Handloads: A Cheap .38 Special Target Load

These times of sparsely available handloading components require scrimping here and there in order to continue shooting, and the .38 Special provides a lot of bang for the buck. Using a lead wadcutter powered by 4.0 grains of propellant makes for as miserly a handload as is possible.

Commercial swaged-lead wadcutters and wadcutters with a hollow base readily “bump up” to seal the bore; expect some smears of lead, though, in the bore from these bullets. The wadcutter listed in the recipe was cast of lead with the addition of 2 percent tin, which helped the melt flow to produce fully formed bullets. Its three grooves full of lubricant prevented leading during extended shooting sessions. Commercial cast wadcutters may be cast of such a hard lead alloy that they might not obturate and seal the bore at the low pressures at which they are typically fired.

Wadcutters provide a couple of advantages over bullets that have their forward section protruding from the case mouth. For one, seated flush (or nearly so) with the case mouth, wadcutters occupy more space in the .38 Spl. case, which confines propellant so that it burns more uniformly. Depending on the propellant fired, velocity spread is about half that compared to a semi-wadcutter bullet of the same weight. Also, about a grain less propellant is required for a wadcutter to reach the same velocity as a regular bullet—soon, we’re talking about some pretty serious savings.

A slight crimp of the case mouth over the forward edge of this recipe’s wadcutter load reduced velocity spread by half compared to bullets with no crimp. Thrown from a powder measure, the recipe’s charge of True Blue propellant registered a standard deviation of velocity of 17 f.p.s. across 15 shots. Dispensing propellant from a measure directly into .38 Spl. cases will save a lot of time, too, because I’m going to shoot as many of these rounds as my resources will allow.