I'm always looking for that perfect powder and load. Problem is that I have neither the time nor money to try them all - I'm quite sure there should be a law against that....Anyway, I tinkered quite a bit coming up with my pet Ruger P90 load, and how it came about is a valuable lesson in itself.

 I agonized over my first powder for what had to be record time - a friend of mine gave it to me. I had bought a Lyman starter kit and was rarin' to go. I had both the Lyman manual that came with the kit and a Hodgdon reloading manual, and started at the low end of the scale in the Lyman book, working my way up a few tenths of a grain at a time. I figured that I would load 3 or 4 rounds at each level and run 'em through to see how things went.

The blessed day came about and I headed up to my favorite shooting spot to try out my hand-crafted ammo. Loading up the mildest group of three, I squeezed off the first shot. Gun went bang. Bullet left barrel. Target was nervous. Missing was the action of the slide moving back, ejecting the spent shell, stripping the next round from the magazine and moving back into battery. Damn.

The latest lesson in the game was to be "mild loads aren't appreciated by my Ruger." I found the softer stuff wouldn't even work the slide, and the low-medium range worked all right but I could actually feel and hear the slide working. It was like shooting a two stage pistol, if you can imagine that.

So I warmed things up, and found that the traditional 6.5 grains of Unique under a 230 grain XTP bullet was nice and accurate in my gun. I felt comfortable enough measuring and repeating everything as accurately as possible. There were no pressure signs to be had, and things were going well. Mostly.

My next lesson was to be on fouling. Unique is a bit messy, and after about 150 to 200 rounds my poor P90 would get pretty bogged down. The feed ramp on a Ruger is a tad steep, and the gun sometimes wouldn't return into battery - it wouldn't stovepipe, but the nose of the bullet would stick to the ramp and stop. This happened a lot with lead or semi-wadcutter style bullets.

My solution for this was to shorten my rounds a skosh. I should note here that changing cartridge length can and will effect pressure and velocity, sometimes dramatically. Don't come whining to me if your front slide gets embedded in your forehead doing this. Anyway, backed off the 6.5 grain load a ways and shortened the round some, how much I'll not be mentioning here. In the end, I had a round that fed reliably, was accurate beyond what I thought I might accomplish at that time, and was toasty enough to keep my Ruger happy.

The downside of this was that it is a.....warm load. After 2 or 3 firings, my cases have nice shiny pressure rings, although the primers aren't overly flattened nor are any of the other obvious signs of pressure apparent.

I'm fiddling around with HS6 now, and I'll see soon what it does for me. My immediate opinion of it is that it is almost as dirty as Unique, probably not as accurate in my .45 as Unique was. The first time I ran a load of HS6 through the range, I found grains of un-burned powder all over hell and gone, this in both my .45 and .357 loads. I'll warm them up some and hopefully this will go away.....