I had to resort to what I could find and ended up with shotgun powder. I bought Promo and it works well for both my .38 loads and .45 ACP. A little dirty but I like cleaning guns as much as shooting so I don't care.
Oh, and it was cheap.
If I remember right, Promo is weight-for-weight identical to Red Dot. I seem to recall that the
density is different, but it will behave the same as Red Dot at any given charge weight.
I used Red Dot(along with a bunch of other fast powders) under HBWCs when I was running low on Bullseye. All worked okay, but everything I tried had issues that made me not like it as well as Bullseye. Titegroup and VV310 were too hot and caused leading sometimes and W231 left me with too much unburned powder(at lest with HBWCs), and Red Dot(IMO) metered too inconsistenly in my Auto Disk. I should have tried Clays-I have a pound and a half of it. Actually, I'm not sure why I didn't.
Since I found two pounds of Bullseye last month, I'm back to using it with HBWCs. With my recent acquisition of a 52-2, I'm going to be loading
a lot of those. I loaded 100 with 2.8gr Bullseye(the auto-disk is dead on with a standard deviation of about .05gr at that weight). The 52-2 cycled and ejected perfectly with that charge, although my shooting left something to be desired and didn't do the gun justice
I've gone to using Titegroup with a 125gr cast bullet for a pleasant range shooting load. I don't remember the exact load, but it was about mid-range in Lyman. A local caster made me a deal I couldn't pass up on 2K of these 125gr bullets(under lead cost) and I couldn't pass it up even though it's not my preferred weight. The caster lubed them in the grooves with Alox, then tumble lubed them again in Liquid Alox. With Titegroup, this is a
very smoky load but doesn't lead at all. It's also a very accurate, both out of my revolvers and out of my M92 Rifle. I often start new shooters out with this load in the rifle, as it's cheaper than the current price on .22s and has about as much recoil(i.e. none). Even in a handgun, it's still pleasant and very manageable for a new shooter.
