I haven't been able to find any Unique for quite a while now, but I think I may have found a substitute for a while. I found some Hodgdon cfe pistol powder and decided to give it a try. I looked up data from the Hodgdon website. In the 44 mag with 240 lee cast bullets I worked up to 11.5 grains of powder. This gave me just under 1300 fps out of a 7.5 inch Ruger super blackhawk and just over 1200 fps out of a 4 inch 629.
Accuracy was good out of both handguns. I really like the efficiency with this powder.
Assuming that you followed the load data, then that is excellent loading range for that powder - why on earth would you want to go back to Unique?
I encourage everyone to double check my loads. The data is availabe on the Hodgdon website. I didn't even work up all the way to the published max load, I like to leave a little breathing room.
I still really like Unique for the 44 Magnum. 10 grains of the stuff will push a 240 grain slug between 1000 and 1100 fps out of my Mountain gun, which is plenty of recoil for me and it will still kill anything I can hit with it.
I paid 25 bucks for the cfe pistol. I used to pay 18 bucks for Unique. When this powder shortage ends I will probably buy whichever is cheaper. I don't care about the copper erasing qualities of cfe because I'm shooting cast lead.
