Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Handguns New Snubby .38 Special Round From Federal

Liability concerns would preclude a hot load in an 38 S&W case.

Anyway, who cares about saving a few tenths of powder for the sake of efficiency when there's nothing impressive about the velocity or energy of this load.
Maybe the load contains a "magic bullet". Maybe not.
Meanwhile, buy something like Buffalo Bore or roll your own.

Yeah, if it starts moving further back, it should have more time to pick up velocity before exiting the barrel.

Yeah, that actually occurred to me before reading your post, and I made a modification of my post with that in mind.

130gr .38 Special load. Ha! There's a sucker born every minute.

Don

Think about what you said there. Yes, it makes the round more "efficient", meaning it uses less powder to reach a certain velocity. Or in different terms, it can't make use of as much powder within pressure limits. As I said, that makes sense for plinking loads, like typical wadcutter loads and Bullseye, not for a defensive load.

Any time you reduce case capacity, you reduce power and velocity potential. Why market a +P load that is intentionally restricted to lower velocity because of less powder capacity? It would make sense if it was designed as a reduced recoil load, but it's not.

I'm pretty sure Federal's marketing department is either suffering from cranial rectal inversion, or knows that a lot of people really are that dumb and will believe this is the next best thing.

They're not getting less velocity though, so that kinda kills your argument...or did you not catch that?
Additionally, lets say they did things your way. You would have to use large charges of much slower burning powder. That's fine if your ONLY criteria is making the chronograph tick a few numbers higher, but it comes at the expense of more recoil, but much more significantly for a defensive load; massive muzzle flash.

When you look at what they have produced, I'm not seeing that reducing case capacity has hurt the end product one iota. It's a balanced round.

Would have been nice to see a side by side comparison through the chrony (a believable one) with some other common loads. Kind of hard to say whether there is a velocity penalty or not, otherwise.

Shaking my head GunGeek. This is a very basic reloading principle and for all the experience you claim, you should know better. Pressure, capacity, and velocity are all related, you can't reduce capacity without affecting the other two.

Yondering... I get your point, and you're correct on a technical level. My point is, for the round they're trying to create; there is no down side to what they're doing (ballistically speaking).

You're absolutely right on your principles of reloading; I'm not trying to dispute that and I'm sorry if I gave off that impression.

But specific to the cartridge they're trying to produce, reducing case capacity isn't a liability, and could have some advantages.

Their finished load has very high velocities for a 135gr .38 Special...so they haven't really left anything on the table that's to the detriment of the load.
Had they used all the case capacity, used a much slower burning powder; certainly they could have ticked the chrono higher. But for a self defense load, you have to consider muzzle flash. And by using faster burning powders, muzzle flash is greatly reduced, and that's more important than a theoretical extra 50fps or so.

Sounds like they are simply making use of the excess space in the case, chosen powder/charge weight/volume is giving optimum velocity numbers without increasing pressure beyond their set limits. Velocity IS a pressure sign!

Wonder if the load is compressed?

Don't think I quite believe 9mm +P velocities in a snub nosed .38 .. That'd be a handful for sure.

Anybody want to take a guess at the velocity (roughly) of the middle 158gr hollowpoint fired from a snubbie?

Don

850. Do you cast those or buy them. I'd like to get some.

This is an awful lot of dialog over data from a busted chronograph.

Exactly. Everybody else other than Guns.com seems to be clocking them in the low to high 800's, which is to be expected.

This is the original H-S Wadcutter that was made by Albert's Bullet Co. for H-S before Federal bought them out.

This bullet was shot from a Model 36 2" at a row of 1-quart paper oil can filled with water. A typical HP would explode the first 1-2 cans and come to rest in the third to fourth can. This bullet at 950 fps exploded the first two cans, split the third can and the the base didn't stop till the 6th can. GREAT expansion and penetration all in one bullet.








I still have a 50 Cal can full of various H-S bullets as it was one of the main ones I loaded for LEOs in the DFW area back when I was in the business. There are two .357 bullets, one jacketed and one straight lead...




The whole story about H-S bullets is in Chapter 22 of the M&S book STREET STOPPERS. The chapter was written by Tom Burczynski who invented the H-S concept...

Bob

LOL. "The bad news is, the round is traditional .38 Special slow. The good news is that I know a guy with a "fast" chronograph. Let's do an article."

Sure there is. They're getting standard pressure velocity at +P pressure. If the goal was a mild load, they succeeded, but is that what you expect when you buy +P ammo?

You seem to be placing a lot of faith in some obviously bad chrono data. You're also downplaying the effect of larger case capacity on velocity potential and pretending it would have to create a lot more flash. Both are false. Frankly, it's funny that you'd defend something like this as a good idea. It's marketing aimed at the uninformed, pure and simple.

As a side note, do some research on your theory of slower burn rate = more flash. Powder choice has a lot more to do with that than burn rate.

Haha, you nailed it!