Too fat for your chamber, won't fit.   You need a rim anyway, don't you?

You can do better out of a long gun, using existing brass and slow powders.

Issue with the water test was NO EXPANSION, for the Hornaday XTP to expand takes rifle velocity because (dummie that I am) I bought me 100 bullets that were intended for a 32-20 rifle.

That's OK -- back in the days of old when cup and core was all there was and Dean Grinnel was the reigning dean of the gun nuts, back when Jeff Cooper was making Super Poopers and various people were doing 45 Supers and 40 Supers and Whispers and all sorts of strange whacky stuff, back before reloading manuals got neutered by lawyers and lawsuits and laws got all convoluted and you could actually talk about what you just did -- there was a thing called a "claw hammer".

Like Black Talons and Teflon coated bullets and all them other politically incorrect things, it was banned by the gun rags and vilified by liberal politicians in every city in the world.

Getting claw hammered meant getting shot with no chance of recovery -- like a Black Talon a claw hammer was a magically bad bad bad bullet and the making of such things has been a lost secret for nearly four decades now.

So, forget what you just saw .....  you really didn't see it because it doesn't exist and never has and never will.   Like Area 51 it was a weather balloon and them THREE World Trade Centers really did come straight down in 9-12 seconds (free fall velocity) after being struck by only TWO airplanes.










Yup, that other thing you didn't see was a 100 grain 32 caliber claw hammer bullet seated to fit the magazine of a tiny diminutive 32 Automag, another one of them silly mythical thingies that never was and will never exist.  

Ain't no super high pressure magnum autoloader that little itty bitty.
Never was, never will be.

Rest easy in your mind, the expanded bullet shown was a factory stock Gold Dot bullet.  
You can just go buy those, normally.

They are becoming available again, slowly -- Speer can't keep up with demand on the things by a long shot right now, so any popular caliber is always out of stock at all places.

The claw hammer trick is just that, a old trick, a trick that is done in the seating die using an expanding punch that opens up the stock hollow point cavity and deepening it some.

In essence you are pre-expanding the bullet mouth up to the degree your loading ramp in your pistol can tolerate and still feed reliably.   When the already mostly expanded mouth hits meat it can finish the expansion quicker and to a greater degree than otherwise.



This same trick can add a hollow point to a lead round nose bullet very easily.   Ain't no drill bits involved, just pressure/swaging techniques.

Actually, since I have an extremely tight very thick walled case and a compressed powder load I can seat the bullet and expand the butter soft lead inside the cup and core hollow point HP all in one step.  

In this case the expansion is 100% completed before the bullet goes to the necessary depth in the case.

Some info on those cast bullets that you did using wheel weight metal -- it is WAY too tough and hard for these tricks to work, especially if you water dropped it.

I have put water dropped ww metal 44 magnum slugs through a tree and they didn't move any to speak of, so don't expect these piddly seating die tricks to do anything to them.


==============


Still, claw hammers are a lot of extra work, because they DO get irregular in shape when first expanded and about half of them require pushing the expansion back into a circle form (using a 8mm rifle seating punch with the long taper to it) then re-opening the hollow point back up and then sometimes having to fix it again as it gets warped again on re-expansion.  Eventually, it gets round enough for government work while still at full expansion.   Fiddle work, lots of it.

Labor intensive to say the least, too many steps, too much work.  So if you can find a Gold Dot bullet just buy the silly thing.  You can go with the standard Gold Dot shape and be assured it will work 100% at any lower velocity you might get out of a stock p32 using a heavy bullet.



The Gold Dot is the bullet you want to buy if you want to play with some heavy bullet tricks.  I just ordered a box myself as I KNOW these will unpack just as pretty as you please and I don't know really know exactly what the claw hammers will do in the real world.  

Plus a claw hammered bullet looks exactly like what it is (big questions and perhaps some legal trouble in a shooting situation) while a 100 grain Gold Dot might just cruise right on by a busy cop as it looks exactly like the rounds he crams into his own magazine every day.  

Heck, he expects a bullet to look exactly just like that .....

You can buy some here as they have them in stock this week -- so move quick if you want some before they are GONE again.


Warning:   The Gold Dots that I actually got shipped in to me look NOTHING like the picture they are being sold under.  These 100 grain Gold Dots are completely spec'd to run in a 1,500 fps Federal 32 Magnum Revolver.   They look like rifle bullets again.

Stock, they DO NOT HAVE the deep Gold Dot cavity and the expansion undercuts are much shorter as well since the bullet was intended to hit at very high velocity.  They are tougher than a standard Gold Dot accordingly.   Still, not as tough to work with as the Hornady XTP by a long shot.

http://www.midsouthshooterssupply.com/item.asp?sku=000213990

In a stock P32 you will run into guppy belly big time on those thin walled weak stock cases at some pretty slow velocities as the pressure in the case will be highest when first fired just to get the big slug moving at all.  In a stock 32acp case in a stock gun, likely you will break something during ejection cycle as the slide velocity will be extreme and the case itself might just rupture at the unsupported section of the web over the ramp and tear your gun all up again.

When I get my Gold Dots in and build me up 100 full bore rounds I will do the chrony testing and the water expansion tests using the standard 5 water filled milk jugs lined up in a row.  

You can reference a lot of .380 and 9mm information on Youtube using this exact same test media, and although it is crude as a test it requires no investment in gelatin casting & stuff to get you a rough benchmark.  

Chrony data and milk jugs and expanded diameter slug let you say "My Frankenstein creation performs about like a ....." with some fair amount of credibility.

Oldfeller--FSO wrote on 08/17/13 at 09:20:34:


Should I interpret this as a hint.....that OF has a winter engine project planned?

LANCER wrote on 08/21/13 at 07:16:51:

Whole different division... stunk works.

LANCER wrote on 08/21/13 at 09:30:47:

IDK... I kinda like it... I think I'm gonna adopt it.

I work just down the street from the original skunk works so it kinda fits.
Hair of the dog that bit ya kinda thing.

Dave wrote on 08/21/13 at 07:07:55:


OF....Yep.  It is fun riding around with the gang.  I read more into your statment than was intended.....I though you were going to do an upgrade or two.

My bike is pretty much as fast as it needs to be.  I do ride just a tad below my perceived maximum......I need to be able to come home in one piece each year....my wife likes having me around.  My friends and family expect that I have enough sense to ride safely.....and I try not to let them down.