With some love from Bar Sto, and fitting expertise from @rbrooks my G20 is now capable of shooting 9x25 Dillon. For those of you who haven't heard of this irrelevant cartridge, it's a 10mm necked down to 9mm. it was created for gaming purposes, but now I'm using it to just see if I can launch a 90gr 9mm bullet at 2000 fps out of a regular handgun. I got to 1700 fps with my 357sig, so maybe it's possible.
First off, the barrel. Bar Sto refuses to sell anything drop in, they oversize it just enough you've got to hand fit, or oversize it a LOT so you really have to. I get it, accuracy is their stick and I wouldn't have gone with them if any of the drop-in vendors still made a 9x25. eBay wasn't panning out finding what I wanted in the last 6-9 months so I went with what I could get. I also learned what it takes to fit a barrel and some of the finishing tricks watching it happen, so in the end it's money well spent.
Next up, the dies. I actually got these last year, figuring if I waited until I got a barrel it might not be easy to find the dies. Dillon is the only game in town at this point, and their dies have some issues. First off, they're made to go in a progressive so the lock rings suck. I replaced them with the Hornady ones I like that lock sideways instead of screwing a set screw into the threads. The dies also don't fully flair or come with an expander, they're assuming the powder drop stage does the expander. I pulled my 9mm expander die from the kit and added it here. Works well once you get it adjusted.
So adjusting, this is the hardest cartridge I've had to load for. Strange bottleneck, you have to size your own brass from 10mm, the dies are really tricky to adjust and... that damn BarSto barrel has NO slop in the chamber. None. The crimp die has to crimp far enough down to get the whole neck in spec without going too far as to bulge the case. There is no 'lee factory crimp die' for 9x25 so you can't just fix mistakes with another pass.
On the plus side, the carbide sizer is really nice. I'm lubing the cases anyway because it seems like the thing to do, but you still run into split necks and such. They tell you to use only new 10mm brass or you'll end up splitting them, but I don't have any new so I'm dealing with the 1/20th failure rate on the once fired:
Once these are fire formed I'll check them for length and trim. This is going to be a labor intensive handgun round.
After the learning, I loaded up 10 rounds for tomorrow to test. 10.0gr CFE Pistol, 115gr XTP, CCI350. There isn't a lot of load data on these and the one load manual that has it only lists old powders I don't have, so I'm doing a combo of googling for stuff (10.2gr CFE Pistol / 115gr was a combo I found a few times) and trying to extrapolate from 357sig -> 10mm and then backing down a bit. As long as I work up slowly I figure I'll find the limit before something bad happens.
First off, the barrel. Bar Sto refuses to sell anything drop in, they oversize it just enough you've got to hand fit, or oversize it a LOT so you really have to. I get it, accuracy is their stick and I wouldn't have gone with them if any of the drop-in vendors still made a 9x25. eBay wasn't panning out finding what I wanted in the last 6-9 months so I went with what I could get. I also learned what it takes to fit a barrel and some of the finishing tricks watching it happen, so in the end it's money well spent.
Next up, the dies. I actually got these last year, figuring if I waited until I got a barrel it might not be easy to find the dies. Dillon is the only game in town at this point, and their dies have some issues. First off, they're made to go in a progressive so the lock rings suck. I replaced them with the Hornady ones I like that lock sideways instead of screwing a set screw into the threads. The dies also don't fully flair or come with an expander, they're assuming the powder drop stage does the expander. I pulled my 9mm expander die from the kit and added it here. Works well once you get it adjusted.
So adjusting, this is the hardest cartridge I've had to load for. Strange bottleneck, you have to size your own brass from 10mm, the dies are really tricky to adjust and... that damn BarSto barrel has NO slop in the chamber. None. The crimp die has to crimp far enough down to get the whole neck in spec without going too far as to bulge the case. There is no 'lee factory crimp die' for 9x25 so you can't just fix mistakes with another pass.
On the plus side, the carbide sizer is really nice. I'm lubing the cases anyway because it seems like the thing to do, but you still run into split necks and such. They tell you to use only new 10mm brass or you'll end up splitting them, but I don't have any new so I'm dealing with the 1/20th failure rate on the once fired:
Once these are fire formed I'll check them for length and trim. This is going to be a labor intensive handgun round.
After the learning, I loaded up 10 rounds for tomorrow to test. 10.0gr CFE Pistol, 115gr XTP, CCI350. There isn't a lot of load data on these and the one load manual that has it only lists old powders I don't have, so I'm doing a combo of googling for stuff (10.2gr CFE Pistol / 115gr was a combo I found a few times) and trying to extrapolate from 357sig -> 10mm and then backing down a bit. As long as I work up slowly I figure I'll find the limit before something bad happens.
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