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’!

I really like the Rock Island's we have (2). All we do is shoot 'em and they seem to get better 'n better. I load 200 gr and 230 gr CB's

I checked out an American Tactical .45 at a LGS the other day, comparing it side-by-side with a Remington they also had. The AT was smoother, crisper, and much better finished up than the Remington, which cost nearly twice as much. The most noticeable difference was the trigger - the AT had a very nice trigger, no creep, barely detectable overtravel. The Remington's trigger felt like pulling a cat off a screen door.

Not meaning to badmouth anybody's product. These two may have been outliers from the QC curve, but I know which one I'd buy if I had gone into that shop to buy a .45.

but this nickel Rock has run and shot about as well as my late lamented 1945 Ithaca, which was sort of a Frankengun purportedly built by AMTU or one of their retired 'smiths. It had the works... 7 digit NM barrel, bushing, lowered frame rails, staked disconnector hole... had 1950's match gun written all over it. I believe if this Rock had a 0.200 crosspin it would hunker under 3" at 50 (five shots rested) and with an honest match barrel, it could be gotten well under THAT.

I can't do it, but my son can put a ragged hole on paper at 25 yds with both our Rocks. We did spend a bit of time working up accuracy loads for both 200 and 230 gr CB's. Nothing has been done to either Rock...except shoot dog feces out of 'em.