I just went to the Hornady web site. They do not offer ANY 230-grain bullets in .45 caliber -- not in .452" or .454" diameters.
Correction: I finally found the Hornady 230-grain FMJ bullet. And they don't tell us the bullet length. Not helpful.
A Gold Dot isn't a FMJ bullet, it's a JHP bullet. Those generally are loaded to a shorter C.O.A.L. than FMJ bullets. C.O.A.L. affects pressure only INdirectly; what counts is seating depth. The only roughly comparable load data on the Alliant web site is the Speer bullet I mentioned, which is specified at a C.O.A.L. of 1.26".The Alliant site also shows a jacketed gold dot 230 gr round with max load of 6.0 gr of Unique at 1.2 COAL.
Your understanding is incorrect. Berry's Bullets is probably responsible for promoting this drivel, and they have now changed to advising people to use any load data for lead OR jacketed bullets of the same weight. Which is idiocy and, IMHO, bordering on promulgating dangerous misinformation.It surprises me that Alliant would have a higher max load for a plated bullet. It is my understanding that plated bullets should be loaded as if they were lead bullets at lower velocities.
The bottom line is that you are using a bullet for which you have NO load data, and for which you have not calculated the seating depth for comparison against recipes for known bullets for which you can calculate the seating depth. You are flying blind. What you need to do is go back to a starting load, get access to a chronograph, and find out what your loads are actually doing. Then work up in small increments.
For what it's worth, this issue of comparing seating depths for unknown bullets is one that plagues all reloaders. To attempt to address that information vacuum, awhuile back our member Niemi24s instituted a bullet dimension project, for the express purpose of tabulating information on many bullets in order to allow calculating comparative seating depths for unlisted bullets. The discussion thread is here:
https://forum.m1911.org/showthread.p...ns-Bullet-Data
The actual table of data is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...#gid=519572970
The useful information is the lengths. Subtract the length of a .45 ACP case from the C.O.A.L. and you have the exposed bullet length. Subtract that from the total bullet length and you have the seating depth. For any recipe, you want your seating depth to be no greater than the seating depth in the recipe. If you seat deeper, you increase pressure. The Precision Delta bullet is included -- two people reported it. Their measurements don't agree, but they're close. The Speer TMJ bullet is listed. The Speer is listed as being .655" long. The Precision Delta is slightly shorter, by .005" or .009", depending on which entry you use. And our table includes the Hornady #45177, with a bullet length of .643".
But the Alliant data for the Speer bullet called for a C.O.A.L. of 1.260". You are using a C.O.A.L. of 1.230", so you are seating .03" deeper than the Alliant recipe and the bullet is only saving you .012" -- so you are still losing .018" of case depth compared to the Alliant data. That means your pressure will be greater for the same powder charge if you use the Hormady bullet.
But you are using a Precision Delta bullet that's longer than the Hornady, but shorter than the Speer (but not much shorter). Still higher pressure.
Again: IMHO, you need to increase your seating depth to 1.260" (or pretty close to that, if 1.260" won't feed in your pistol), reduce your charge to the starting load, get access to a chronograph, and work up from the starting load.
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