Sport Pistol Powder

Since I haven’t been spending as much time writing about shooting, I’ve been actually shooting more. A lot more, which has kept my reloading press busy. Up until now I’ve used Unique for most of my pistol loads. Recently I got a hold of some Alliant Sport Pistol powder, which was introduced last year. It’s very fine grained, measures very well, and doesn’t have as much of a tendency to jump out of the case and end up all over the press as the plate snaps into index. What does get on the press is too fine grained to really gum up the works, which means I don’t have to stop as often to clean up the mess.

The only downside is it’s harder to detect a double charge in larger calibers visually, and while I’ve had overcharges with Unique that were scary, it’s slow burning enough that I didn’t have a kaboom when I’ve done it. I have a feeling Sport Pistol overcharging will have more of a tendency to blow up the pistol.

The loads feel a little more crisp on recoil than my Unique loads. They also give loading info specifically for polymer coated bullets, and it’s advertised to be formulated to work with poly coated bullets. I don’t know how much that’s true, or how much is just marketing BS. Supposedly poly coated bullets are safe to shoot through pistols with polygonal rifling, like Glocks. I hope that’s true, because I’m shooting ACME “lipstick” bullets through mine. The poly bullets are dirt cheap and work well on steel targets. I’ve noticed they make a nice cloud of dust when they hit the steel, so I’d be careful with the rounds indoors. So far they seem to be working great for such cheap bullets.

12 thoughts on “Sport Pistol Powder”

  1. I use a RCBS Powder Checker Die on my load master for this. Depending on the press you should be able to fit one into the process.

    1. I use Hornady’s powder cop checker die, but that only works if I have the space to spare using Hornady die sets. For my Lee die sets, I have to forego the powder cop to have room for the crimp die.

  2. 3.9gr of Tite Group behind Blue Bullet 125gr, works great out of a Gen 4 Glock 19. Powder cost is the same and bullets are about 3/4 cent cheaper, each. :)

  3. I could not tell from website, until do the acme prices include or exclude shipping?

  4. I used to love power pistol and had quite a bit, loaded thousands of pistol rounds with it, mostly .45 and i ran dry just before the Newtown shooting. After that, you couldn’t find power pistol, or, pretty much any allianz powder for … well, I’m not really sure because I had to source other propellants.

  5. I looked it up and acme adds shipping charge on top of price for projectiles. There are many great options for powder and projectiles. I like RMR bullets for projectiles. With ammo the cheapest we’ve seen in years the cost savings of reloading is certainly diminished.

  6. I’ve have absolutely no experience in reloading, so I can’t help but wonder: would it be practical to determine if a cartridge has been overcharged by weighing it?

    Of course, I can imagine the answer to be “individual cartridges, yes, if I took the time (but who has time for that?), but an entire block — no, if only one is overcharged, due to statistical variations of all the other cartridges in that block…”

    1. You can, but there’s a lot of variability in case weight. So if you have a pistol cartridge 2 grains heavier, you can’t be sure it’s powder. I sometimes will do this as a sanity check, but it’s more useful on rifle rounds where you’re measuring out more powder. However, for the loads I do for rifle, you couldn’t miss a double charge visually (because it would spill all over).

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