I recently received some of Armscor’s 230 grain, full metal jacket .45 ACP ammunition for testing & evaluation. It comes packaged 50 rounds to the blue, folded cardboard box and the bullet itself has a brass-colored jacket. Overall length is uniform and the crimp is firm.

Rock Island Armory is one of Armscor’s product lines and it seemed appropriate to test this ammunition in a pistol by the same maker. So I set up my old Chrony Beta Master, five feet in front of the 25 yard line and turned loose the first five shots. The numbers shake out like this:

High and low shots were 854 and 883 feet per second (fps) respectively. Average velocity from the five-inch barrel was 866 fps. The extreme spread of five shots was 27.44 fps with a standard deviation of 11.04. This is good, potent hardball ammo and the numbers indicate consistency in the loading process.

My portable range table has seen better days and it has a little wobble to it. I fired those first five shots with the gun rested over my poor old, powder-burnt range bag. All but one of them broke clean and I could tell the front sight was a little high when it went… so I’ll eat the flier that made the group 2 ¾ inches. The four I didn’t screw up went into barely an inch and a quarter … which is as good as this pistol has shot with anything. The only accuracy work I’ve done on it is to fit the stock, 0.003”-over bushing to the slide. Several other groups were essentially repeats of this performance; barely over an inch for the shots that I didn’t screw up.

Feeling brave, I fired five more rounds at the above target, again from 25 yards; but this time from the ‘Bullseye’ or ‘Duelist’ stance. Four of those rounds went into 3 inches, with my standard flier opening the group to about 5 inches.

This is accurate .45 ammo that made me bust my hump to ‘shoot up’ to it, from what is essentially a GI 1911A1. I would not be at all ashamed to shoot a match with it, whether it was action or bullseye. Wish I had a pallet of this stuff to further ‘evaluate’!