Berry’s Hollow Base

[HiBC]

So by some of the comments here someone please explain then why the hollow base bullets are rated to 1500fps or 250fps faster than a solid flat base if the hollow base is meant for a low pressure round?

Talk (including mine) is cheap. Buy some,test them,let us know what you find.

You might get high velocity and low muzzle pressure from a 9mm carbine barrel 16 in long.

To keep from leading comps,the folksI know use Montana Gold bullets that are jacketed with no exposed lead at the base.

I gave it to my brother,but we have a Guncraft 38 Super single stack race gun built by Ben Jones in the 70's .It was owned by a champion shooter and has a high round count.
The ammo to run it is 40,000 psi 1400 + fps 38 Super,124 gr.For over 40 years

This gun is tight,slick,accurate,reliable. NOT beat up from those loads.
How?? The comp is efficient enough the gun runs on 9 to 12 pound recoil springs.That,and the Man who built it was a Master.

 

[kmw1954]

So I just looked through my Western Powder data for the 9mm+P and one has to get all the way to the high end with Silhouette, AA#5, True Blue of AA#7 to reach the 1250+ fps level and none of those loads are shown using Hollow Base bullets. Then for the 45acp+P one has to drop down all the way to a 155gr bullet to reach 1200fps.

HiBC if you would like to go out and purchase a 9mm carbine feel free, I'm not going to do it.

 

[74A95]

So I just looked through my Western Powder data for the 9mm+P and one has to get all the way to the high end with Silhouette, AA#5, True Blue of AA#7 to reach the 1250+ fps level and none of those loads are shown using Hollow Base bullets. Then for the 45acp+P one has to drop down all the way to a 155gr bullet to reach 1200fps.

IPSC and USPSA shooters push 115 grain bullets to ~1450 fps or more, and 124 grain bullets to ~1350 fps or more. As you might have guessed, their pressures often exceed even published +P pressures.

I don't know how many of these shooters use plated bullets - most I know use jacketed bullets - but for those who want plated bullets, a thicker plating is useful. How well would Berrys hollow base bullets stand up to those pressures? Unknown.

 

[HiBC]

HiBC if you would like to go out and purchase a 9mm carbine feel free, I'm not going to do it.

I do not have enough interest in a 9mm carbine to consider one,myself. I was not suggesting you buy one.

Berry's wrote some numbers in a book. Another book of numbers gave numbers that mismatched the numbers in the first book.

You asked "How can this be?"

It could be with a 9mm carbine. Berry's will sell bullets to people with 9mm carbines. Its all happy.The numbers are explained.

We agree,we aren't buying carbines,and with a 9mm Nato handgun,we can't get to 1500 fps (very many times!)

Its an "Outside the box" thing. Oh,yeah! Carbines!!

 

[kmw1954]

Nice discussion guys but I certainly don't and wouldn't feel comfortable loading to levels that would reach 1350+ fps levels. Even when I load to published max levels I'm weighing every charge and measuring every length even though I am positive that my guns will withstand +P pressures w/o fail.

 

[74A95]

That's a good theory, but it doesn't explain my real world experience loading Berry's hollow-base 185-grain .45 ACP bullets. The velocities I got using Winchester 231 were far lower than the on-line load data on the Hodgdon web site predicted. 5.3 grains produced an average of 665 fps. The Hodgdon web site tells me that a 185-grain bullet loaded over 5.0 grains of W231 should produce 762 fps, so my loads are almost 100 fps slower using 0.3 grains more powder. If the hollow base doesn't contribute to the discrepancy, I don't know what does.

Jeez, you're talking about two very different bullets. You're using a plated bullet at what OAL? Hodgdon is using a Hornady 185 grain Jacketed SWC loaded to 1.135". That's short, but appropriate for a button-nosed SWC. A bullet loaded that deep will create high pressure and more velocity than the same bullet loaded longer.

Also, differences in powder lot # and primer can produce differences in velocity. Different barrels produce different velocities with the same ammo. Differences in case capacity can produce different velocities. It's a long list. Experienced reloaders should never expect to produce the same velocity as published data for all those reasons and more.

To reiterate, the hollow base has nothing to do with it. You're barking up the wrong tree.

 

[74A95]

Nice discussion guys but I certainly don't and wouldn't feel comfortable loading to levels that would reach 1350+ fps levels. Even when I load to published max levels I'm weighing every charge and measuring every length even though I am positive that my guns will withstand +P pressures w/o fail.

No problem. No one's asking you to. Major power factor from a 9mm pistol requires that the gun and barrel chamber meet certain criteria in order for it to be safe. Race guns are built with that in mind.

