If you don't hear from me for a couple days....

It's because I'm loading and shooting!

Gotta find time for church on Easter, but other than that, it's loading and shooting.

ETA: I'm going to thoroughly inspect and, if necessary, clean the pistol after the match on Saturday. I won't have a chance to test fire 5 or 10 of these before the match, plus I'm planning on starting low and working up, just like any load. I can probably field strip and inspect the gun after the first stage; 20ish rounds. What should I be looking for as far as severe leading? Can I get away with shooting 200-300 rounds with leading going on?

It'd probably be ok to shoot (IPSC matches are 200-300 rounds!?!!?) but since it sounds like you have the opportunity to check it, I'd go ahead and do it once or twice.  I think you need to take the barrel out and run a boresnake or patch through, preferably with some Hoppes or CLP on it, to remove the soot, then shine a light down the barrel or hold it up to a light and look.  If there's leading, you'll (after wiping the barrel out) see it that way in the grooves.  I don't know what "too much" is for safety purposes.  But, I know I've run up to a couple hundred through with moderate to heavy leading and not had any problems so I would think you should be ok, even if you're getting a lot of leading which maybe/probably you won't.

Well, I haven't shot them yet. Shot the match with factory ammo.

So I had these bullets, and I had a 9mm gauge. I set my press up to seat the bullets down to the wax ring. I measured with calipers and found them even at that depth to be well under Max OAL listed in the Speer manual (for 124gr FMJ, not 125gr TC). So that set, with 4.1gr of 231 powder (0.1 above "starting load" listed) I churned out 400 rounds. All passed the gauge. I'm golden, right?

WRONG!

Just before going to bed, I decided to see if the dummy round I made would feed. Came out of the magazine fine, went right into the chamber, and stopped. Gun wouldn't go into battery. In fact, I had to pound the dummy out with a cleaning rod to get the slide open.

I field stripped the pistol and dropped a live round into the chamber. It wouldn't go in all the way. I checked four more. No dice.

Must be the gun. I field stripped my Beretta 92FS, dropped four more rounds into that barrel. Same problem.

s___. Can't shoot these.

Packed up factory ammo, shot the match, good day.

I took four sample cartridges with me and consulted a number of experienced loaders, especially guys who have used Bulletworks bullets. The consensus was that even though it's way below Max OAL, and looks short, and doesn't fill the front-to-back space in the magazine, the solution is to seat them deeper.

I'm going to adjust the bullet seater die with a dummy until it will feed and extract from my pistols, then it looks like I'll be hand feeding cartridges into station 4 for about 400 rounds.

Yup.  Geometry is a B****H.   Once you get it worked out though you're gonna' love how that set up operates.

So I re-seated all the loaded rounds to just where they'd chamber and extract cleanly, which was pretty deep.

Went and shot a practice match tonight.

For the first time in my life, I can blame my s___ty hits on the gear. Those bullets fly about as straight as Michael Jackson.

Thanks for the help, everyone, but I think I'm gonna just eat the extra $40/1000 and go with jacketed.

Ouch.  That's a lot of work down the tube.  But, just to make sure you're on the right track, set some of these rounds aside, and verify the lack of performance off a rest.  Dotting I's and crossing T's you know....

Sorry about all the effort put forth that you didn't get what you expected out of. 

We're talking about maybe 3-4 hours of effort. My time is free, as far as I'm concerned. I didn't take these s___ty loads to a major match, so it's all gravy.

As far as the bench, I might, might not. I shot three of my loads at 7yds before the match, just making sure they wouldn't blow up the gun. They made a 3" group without me even attempting a group.

Also, I know how I perform on the local matches, against the local competitors pretty well. I can count on certain guys to beat me, I can count on certain hits, I can count on beating the first-timers, if no one else. The regulars are really good shooters, and  I'm at the bottom end of the regulars, so I don't expect to beat them.

Tonight, 2 out of 3 first-time shooters beat me. That tells me it was the ammo.

I'm loading these 125gr bullets at 4.1 grains of Win231. That 0.1 above the listed "starting load" for a 124gr FMJ in the Speer book. I'm gonna load the last 100 rounds I have with 5.0 grains of powder, just to see what it does.

But I think I'm going to just do a group buy with another guy or two for a couple thousand Montana Gold FMJ bullets.

I'm gonna shoot what I got. Don't care what it does.

BUT. I've got 100 or so that aren't loaded yet. In another thread, George mentioned he's seen bullets keyhole like this when they're too slow. Well, I'm at starting charge on these. 4.1gr of 231. I'm gonna load the last 100 in the mid-range of the load data (about 5.0gr) and see what happens.

I'm gonna shoot what I got. Don't care what it does.

BUT. I've got 100 or so that aren't loaded yet. In another thread, George mentioned he's seen bullets keyhole like this when they're too slow. Well, I'm at starting charge on these. 4.1gr of 231. I'm gonna load the last 100 in the mid-range of the load data (about 5.0gr) and see what happens.

I really wouldn't give up after a box of bullets.  Once you make them work for you cast bullets open up a new world of options.

Check for that then.  If it's present, a bump up in powder charge should help out by building enough pressure to bump the bullet base out to seal the bore, and give a touch more rifling engagement as well.  Basically, if you have leading in the throat to any substantial degree, it generally means you have gas cutting because the powder didn't generate enough pressure to expand the base of the bullet, sealing off the chamber.

This is can be a big problem with commercial casters, as they cast with a bevel base for ease of seating, rather than a flat base which is a little more difficult to seat, but will generally seal the bore MUCH better.

I loaded up 20 rounds at 4.3gr (max listed is 4.5) and tried them out. Same problem, only now I'm flattening primers. Too hot.

I talked to one of the guys at the range. He's never loaded 231 in 9mm, so he didn't really know where I needed to be on it, but we discussed a bit.

We know they tumble at 4.1gr
We know they tumble at 4.3gr
We know the primers get flattened at 4.3, so that's too hot.
He thinks that I've been too hot from the get-go, and the bullets will stabilize when we find the right speed. Can't argue much with that. He suggested I drop down to 3.9 for a small test batch and see what happens. We might bust out the chrony tomorrow, too.

I got stuck at work too late to chrony, but I got to the range in time to test a couple. No pressure signs and nice clean holes in paper. I found my load!

3.8gr of Win 231 seems to do the trick. Should be able to buy more bullets on Sunday.

Chrony'd a handful today. They're coming out between 1010-1015. I don't know the extreme spread or any of those other numbers. I didn't know how to work all the functions on the borrowed chrony, so I just wrote the numbers on a piece of paper. Then the battery for the IR screens quit, so I only got about 6 shots.

Those speeds get me 125.2-125.8 power factor. Barely making minor, but I'm making it. I'm gonna up the load from 3.8 to 3.9 and leave it there.