Bucksnort1
New member
Does anyone have reloading data for Frontier (South Africa) plated, .357, 158 grain bullets. I want to load them a little on the hot side for shooting from my Rossi 92.
There's plating, and then there's plating. The Speer Gold Dot bullets all have plated jackets, but they are hard enough to reach jacketed bullet velocities.
The other factor (and I've thought about doing a video about it, but it would be a bit of a pain to put together) is that what causes bullets to start fouling badly is how hard they are upset by the pressure behind them. The higher the pressure, the more distorted they are and the more friction they have against the bore. The late Richard Lee describes this in the second edition of Modern Reloading and provides pressure limits based on BHN. The same should apply to plated bullets.
But here's the catch: assume you load a plated bullet to shoot at 1200 fps in your 4" 357 revolver with 2400. It should be around 25,000 psi peak. Now you take that same bullet and fire it in an 18" carbine. There's no difference in pressure, so there should be no difference in bullet distortion or failure to fly well, but the velocity will be about 1570 fps because of the barrel length. So, what's the real velocity "limit," and what assumptions are behind it?