Berry's Preferred Plated bullets in .40 S&W vs. HSM Plated

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SoupOrMan
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Berry's Preferred Plated bullets in .40 S&W vs. HSM Plated

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Having run out of bullets to reload and needing them faster than Graf's or Midway could ship them, I drove down to my local gun shop to pick up some non hollow-point bullets. Sure, it might be fun to run a USPSA match shooting nothing but my handloaded combination of 180-grain Hornady XTPs over 7 grains of Longshot but I'm not made of money, nor will I be once that mortgage kicks in. So I needed some bullets in a hurry.

The local gun shop is on the case with a rotating supply of bulk bullets. Sometimes they're Berrys, sometimes they're not. This time I managed to pick up a box of 1000 Berry's Preferred Plated 180-grain bullets in .40/10mm. So with that and a new can of Universal, I was off to the races.

The bullets are pretty simple: a lead bullet completely encased in gilding metal. Unlike the usual truncated cone shapes that I'm used to seeing for .40 caliber bullets, these are round-nosed. So, they look a little weird to me when I load them. They're like the younger cousin of the .45ACP ball round that most people are used to seeing.

One of the things I've noticed compared to my previous batch of copper-plated bullets (Midway's HSM brand) is how uniform the bullets are. The HSMs I've gotten have been up to .408" diameter, making the bullets difficult to seat and re-size with the reloading equipment I have at hand. The HSMs were also difficult to gauge seating depth, as I'd get anywhere from 1.105" to 1.145" OAL due to the bullets being very different. The Berrys bullets are far closer in tolerances as I've gotten a consistent overall length of 1.126", plus or minus .002".

The only place where the HSM bullets do a little better than the Berrys during reloading is when they're run through the Lee factory crimp die. The Berrys bullets gain an additional .001 to .002" in length when they go through the post-sizing process in the factory crimp die. The HSMs tend to stay the same.

Ah, but how do they feed and shoot? In a cleaned and lightly-lubed magazine, they feed just fine with no hiccups. In a dry and rarely-used magazine, they don't suffer the same hiccups as other bullet styles. The HSMs are regular truncated cone bullets you'll usually see, and the truncated cone bullets have tended to stop feeding in a dry or dirty magazine, causing nasty dents in the cases as the slide goes forward without pushing the cartridge completely into the chamber. As for shooting, they stay on target, in my case a 8" Shoot-N-C set at 10 yards. (It's all I had, otherwise I'd have stuck with the IPSC "Metric" target.) I aim for the red dot in the middle of the target and get a nice tight group with them. So basically if you can stick it into the case with little fuss, it'll get launched without much fuss, either. Hooray for consistency! They also seem to like being fired from a load of 5.5 grains of Universal without leaving any major copper deposits behind. This is also a boon to those of us who don't break down and clean the gun entirely after every shoot.

I don't know if I completely like these bullets yet, but I'll keep using them if they keep feeding despite the cleanliness of the magazines. So far, so good.
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