Ammo Recommendations

[nedmoore]

Can anyone recommend ammo. for a .40 and .45 caliber. It would be great if I could buy it Academy or Gander Mountain. I have only used the white winchester range loads. Thanks.

[Mike1951]

I don't recall seeing many defensive loads at Academy and my experience with Gander Mountain is that their ammunition is outrageous.

There are many suitable loads and folks can disagree for hours over which of the good ones is better than the rest.

Federal makes the older design Hydra-Shok and the newer HST. Remington makes Golden Sabre. Hornady has their TAP ammo. Speer offers the Gold Dot as well as Gold Dots specifically designed to be used in short barrels. The list goes on and on.

Whatever you pick, consider that you should run enough of it through your handgun to establish whether it is 100% reliable. That count will be different between shooters, but for me is 200 rds. Some of the ammo can run over $1 round, so this can get expensive.

Lower cost options would be the Remington and Winchester JHP bulk packs usually sold at Wal-Mart. They won't be state of the art bullets, but will be better than FMJ.

[Mithras61]

I like Federal HSTs, and get them for a fair price from http://www.ammunitiontogo.com/. It's one of the few places I've found that has actual 230g LE Tactical HSTs (not just Hydrashoks) and has them in 50-round boxes for $23.95 in 45ACP.

[KRM45]

I use Speer Gold Dot in all my guns. I too buy mine in 50 round boxes, usually from a police supply store. You can also find them online...

I recommend you shoot at least a box of it to make sure it functions properly, and that your accuracy is the same as your target load. I also practice with the same bullet weight as I carry for defense ammo.

[HankB]

In .45, what I shoot in practice is a 230 cast round nose bullet on top of 4.8 grains of 700-X powder, which duplicates hardball.

Winchester white box 230 hardball is the "usual" factory practice load, but Wolf 230 RN works OK as well . . . although the lacquer coating tends to accumulate in your chamber until reliability suffers - a friend says it happens consistently at about 700 rounds if he doesn't clean his gun. Plus, some people claim that the steel cases are hard on guns, particularly the ejector. (We used a lot of steel cased .45 ammo in WWII, so I'm not sure about the "bad for your ejector" story . . . )

For defensive use, I recommend whatever name brand ammo (Federal, Speer, Winchester, or Remington) you can get in a 230 JHP which is reliable in your gun. I've normally used Remington Golden Saber 230 JHP in my Baer Premier II, but recently got some Winchester 230 +P JHP that seems very promising in my limited testing to date.

I favor 230s because if for some reason the bullet doesn't expand, it will perform at least as well as USGI hardball - and that's not too bad.

[MoJo]

Good advise here. There a lot of rumblings on the Net about WWB reliability. I quit using WWB some time ago because of repeated inexplicable failures in 9MM, and .40 S&W. Remington UMC JHP ammo has been 100% reliable for me in 9, .40, .45, and .357 Magnum it is available in 100 round boxes at Wally World at an attractive price. I keep a couple of hundred rounds of each caliber on hand as emergency ammo. I personally use Federal (HST, Bonded Hydrashock, and Classic) Speer Gold Dot, and Remington Golden Saber as carry ammo, depending on what works best in my gun.

[G.C.Montgomery]

Sticking with the major brands is generally solid advice. Only you know your guns so it will be up to you to test your equipment and whatever ammunition you choose. I prefer to test at least 200 rounds spread across several different lots of any one brand. That way, I've got at least some confidence that if I randomly buy some at a gunshow, online dealer, or police supplier, I should still have consistent performance from that brand. I can tell you that I've run Gold Dot and Winchester Ranger for a very long time with consistent reliability with respect to feeding, ignition and extraction from one lot to the next in 9mm, .40 and .45. More recently I've started testing Federal HST but I haven't had time to buy a large enough supply for significant testing.

Somewhere way down the list from reliable cycling are things like terminal ballistics and accuracy because all the major brands are designed with FBI testing standards in mind. Accuracy is generally pretty good across the board but varies from one gun to the next. The bullets will all generally expand provided they are traveling at optimal velocity and nothing has compromised the bullet such as glass, steel, wallboard/sheetrock or clothing.

On that note, barriers of any kind tend to change the dynamics of how a hollowpoint bullet performs because cavities can get plugged and jackets can get distorted or even ripped off by objects a bullet encounters before striking the intended target. Some bullets do better through these barriers than others and some barriers, like automotive glass and steel, are more likely to be encountered by law enforcement than civilians. As a result, some ammunition is marketed specifically toward law enforcement and features "bonded" bullets designed to provide better performance through barriers like automotive glass and steel. The average defensive shooter may or may not see much benefit from these lines of ammunition. There's nothing wrong with buying it, just don't expect some sort of miracle bullet.

[nedmoore]

Thanks guys.