Today wasn't too cold and not much rain, so I made a range trip to see if the stuff I heard about the Hi-Tek coated bullets being faster than jacketed was true. I had read that on some forums, but didn't know for a fact with my own eyes. And it gave me an excuse to play with my Caldwell chronograph too.
The bullets I tested were as follows:
Bayou Bullets 158 grain coated SWC
Zero Bullets 158 grain jacketed soft point
All were loaded with CCI 550 primers and 16.3 grains of Win 296 and all had a hard roll crimp. The cases used were Starline with around 2-3 loadings on them.
The test guns were my old Rossi model 1892SRC carbine, which has a 20" barrel and my 6 1/2" barrel S&W model 27-5.
The objectives were to:
1. See what velocity difference, if any, was encountered simply by switching from a jacketed bullet to a Hi-Tek coated bullet, all else being equal.
2. To see the velocity difference between a short, vented barrel and a long, non-vented barrel with the same load.
I set my chrony up around 15 feet in front and started testing. Temps stayed between 53-55 degrees the whole time testing.
Results:
First up is the pistol.
With the Zero bullets, the average velocity was 1146 fps with a standard deviation of 18.19
With the Bayou Bullets, the average velocity was 1234 fps with a standard deviation of 13.58
Now for the rifle results:
With the Zero bullets, the average velocity was 1696 fps with a standard deviation of 15.44
With the Bayou bullets, the average velocity was 1762 fps with a standard deviation of 12.29
The coated lead bullets averaged 88 fps faster than the jacketed bullets with the same load in the pistol. With the rifle, the coated lead bullets averaged 66 fps faster than the jacketed bullets.
The rifle averaged 550 fps faster than the pistol with the Zero jacketed bullets with this load. With the coated lead bullets, it averaged 528 fps faster in the rifle.
These are the first coated lead bullets I've loaded. I've shot mainly jacketed bullets since the nineties until last year, when I started trying the plated bullets out. They seemed to shoot just fine, but the pricing on them has gotten so close to what I bought the Zero bullets for it wasn't worthwhile to mess with them. They were only around a penny or so a round cheaper. But, after reading about the coated bullets here and at the S&W forums I decided to give them a go and now I am glad I did. I get better performance for less cost. Accuracy on them seemed to be par with the jacketed bullets, but I really wasn't doing an accuracy check as much as looking at the velocity difference between the 2 styles of bullets. I didn't see any more smoke from the lead bullets than I did with the jacketed bullets either. And I had no leading problems either. The only problem I have run into with the Bayou lead bullets was last time I had shot them (which was the first time I had shot them), I ran into a problem with bullet creep in a short barrel Colt revolver my brother has. I re-crimped those bullets with a very hard roll crimp and that is what I shot today. Today I saw no sign of bullet creep on either the revolver or the rifle, but my brother didn't bring his Colt Lawman to the range today.
The biggest surprise for me today was how much more velocity this load picked up out of the rifle than the pistol. I had guessed that it would be around 400 fps but I was low on my guess by over 100 fps. And another surprise to me was that the coated lead bullets picked up a significant amount of speed with the same powder charge.
Also, my brother and I played with our ARs too and burned up 200-300 rounds each. It was a fun range trip. The weather looked like **** and kept everyone away, so we had the pistol side all to ourselves.
