I just bought a box of Hornady 230 gr HP/XTP bullets for my new S&W 1911. What COL should I use for these? Has anyone loaded for these XTP's? Would the loaded length be similiar to the Gold Dot or the Golden Saber? Thanks for your help.
Muddy Flats

The trick with any 230 grain jacketed bullet in .45 ACP is not to leave any less powder space than 230 grain ball does, or pressure could go up dramatically. Ball is seated about .268". So take the average bullet length plus nominal case length (.898") and subtract .268" and don't go any shorter. Longer is OK as long as it feeds reliably.

Nick

According to my 15th Edition of Hornady's reloading manual, the 230 gr HP-XTP should have a COL of 1.230".

I load them to 1.240", but my old Remington-Rand 1911A1 may have a looser chamber than your Smith. There's an old rule of thumb, Remove the barrel and drop a cartridge into it. The base of the case should be flush with the barrel hood. It works with most bullets.

Bye
Jack

I am surprised how deep Hornady recommends seating that bullet. If my length information is correct, QuickLOAD shows a standard ball charge creating 19,000 PSI will go up to 21100 PSI (slightly over SAMMI max) from that greater seating depth. That's OK for a ramped barrel, but in a standard 1911 I'd work the load up carefully. Using my calculation, you'd get an OAL of 1.26". I'd see whether that will chamber using the method Jack mentioned? I posted the below illustration of it in the 1911.org forum originally.

Nick

http://img453.imageshack.us/img453/8337/45seatingpossibilitiesx8005jn.jpg

I just measured five 230 grain HP/XTPs of lot 00-061. They went .630"-.632". Earlier versions of Quickload overestimated pressure on straight wall cases and it still may have that problem.

Bye
Jack

I noticed early on that QuickLOAD uses really minimal case water capacity estimates (err on the side of safety), and if you plug in what you've really got, the pressures go down. I think that's usually the source of the apparent pressure estimate error. The straight wall cases are pretty sensitive to a small change.

In this calculation I didn't change the default 25 grain water capacity for the .45 ACP, because I don't know what cases he's using? Changing the case capacity from 25 grains of water to 26.5 grains (more like the cases I have) drops the pressure from almost 21,100 PSI, to 18,600 PSI. This is with At the .230 OAL with the XTP.

Nick