I got to messing around with the old H&R this morning, wanting to shoot it. I had noticed weeks ago that the 9mm case is just a tad shorter than the .38 S&W case. I pushed a .375" diameter round ball on the end of a 9mm case and dropped it in the chamber. Lo and behold it was the exact length that would be needed. So today I decided to shoot some of them.

I loaded one with 1.5 gr. Bullseye and fired it into a wadded up old flannel shirt. It was quite wimpy and did not even penetrate the cloth. So back to the shop and I loaded one with 2.0 gr. Bullseye. Fired into the shirt it still did not penetrate 1 layer of cloth. A fun load for shooting rats but I am not sure it would hurt them severely. Back to the loading bench and this time 2.6 gr. Bullseye. The report was more like a gun and the wadded up shirt was knocked off the table I had it on. Checking I found it penetrated 1 layer of cloth and dented the next layer. THIS would be a rat load!

None of the cartridges swelled out to the chamber at all. All 3 were smoked pretty well. I don't trust this old gun too much and don't plan on going any heavier right now. I may work up to 3 gr. in a couple steps, but I am not real sure I want to. It's more for fun than anything else.

Here's some photos of the steps during testing this morning.

9mm case with .375" round ball ... grease on the ball

9mm case with .375" round ball ... note that headspace is almost perfect.

2.0 gr. Bullseye load did not penetrate 1 layer of cloth!

2.6 gr. Bullseye penetrated 1 layer of cloth.

Fired balls ...

for no real good reason as I know many of them are STILL used with factory .38 S&W 146 gr loads. My only .38 S&W ever has been my Webley MK IV. I load 2.0 gr Bullseye under a 200 gr. RN bullet of appropriate diameter. I've been told this is right at too much for the gun but I have shot a few hundred with no discernible problems.

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Sincerely,

Hobie

It's been abused too much by neglect. I have some 95 gr. round nose cast bullets for it coming and I will load them light.

It’s neat that the ball in a 9mm case headspaced properly for you. I’ve always wondered about how close the two cases are but never actually measured them side by side.

Just curious, how are you measuring those small doses of bullseye? My RCBS measure won’t go down much below 3.0 of bullseye. I soldered some wire handles to a few 22 short and long rifle cases and have amounts written down for them with a handful of different powders. For the small amo7nt of shooting I do with 38 S&W, it’s ok, but a powder measure would be nicer!

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at the Lee measure. It's cheap. It's flimsy. It's not esthetically pleasing. But it works. I can't recall the charge off the top of my head, think it was 1.9gr of .... Unique? Bullseye? 231? What ever I wrote down. Anyway, it was able to go that low and was repeatable and consistent. Like I said, it's not the type of measure one drags out to brag about the beautiful bit of workmanship that went into it. But for being a conglomeration of mold injected and stamped aluminum parts it does good work. And you can crank it down to very low amounts of powder.

On the other hand, I've loaded scads of ammo using the 22 LR or 22 Short case on a copper wire handle and didn't even bother with the scale once I knew what charge it was throwing. Not something I'd recommend doing if you're on the ragged edge of safety, but works great for low level plinking loads.

Mine, cranked all the way 'down', throws 1.7gr of Bullseye pretty consistently. I use that for .32SWL WC's. I have a new dispenser and haven't tried BE or light charges in that yet.

It handles pistol powders very nicely. Doesn't care much for stick powders though. It's bugging me about WHICH powder I used, but the consistency was impressive. Much better than attempting to do the same with my Lyman.

That’s the powder measure I started out with years ago. I was going to look amd see if I still had it or if I had passed it on to a freind. I was pretty sure it would handle smaller charges. I remember it leaked powder a good bit between the body and drum and it did not like H110! I bought a pound years ago to try with hotter 45 colt loads and by the time I got the powder charge set up and dumped a few charges it was pretty well locked up, never have gotten into H110 just because of that! I’ll have to dig through my boxes of stuff and see if it’s still around.

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as well as stick powders like Paul describes. For H110, I backed out the screw on the handle and drum assembly until it cycled smoothly and put a small container under it to catch what powder spilled out the sides. Messy but it worked.

For stick powders, I set it to throw a light charge and hand trickled each one up to weight. Tedious but it works. I now have an RCBS dispenser/scale. Hit the button and away it goes!