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To: mylife

Rifle chamber pressures are higher in normal situations (mid-50K psi), yes, but I must warn you as a guy who reloads and crunches numbers:

There’s a lot more room for error in a .45 ACP case than in a .308 case.

The root of the reason is that smokeless propellants were still in their infancy when the 1911 and the .45 ACP were developed. The cases were made with large capacities to enable the cartridge to meet design goals with the relatively slow-burning powders of the day.

Today, we have a huge number of smokeless powders in comparison to 1911, and not quite as huge a number relative to the 1950’s when the .308 was developed. In particular, we have a lot of development in pistol powders to get denser charges.

If you’re on a progressive press, an overcharge of a .308 will easily be seen. There’s going to be loose powder spilling everywhere in almost any load configuration I can think of in a .308. Unless you’re really, really not paying attention, you’ll know that you’ve double-charged a .308 round.

In a .45 ACP, as I said earlier, it is easy to double-charge them with some of today’s faster-burning powders. By this I mean that you could be pulling away on your progressive press and double the powder charge and not have any spill out of the case. The reloader can be happily pulling away, just stuffing pills down on top of a case, and not paying any attention to whether or not the case was double-charged. Nothing spilled out, so everything is OK right?

Wrong. Oh, so terribly, painfully wrong.

Nominal .45 ACP case pressures are in the high-teens of PSI - like17K to 21K PSI - at normal loads. 23K for “+P” loadings.

A double charge of powder would increase your pressures to 30k+ PSI.

There’s a reason why people have been trying to develop a replacement for the .45 ACP cartridge - eg, the .45 Super, .45 GAP, et al. The .45 Super is mostly about thicker brass at the web that increases the failure pressure for the case - nominal pressures for the .45 Super case are up around 28K psi. The .45 GAP takes the opposite approach - they reduce the size of the case, which reduces the over-charging issue.

This problem of “too much case capacity for modern powders” occurs in other older handgun cases too. It is even easier to do something really wrong in a .45 Colt case.


49 posted on 02/12/2011 10:32:32 AM PST by NVDave
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To: NVDave

Well..

I guess we will hold the 45 at arms length...


54 posted on 02/12/2011 10:42:53 AM PST by mylife (Opinions: $1.00 ~ Halfbaked: 50c)
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