Loading 38 Super: Discussion

Cleaned and lubed my gun tonight. Tightened up the extractor. It seems to hold a case even if I shake the slide a bit. Hopefully that solves the extraction issues.

If I have it too tight, is there a tell tale malfunction to expect? Stovepipe?

Roger that. Thanks.

Backed my crimp way down. When I got it where it looked right I pulled a bullet. There’s only a faint crimp line now. Passed the plunk test ok.

I’m a little concerned about the extractor though. I chambered a round to check for setback. No problem. But when I tried to eject the cartridge, it didn’t engage the ejector quite right. Slipped passed and just sat there.

Major jam. I definitely over tightened the extractor.

Better pull her apart again and better brink my punches out for the next shooting session. Probably going to need to adjust in the field.

Walkalong said:

Excellent. Round looks great.

Maybe shooting it will work vs hand chambering, might loosen things up enough....dunno, guns act different hand chambering sometimes.

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Thanks for that feedback. Hopefully I've got my dies and loading operation all settled now for this cartridge. I will be interested to see how seating goes as I further compress the powder by 0.1 increments. I may need to bump the seating die down slightly.

As far as shooting and functionality, that's been my experience as well. Sometimes hand cycling is not the best indicator of shooting function. Before I adjusted the extractor, I was getting perfect hand cycling. Rounds chambered, rounds ejected cleanly. After shooting, six mangled cases later told me the ejector was not interreacting with the rimless brass strongly enough. At least that's what it seemed to indicate.

Last night I decided to load a full magazine and see how that went. The first five rounds chambered fine. However each one failed to engage the extractor. So I'm thinking excess tension is not allowing the ejector to push the brass off the extractor, then the nose of the bullet is hitting the ejection port, and it's just sitting there. I thought "Ok, well just try shooting it because empty cases may eject fine. Then the sixth round got wedged under the extractor so hard, I had to really fiddle around to get it out. I mean wedged HARD. So then I'm trying to get the dang thing dislodged, and it's a live round.

So I think I've got to loosen it up a bit. It ejected live rounds fine before, and now it won't.

Loaded up some rounds at 10.2 and 10.3 gr last night. Due to my magazine required shorter OAL, I am uncomfortable loading to max of 10.4 until I've tested these rounds and looked for pressure signs. Based on the total lack of pressure signs from the last batch at 10.1, I am pretty sure I'll be fine. Going to try and get out and shoot these this weekend. Will share velocity data.

@brutus51, first thanks for the concern.

I have absolutely no intent to go past 10.3 grains unless I see absolutely no pressure signs in my 10.3 loads and am short of 1400 FPS. The load also needs to be accurate of course. I am loading to a 1.25 OAL which is a 0.01 shorter than the published OAL. For that reason I’m not real keen on loading to a 10.4 max load. I’m working up slowly also to see how my gun does.

Despite the feeding and ejection issues, the last batch had very mild recoil and the spent cases looked absolutely fine. No bulges, flattened primers, nothing.

I do not want warm 9mm loads though. I want something that rivals 357 in the 124 gr weight range. I’m thinking 1400 to 1425 is fine and should be totally achievable with this powder, but we’ll see. I don’t expect to hit 1500 FPS though, especially with a slightly shorter barrel.

As far as getting a bigger gun rather than pushing this gun too far. No worries. I’ve got lots of options in 357 mag, 10mm, 454 and 460 mag. No need to press this gun into inappropriate activities. If I really want a bigger thump from a semiautomatic I’ll grab one of my 10mms.

I do appreciate the concern though. I take loading my own ammo seriously and I have no desire to beat my guns or myself to hell.

My test shooting is slow and meticulous. If I see signs of over pressure at 10.2 or 10.3, I’ll just pull the rounds.

This is a great reason why I’m posting about this at all. It provides me info. It helps ferret out details on particular loads. And it might be useful to someone else looking to load this cartridge.

I really appreciate everyone’s input on this.

For the record. First load in 124 gr jacketed bullet portion.


OAL only deviation. Hence, stopping short of max.

brutus51 said:

I also have the same copy of Modern Reloading, it's a good manual but they tend to copy their data from other sources, hence the same data as found in VV's website.
Took a look through some of my other reloading manuals and this is what I found:
Hornady's 10th lists for N105 8.2gr for 1000fps and 8.9max. for 1200 fps with their 124gr offerings, shot in a 5" Colt 38 super.
Lymans 50th lists for N105 8.2gr. for 983fps. and 9.2max. for 1303fps with a 124gr. jacketed bullet, shot in a 5" universal receiver.
No data available in Speers latest.
Oddly enough Lyman usually tends to be the more conservative source.
It pays to have multiple sources of information.

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I agree.

I have the Lyman 49th, Speer 14th, Hornady 9th, 2018 Hodgdon periodical, first edition of Western Powders, and the aforementioned Lee manual.

I cross reference all of them. You’re right about Lee just reproducing others data, but I find it a good comprehensive conglomerate source. Some of the data seems a little detail deficient though.

Lyman and Hornady both seem conservative to me.

Had a pretty rough day of shooting.

Drove out to my shooting spot. Set up target at 25 yards. Set up Labradar. Take my first 20 shot group and it started raining, hard.

Pushed my crap into the pickup bed, shut her up and piled into my truck to wait it out.

My brass was still getting mangled up like my first outing and failing to eject properly.

So while I waited out the rain I took my gun apart and retightened the extractor a bit.

Rain finally stopped after about 30 minutes. Jumped out and loaded up my XDs 45. I didn’t want to set the tripod and Chrono up with more rain as a threat. Popped off 100 rounds of 45 acp ball ammo with a 230 gr FMJ over 6.3 gr of Unique. Pretty much confirmed, I’m done with that gun. I always liked it before, but now that I have a Sig P938 Legion, and enjoy shooting that gun so much more, the XDs seems clunky, unrefined, and pretty unnecessarily punishing. Probably going to ditch it.

Then the sun came out. So I set up the Chrono again. Shot a bunch of fast groups to get the data I wanted. DW is still mangling brass but seemed a little more consistent. So I’ll tighten the extractor a tad more and see.

Cracked off some 357 H110 max loads. Disappointed at the velocity. I didn’t even get up to 1200 FPS consistently. Sure made some big flashes.

Anyway, 38 Sup data is below. Velocity is only creeping up.

Temp was 62 degrees, humidity 60%, elevation 6600 ft. All velocities are at the muzzle.

10.1 gr N105, 124 grain RMR TC, OAL 1.25”
20 Shot group
Ave. 1385
High 1411
Low1349
ES 62
SD 15.6

10.2 gr N105
20 shots
Ave. 1395
High 1419
Low 1375
ES 44
SD 12.3

10.3 gr N105
20 Shots
Ave. 1398
High 1416
Low 1382
ES 34
SD 10.2



Those cases were loaded to 10.3 gr. Looks like a slight cratering on the primer, but edges are still round. So I think I’m going to try 10.4., and then leave it at that.

All three loads were accurate and pretty soft shooting. Didn’t feel like I was beating the gun up. So at least I have some nice accurate fast loads. Chances of getting to 1425 FPS seem pretty much nill, but if they shoot, it’s not like 1400 FPS is bad.

4 hours of dodging rain to get 6 sets of data. Maybe shot 250 rounds.

I’m thinking my XDs and E Series S&W1911 are going to get traded toward a Dan Wesson 45 bobtail.