Originally Posted by Wiley Coyote
Originally Posted by nitroexpress
Loaded up 100 380 acp's with some 90 gr. Speer Gold Dots. Seated them to .974 over 3.1 grains of BE. Pop'ed one in the mag and snapped the slide and chambered just fine. So I taper crimped them all and then decided I would load up the magazine and upon loading round #2 knew Houston had a problem. COAL was too long for the magazine. Didn't have a issue with one cause the nose isn't buried inside the mag housing, Ugly. So I ended up just having to nudge them down to a COAL of .965 and all is well. Let that be a lesson on auto loaders, make sure action will go to battery, but at the same time be sure the overall length will work inside the magazine. Sometimes it's easy to forget the simplest of things.



Case gauges are your friend.


True, they are nice to have, but in this case they would not have made any difference I don't think. Speer's manual gave me a max oal of I think .984 and I had a minimum oal from Alliant of .970, which is where I seated them at initially to see if the slide would go to battery which it did. I really did not want to seat them much below the information provided by Alliant, and when I first found out that they were having a nose problem in the Browning model 10/71 I tried them in a Bersa 380 I have and no problem in that magazine at all. I guess the mag on the Browning is just a very tight fit.

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