Loading .357 With The 110 XTP

[rickhem]

I bought a box of the Hornady 110 XTP bullets and worked up some loads for my Big Boy. I have an old bottle of 296, and looked back through a number of older reloading books, and it looks like everyone has basically the same charge weights. Even Hodgdon's on-line data matched. Start load is 22.0 grains, and a max load is 23.0 grains. So I loaded ten at 22.0, ten at 22.5, and ten at 23.0.
The good from this was that the difference in charge weight didn't really change the place on the target where the rounds hit. With my rifle zeroed for 50 yards with my 158 XTP FP and Lil Gun load, the 110 bullets, no matter what charge weight, were about 5-6 inches high, and about 1-2 inches right. Not surprising with a variation of less than 5% on powder charge. All the groups were of similar size too. But that leads me to the bad part, which is that all groups were 4-5 inches in size. I didn't mess around with adjusting my scope, just let the groups form and see how well each charge weight did.

My first thought is that trying to push this bullet at 2300 to 2400 fps is just too fast. Looking at all the places where load data is posted for both handgun and rifle, it seems like the exact same loads are used for both. Like they just took handgun loads and fired them through a rifle to collect some data, then published it. My loads through a 6 or 8 inch revolver may work well, but my rifle didn't like them, at least not at 50 yards.

I'm going to load some up with different powders and try to get them to about 1800 FPS and see how those group. My hope was to have a load that would shoot a very rapidly expanding bullet at a high velocity for groundhogs and such, but it needs to group much better than I'm getting so far.

[BigAl52]

I doubt you are going to get that bullet to group very well. The twist rate of your rifle probably isnt going to do much for that smaller bullet. Maybe give some 125's a ride and see how they do.

[rickhem]

I doubt you are going to get that bullet to group very well. The twist rate of your rifle probably isnt going to do much for that smaller bullet. Maybe give some 125's a ride and see how they do.

When I was at the shop looking over their shelf of projectiles, both the 110 and the 125 were right next to each other, and they were both $25.99 for a box. I went back and forth about that for a while too. I'm anticipating use with these lighter bullets being 50 yards or less, probably 30 yards or less in most instances. I figured that loading them at higher velocities would make them even more explosive, and I'm sure that is the case, but I'm going to have to sacrifice a little speed in exchange for what I hope will be better accuracy.

But to your point, yeah, probably just should have gone with the 125s in the first place.