Well got some time to go to the range today so I loaded up some of these bullets with 8.0g of power pistol & took an old shot out 6" bbl'd s&w 586 with me. The results were not what I was expecting but it's a start. This pistol chronographs on the slow side & will do 1" @ 50ft with loads that it likes. This load/swaged bullet combo is no different than what I've been seeing from this pistol for the last decade.



That is a 1 1/4" group @ 50ft that averaged 1103fps from a 12-shot string over a chronograph that was 10ft from the muzzle.

I did a expansion/penetration test with wet newspaper. I took 12" of newspaper and put it in a brown paper bag and then taped everything as tight as I could get it with masking tape. I then put the bundled newspaper in a cooler and filled the cooler with water and let that sit for 2 days adding water as needed. I took the saturated bundled of newspapers out of the cooler and stood it upright on a table and shot the bundle 6 times with these swaged bullets from 25ft away.

I tried to be conservative with all my measurements.

Started finding bullet fragments, bullet jackets, cores at 6 1/2" into the newspaper (3 fragged bullets).



Found 2 intact bullets @ 7 1/2".



Found the 6th bullet intact @ 9"



All 6 bullets (3 @ 6 1/2", 2 @ 7 1/2", 1 @ 9")



I planned on making some more of these hp's and testing them with p+ loads in a snub nosed 38spl.

I'm also going to modify/tighten up the hp to retest in the 357 mag to see if all of them will stay intact. If not the next thing to try/test would be 9mm cases instead of the 380acp's, put a longer notch on the 9mm cases and add a plastic bb to the nose.

These bullets actually did pretty good for a quick test run at making them ( around 1 hour to setup-modify-adjust everything to turn out 25 test bullets).

I can see I'm going to be spending a little time playing with these hornady universal blank dies this winter. got a pile of 380acp/9mm/40s&w cases laying around waiting to be swaged into 38spl/357's/44spl/44mag's/45acp's.