Although I can't get off work to go on the trip, I still have the P32 stuff out on my work bench and I take a poke at it every week or so -- the unknown keeps popping up out of left field and making me figure out ways to get around it.
One of the things I deal with is NO GOOD BULLETS AVAILABLE, so I am working with slugs I would not normally buy. By default, I would go with a Gold Dot in any weight that I am trying out. Expansion with a Gold Dot is an already done thing -- they fully expand the plated pellet with the nose cutter then pack it back together to look like a bullet. When it hits something, even water, it unpacks to the fully expanded state again, very very reliably it unpacks. Cops prefer Gold Dot strongly as it holds together in wood and in car doors, yet it will always unpack to the original form (the pic below was shot into plywood for example). The Gold Dot has a very good rep with all military and police forces for holding together in car doors, walls, etc and yet always expanding fully when it hits meat.
Anyhooo ...... so I haven't been able to worki with my favorite bullets and I miss them a lot. For example, working with a soft nose 90 grain Sierra means having to make a custom seating punch to support the totally totally bubble gum dead soft lead nose metal that they use to get reliable low speed expansion. The noses are so butter soft that insertion forces just to put the bullet in the brass are more than the nose can take and
it gets mashed totally flat if not internally supported.
Sadly, there is no .312" diameter 90 grain Gold Dot bullet any more, they quit making them.
Going up to 100 grains currently right now means a Hornady XTP bullet (which is all that was available when I started this iteration). These bullets are HARD, harder than is reasonable and to try to get them to expand at mousegun speeds is ludicrous -- but I had to try anyway as that was all I could get.
The same internal support punch that is required to seat the dead soft Sierra 90 grain bullet (it deepens and expands the hollow point while getting enough push purchase to install the bullet) will also expand the rock hard Hornady 100 grain into a partially pre-expanded state.
Question is, will the Hornady 100 grain finish expanding at mousegun speeds once it hits something
(doubtful, but we will give it a try since we bought the stupid things).
Here are the bullets, and here is a fired case so you can eyeball judge the pressure levels the 32 Automag is currently running at.
Chrony work comes later I am afraid, I am still in exploration mode shooting a in bucket of sand with my rug rig by my desk as I do load development and work through all the issues that keep cropping up (constant issues, constant). Bucket is now 98% full and the dirt is very hard tamped as I found myself running out of dirt depth when I went to the 100 grain bullets -- more dirt, harder packed was needed to stop the heavier slugs.
In this heavy recoil eating triple sprung 32 Automag the 60 grain Gold Dot bullets are a total joke, they blow up
completely in 5 inches of dirt due to the high impact speeds and only lots & lots of the very fastest powders can get enough slide momentum to knock the slide back all the way to battery lock on the 3 spring modded 32 Automag pistol. The extremely loud very sharp CRACK noise is a bit much too, much more than I would want to ever subject my bare ears to. A 5-6 inch deep very wide surface wound with no penetration afterwards isn't my ideal bullet performance either. It would kill given time, but it would not stop an hopped up assailant instantly like a 14-16" penetration past the heart to the spine would do.
Bullet weight, I think I have learned something about for this particular gun. 90 grains is about the right weight for short handled (pocket carry) use. The gun kicks back at 90 grains more than you would like, but at 100 grains you really have to use the extended magazine/grip assembly to control the gun at all.
Recoil forces are simply overpowering using the short grip at 100 grains of bullet weight, you'd never get your second shot off without eating the back of your hand with the slide movement on ejection of that second shot.
Here are some pics of the loads developed so far, and a piece of fired brass so you can partially judge the performance levels of the rounds as worked up so far.
Here are the starting point bullets before manipulations began .....
.... and this is what they look like at this point in time.
.... and this is the current max pressure loading, starting to show guppy belly, imprinting the tooling marks from the chamber walls and getting a fairly bulgy/wiped/flattened primer and a little bit of shine on the head stamp. Pressure on this one might be up in the lower 30ks pressure wise, looks pretty much similar to a lot of the 9mm and 40 S&W cases I just deprimed recently and those run 36k on psi pressure roughly.
The 32 Automag certainly isn't a wimpy little cartridge -- it cooks.
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