47Colt

Hi all,

Can anyone help me?

I've searched and searched but, am having problems finding an answer to my question. Can I safely shoot Aquila .38 Super +P 130 Gr FMJ ammo through this weapon?????

Thanks, 47Colt.

Casca

What Weapon.If it's chambered for a .38 super & in good condition.

duallydondon

I will err on the side of caution and use Fiocchi regular in my Colt.

Waldo Pepper

All factory ammo is loaded +P and some to +P+ and any gun mfg in last 30 years should have no problem if recoil springs are in good shape. Colt used 14.5# springs and still do as far as I know but most other mfg's probably use 16# springs. I use 16# for my Taurus and my Dan Wesson is coming with a 16# spring.

retDAC

Welcome to the forum. Very nice Dan Wesson in your other post.

A suggestion: you might want to check the last post date before replying. Usually better to start a new thread with a link to the old one.

JohnnyT

When the .38 Super was introduced, it had a little brother in the .38 Auto. Dimensionally identical to the earlier cartridge, it was loaded to much higher pressures and hence higher recoil forces...which is actually the real gun killer. It was amply strong enough to handle the pressure. The strength of the breech lockup was where the older pistols was questionable. Even though they would withstand the occasional foray into Super levels...the guns didn't live long and prosper.

Fast-forward to the 80s and Winchester's 125-grain Silvertip offering. These were loaded in nickel cases and marked +P on the headstamp. They were loaded to higher pressures than the brass-cased .38 Auto which was still available in limited runs from Remington.

But...

The Silvertip round was downloaded a bit from original Super levels due to the large number of old pistols still out there which...although proofed for .38 Super...were made of softer steels and had an unknown history. Like the standard .44 Special cartridge and its own little brother, the .38 Special...the original pressures had been attenuated somewhat for the same reasons.

There was also the matter of some cheap pistols of unknown quality being chambered for all three cartridges, with Llama fielding a good many .38 Super 1911 variants. Like the .38 Special +P of today is loaded to original .38 Special pressures...the Super was "softened up" a bit to avoid liability concerns. I'd be willing to make a strong bet that .38 Auto +P is loaded to the Silvertip's levels, and +P+ is equal to the original .38 Super that Eliot Ness favored in his pursuit of Al Capone.

The recoil spring is really neither here nor there. The spring's primary function is returning the slide to battery. Whatever else it may do is incidental. The locked breech pistol can be fired without a spring without damage or problems. If you want to try it, be sure to use a full-length guide rod and plug for the experiment. The short "stub" type spring guide has a tendency to get cattywampus and will do some damage without the spring to keep it aligned.

Waldo Pepper

You got it half right JohnnyT.

The recoil spring controls the speed of slide rearward as well as return to battery along with the force of the return. Shoot one time too many w/o recoil spring you will just have ruined a gun. The recoil spring besides controlling slide speed backward witch also controls return timing for feeding, and in this process also the ejection distance of spent round.

Back about the summer of '95 a friend and I went shooting and he had put his Colt Gold Cup back together w/o recoil spring to show me I was wrong about spring having anything to do with recoil function. He fired two rounds and cracked the frame and damaged the slide on the second round. The selling dealer sent it to Colt and Colt sent it right back refusing to honor the warranty, I actually felt sorry for him as it had been birthday gift from his late father.

Now all that said you can beat a gun to death with too heavy a recoil spring with it slamming back into battery too hard. Some calibers seem more likely to suffer damage from poor recoil spring choice when re-loaders experiment or guys buy "hot loads" from small niche ammo company. Couple of problem rounds that come to mind is the 10mm and 40 cal it gave birth to. So much so that I would generally avoid a used 10mm unless I knew the gun history well.

JohnnyT

Nope. I got it all right. The slide just doesn't hit the frame all that hard.

A few years back, a fella comes into the local gun emporium and asks for a 22-pound spring for a Colt Commander. His reasoning that it would 'save" the aluminum alloy frame. I tried to explain this thing to him, but he was unconvinced...so I asked him hows many rounds that he allowed it would take to destroy a Commander frame fired with no spring. Less than 50, he says...so a bet was struck. We belonged to the same private range and we met the following Monday for his education.

I fired 49 rounds of full hardball and field-stripped the gun. The impact abutment was fine. 50 more will do it, guaranteed...says he. So I did it again. No damage. He cracks open a box of Remington 185 +P. 21 rounds later, there was no damage.

At that point he accused me of setting up a "super-speshul trick gun" that would let me do that without damage and stalked off.

I've used that same much-used Commander for that same demo about a half-dozen times. The frame is fine. Incidentally, the Commander has never been run with a spring heavier than 16 pounds.

And here's another myth busted. Everybody assumes that the Commander slide hits the frame harder than the 5-inch slide, all else equal...but it doesn't. It actually doesn't hit quite as hard, even with equal springs. I'll let ya wrap your head around that for a few minutes, then I'll come back and explain it.

Watch this video and think about what you're seeing. I've seen a guy do it with a .45 Glock, too. Among highly trained and keenly observant law enforcement types, that there's known as...a clue.

Waldo Pepper

Well I guess we'll just never agree, happy & safe shooting.

End of discussion on my part.

JohnnyT

Ah! Another case of "My mind's made up. Don't try to confuse me with facts." eh?

Waldo...This ain't my first trip to the circus. My hands-on experience with the 1911 goes back to 1963, and I've done things to'em that'd curl your hair in testing theories and dispelling with myths. I'll work harder to disprove my own theories than to prove them. I don't make flat statements like this unless I've proven it...not once...but several times.

Lemme ask you this:

Let's place a steel rod through the bore...form-turned on the end to match the bullet's nose profile. Then, let's thread the muzzle and install a screw that presses firmly against the steel rod that's against the bullet in order to prevent any slide movement.

Then let's fire the gun.

What do you predict will happen as a result?