Some readers might find the article below of interest. It describes 9 Major in a 4.6" barreled Glock. If you look at the load data, charges can be surprisingly high with some powders compared to what is published by powder and bullet makers. 9 Major is not for the faint of heart.

https://www.ssusa.org/articles/2018/1/9/how-to-use-9-major-in-a-short-barrel/

 

[kmw1954]

74A95 thank for the link, I will read it latter when I'm not as tired and can actually digest it. As I go along and progress in this hobby/endeavor I find this kind of thing fascinating!

At a younger time I probably would have found competing very exciting. Unfortunately the ticker and the legs would not hold up these days.

 

[Aguila Blanca]

Sorry,I don't dance just because you snap your fingers. I consider the corroboration of both Unclenick and Dufus quite enough. Hollow bases are to provide seal and obturation for low pressure target loads that may not otherwise "bump up"

That is not the reason Berry's offers hollow base bullets. Their hollow-base offerings are generally light-for-caliber bullets. If they made them with a solid base and a conventional profile for the nose, there would be very little body length to the bullets and accuracy would suffer.

So they took a bit of the mass out of the center core and distributed it around the base in order to get a longer body. The reason was accuracy, not expansion.

https://www.berrysmfg.com/item/bp-45-452-185gr-hbrn

Berry's Superior Plated hollow base bullets are designed for shooters who need increased accuracy. The hollow base allows the bullet profile to be longer and provides more contact area with the barrel and rifling to stabilize the bullet and improve accuracy. The bullet profile is longer but the weight remains the same and you can load these bullets using any published load data for a jacketed bullet as long as it is the same weight bullet.

 

[David R]

I have used both hollow base and flat base of the sane weight in my 380. Can not tell the difference with the crony or target.

I doubt the base swells because it's so thick compared to a 38 cal HBWC.

I believe it's for a longer bullet (more bearing surface)

David

 

[Unclenick]

I looked around and didn't see any HB Berry's bullets in my basement. Mine are all 45 anyway. The one clear picture on their site of a hollow base profile is for their 45 185 grain HBRN design. It appears to have the form of a truncated cone. Assuming the narrower base cavities do as well, calculating the volume is trivial, and you can calculate how much shorter the bullet would be by dividing that volume by pi and then dividing again by the square of half the full bullet diameter. This value is how much shorter a flat base version would be seated to produce the same powder space under the bullet.

Seating Depth = Case Length + Bullet Length - COL

COL = Case Length + Bullet Length - Seating Depth

 

[kmw1954]

Well I use the Hollow Base in 9mm and 380 and I am not going to fret about any of this. There is enough published information between Hodgdon and Western that I can safely figure out what I need to do as far as loading these. Yes the bearing surface is longer but not by much. At the velocities I load to these Hollow Base bullets perform just as I believe they were meant to.

Also from my experience and using Western powders I agree with their published data that with certain powders there is a significant difference between the hollow base and the solid base bullets of the same weight.

 

[Aguila Blanca]

I looked around and didn't see any HB Berry's bullets in my basement. Mine are all 45 anyway. The one clear picture on their site of a hollow base profile is for their 45 185 grain HBRN design. It appears to have the form of a truncated cone.

I have both the 230-grain plated round nose and the 185-grain plated round nose. hollow base. In all the photos attached, the 230 is on the left and the 185 is on the right. In the profile shot of just the bullets you can see that the overall length of the 185-grain bullet is slightly shorter than the 230-grain, but when they're loaded it's tough to see any difference.

Since I load both, I've adopted a multi-pronged approach to keeping them separated. First, of course, each box gets labeled. Second, I use different types of box for each. Lastly, I had long ago settled on using only Winchester brass for the 230s, so for the 185s I use ... anything except Winchester. So far it's been working.

 

[Aguila Blanca]

I decided that, for my own enlightenment and edification if nothing else, I wanted to better quantify what's going on with these bullets. So I went down to the dungeon of doom, pulled out five each of the Berry's 185-grain and 230-grain bullets, and took some measurements. For both, the [bullet] overall length was remarkably consistent. For the 185s, they ALL measured .587". For the 230s, four measured .640" and one measured .639", so the average is .640".

Following a methodology used by the statistic maven over at M1911.org, I then used a fat Sharpie to blacken the side of each bullet, used a straight utility knife blade to scrape the black off the bullet bases, and measured that. There was quite a bit of variance, certainly due to the fact that there's no hard stop, so I was just using the MK 1 Mod 3A hairy eyeball to align the depth plunger on my caliper with the top of each scratch mark. I came up with an average base length of .236" for the 185-grain hollow-base bullets, and .240" for the 230-grain bullets. That leaves the "nose" of each at .351" and .400", respectively.