Universal Clays - what am I doing wrong?

The simple true is virtually no handgun cartridges will burn all of the powder in the charge, even fast powders like Bullseye and WW 231.

When I worked on the range back in the 1990s we'd sweep the range at the end of the day, and the pile of unburned powder ejected out the muzzle was quite impressive.

Several times during heavy use days we had flash fires on the range due to accumulations of unburned powder downrange. One was caused by an idiot who thought the "No Smoking" sign didn't apply to him. He was getting quite testy with staff, not liking the fact that we were kicking him out, when the off-duty Virginia state trooper in the store gave him the option of leaving or being arrested.
 
An "extreme" experiment; if you could gather a bit of the flakes, try to ignite them. If they don't burn, they are just flakes of burned powder (which I've had happen with some low pressure loads; burned but not completely consumed/destroyed).
 
I did that experiment and it was much easier than you might first imagine it would be to gather the flakes...

I simply took them from the bottom of a ziploc freezer bag that I had moonclipped .45 ACP brass in. Flakes looked like Universal except the color was a funny brown, almost a dark orange color and I piled them up on the walk in front of the house and they burned quickly as smokeless does. It is absolutely unburnt powder and we could certainly argue about how much is too much depending on things we have noticed in our own ammo, but Universal in .38 and .45 is, for me, history.

Far too many (much) better choices all the way around. And Universal does so darn well in 9mm for me that I'm happy to reserve all of it for the center fire round I shoot the most of anyway.
 
Per Sevens's point, in general, the slower a powder is, the higher the pressure it needs to be run at to burn cleanly. Very fast powders like Clays and N310 do well even with low pressure target loads that often operate down around 10,000 psi or sometimes even less. Universal does better at 15,000 psi and over. I've run close to 3,000 rounds of 230 grain cast RN over 4.8 grains of Universal in a .45 Auto 1911 before the first feed failure (failure of the slide to go 100% into battery; this was over just three days, so the carbon didn't get time to harden).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top