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gschwertley
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Posts: 799
(6/12/05 10:16 pm)
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Replicating Military Loads for the .38/200
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One of my revolvers is a Smith & Wesson .38/200 made around 1943. Most of these were made for the military forces of the British Empire during WW2.
Originally, the ammunition for this revolver was a 200 grain lead, then full-jacketed bullet cartridge. The original muzzle velocity for this cartridge was around 630 feet per second from what I have been able to determine.
Many of you know the US version of this cartridge which is the .38 Smith & Wesson, the precursor of the .38 Special. Many old, weak, cheap, top-break revolvers were chambered for .38 S&W in years gone by. For this reason, the ammo available for it for many years has been very weak and low pressure for lowest-common-denominator safety reasons.
For this reason, it really is impossible to find ammo that shoots to the potential of the Smith & Wesson .38/200 revolver, which is just as strong as its Victory Model counterpart made in .38 Special.
For some time I have been experimenting with finding a way to replicate the performance of the original military cartridge as closely as I could. The .38/200 has a bore size of .360, not .357 as the .38 Special does. There is no source of 200 grain jacketed bullets of this size/profile or weight. Knowing this, obtaining cast bullets of the proper design and weight was my next choice, which the British used before WW2.
I have checked around and the only mould maker who makes a proper-sized mould for this use is NEI. If there is another on the market, I sure would like to know about it. For a time, I was able to buy 195 grain (alloy variations) bullet cast from an NEI mould from a company in Oregon, but they have discontinued their cast bullet business. I may have to get one of those moulds.
With the approximate proper bullets of 195 grain Lead Round Nose, I experimented at some length with Alliant Unique powder. WW small pistol primers were used with RP brass. I was disappointed with the velocity spreads I got with this powder. I can tell you that to approximate the original service velocity of 630 fps, you need to be in the charge area of around 2.9 to 3.3 grains of Unique.
In the course of my experiments with this cartridge, I made a disturbing discovery about Unique powder, which I have revered for years. There is "old" Unique and "improved" Unique. I used powder of both types over the course of these experiements and discovered that with the same load, my average muzzle velocity difference comparing one lot to another was nearly 100 fps.
After all the time I spent with Unique, happier news was in store with Accurate Arms Number 5 powder. I only fired one loading of this powder and got good results. Using the same 195 grain LRN bullet and WW primers with RP brass, a load of 4.0 grains of AA#5 propelled the bullets an average muzzle velocity of 691.5 fps with a standard deviation of 9.5. This velocity was greater than the original service load, but my results with just this one loading show more promise than when using Unique. I have plans to experiment with Bullseye as well. I haven't gone into the accuracy of the loads in these experiments, because I do not have a Ransom Rest. When hand-holding handguns, there is more room for human error than with a rifle. I will say that at 25 yards, none of the Unique loads were as accurate as the one AA#5 load and it was a 2 inch group and very close to point of aim.
If you cannot bear to go to the trouble of obtaining a bullet in the 190-200 grain weight, you can get pleasant results with common 158 grain lead RN bullets. There is published data for these, but it is not terribly speedy. Stay with the heaviest lead revolver bullet (up to 200 grains) you can find; the bullet will print closest to point of impact with the sights as they were originally designed.
If you are going to use common 158 grainers sized .358, my advice is to use WW brass which is thicker than RP. You can use RP if you perform a sort of secondary sizing operation, whereby you use a .38 Special sizing die to resize only the first quarter inch of the .38 S&W case (after full-length sizing in the .38 S&W die). This way, you will get proper bullet pull using .358 bullets if you run into loose bullet problems.
Shooting longer-barreled revolvers with slow-moving heavy lead bullets causes this bullet to print in a certain place. If you fire a faster, lighter-weight bullet in the same old revolver, the bullet exits the barrel faster and hits low. With the heavier bullet, the time between when the primer goes off and when the bullet leaves the barrel is greater, allowing recoil to cause the barrel to rise farther. This in turn causes the bullet to print higher. I have fired many speedy, jacketed bullet loads in my .38/200 but none that I would recommend because of the situation with point of aim/point of impact. These loads would be fine for self-defense but not for target shooting with the sights unaltered.
Remember, the loads spoken of in this post were fired in my revolver and yours may be different. Always make sure your weapon is safe, even if this involves having a competent gunsmith inspect it. Always use safe reloading and shooting practices and remember to keep your weapon pointed downrange.
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