By Duane Thomas
Many people choose plated bullets to handload, since they cost less than jacketed but don’t cause barrel leading like bare lead. Problem: most people can’t load such bullets so they shoot accurately. Simply using the same procedures we can get away with, when using jacketed bullets or even hard cast lead, and thinking that will transition over to plated bullets will not work. Ask me how I know.
One area where we need to pay attention if we want to load accurate plated bullet ammo is in choosing the right bullets.
To start with, we need to understand a few things about plated bullets, and why they’re so much harder to load and produce accurate ammunition than jacketed or hard cast lead. As a cost cutting measure, and a huge reason plated bullets are less expensive than jacketed, they’re made with a soft lead-wire core. Then in order to avoid barrel leading, they cover that with plating. Thing is, the plating isn’t nearly as thick as a bullet jacket, therefore not nearly as strong or resistant to deformation. So, we’ve got dead soft lead covered with a thin, fragile coating. We need to take that into account, because if we don’t, we will deform bullets during the handloading process. Deformed bullets will not shoot accurately.
Typical thickness of a bullet jacket is .011” to .012”. Typical thickness of a single-plated (more about what that means shortly) bullet is .003” to .004”. In other words, we’re only getting a third of the deformation protection from plating as from a true bullet jacket. However, we also have “double-plated” a.k.a. “thick-plated” bullets, on which the plating goes .007” to .008”. While the plating on these bullets still isn’t nearly as thick as a bullet jacket, it’s a lot thicker than the typical single-plated bullet.
We have two major producers of plated bullets these days: Berry’s and X-treme. In 9mm (the classic “fast” autopistol cartridge), Berry’s offers both single-plated and thick-plated bullets; just look for “TP” (Thick Plate) as a suffix to the bullet name. X-treme thick-plates all their bullets, period.
If we’re firing a subsonic load (the classic “slow” autopistol cartridge being, of course, .45 ACP), in my experience we don’t actually need thick plating. As long as we’re doing everything else right, we can get good accuracy with single-plated at such low velocities. Nor is thick plating really necessary in a subsonic load in 9mm, i.e. if we’re running 147-grain bullets. But when we start talking projectile velocities over 1,000 feet per second, for instance we’re trying to make Minor power factor in 9mm with 115-grain or 124-grain bullets, that’s when we absolutely need thick plated bullets to get good accuracy.
