diameter a jacketed bullet, the lead gets squished down, but the jacket then springs back. Granted, the spring is perhaps a ten-thousandth of an inch, but it is there. So, the lead core gets re-swaged back out to the jacket interior walls.

      Under more-or-less normal use, the two stay together. However, when jhps actually expand, it isn’t unusual for the lead core and the jacket to separate, which is bad for terminal performance.

      On the lead round nose, note the cylindrical bearing surface, and the rounded nose above. A good design (which this is) has them as separate components. Older designs had the round nose blending smoothly into the cylinder, and typically they didn’t shoot as well as this one does.

      Cast lead bullets can also have a gas check. The gas check works like a set of copper galoshes, keeping the base of the bullet protected from the powder gases.

      The truncated cone. The TC was the original 9mm Parabellum design, back in 1904. It suddenly became vogue in the U.S. with the adoption of the 40 S&W, in 1990.

      Bonded bullets are those which essentially (each maker has their own proprietary process) the lead core is soldered to the copper/ brass jacket. They can’t separate. No matter how you peel back the jacket, the lead core will stay bonded to it. And the lead, being quite malleable, will stay attached to itself. Bonded bullets have a stellar record of expanding while remaining intact, even after penetrating intervening obstacles like windows, sheet metal and heavy clothing. But the process of bonding adds cost.

      * jhp = jacketed hollow points; fmj = full metal jacket

      PLATED

      Plated bullets are made to offer the best of both worlds – lead and jacketed. The soon-to-be-plated bullet core is typically swaged to shape. Then, the bullet cores are dunked in a chemical solution, and while in the solution an electrical charge electroplates them with copper. The trick is to plate the bullets as individual bullets, and not just plate the whole pile of them into a copper-encased blob. How do they do it? I don’t know. They won’t say, and I don’t blame them.

      The double-base wadcutter is a simple cylinder, and can be loaded in either direction.

      The hollow-base wadcutter. The bullet is loaded base-down, and it acts exactly like a minié ball. The skirt expands to grab the rifling, and the nose-heavy design keeps it going straight. And yes, they travel a lot further than 50 yards.

      One thing that I do know is that plated bullets can be very good, but they can have some quirks. The soft core has a soft plating, and the thickness of the plating makes a big difference in the final product. Thicker is better. Also, the plating process, since it has to use some method of keeping the bullets apart, ends up with bullets that aren’t as “crisp” as jacketed ones. However, that can be solved to a certain extent. One method of making plated bullets even better is a secondary swaging operation, often called a “double-strike.” There, the plated bullets are individually swaged to final dimension, and the swaging cleans up some of the vagueness of the bullet dimensions. You can recognize such plated bullets by the impact mark on the base, a circular pressed area.

      The plated bullet is not a jacketed bullet, it is a compromise. It is meant to deliver many of the benefits of a jacketed bullet, at something closer to the cost of a cast lead bullet. The hardness/durability of the plated bullet depends on the alloy of plating, the thickness plated and the pressure used to double-strike the finished product.