Having recently scored a lot of .38 Special cases, I thought I might try and put together a competition load with a bit more punch and have been looking into the “FBI Load”; in other words the .38 Special loading used by the FBI and many other US law enforcement agencies back in the heyday of police revolver use.
There’s a lot of discussion on the internet about it, but the general consenus is that it was essentially a .38 Special +P load firing a 158gr lead hollowpoint projectile, and that most of the major ammunition manufacturers produced some variant on it (and a couple still do).
Further internet searching suggested that 5.2gr of Unique behind a 158gr lead projectile was widely considered the closest approximation of the loading, so I loaded up a batch with 158gr LRNFP Spartan cast projectiles, and another batch with 158gr JHP projectiles.
Interestingly, Alliant themselves list 5.2gr of Unique as the max powder loading for .38 Special +P, but I’ve got data from other published sources saying 5.4 and even higher (from some of the 1930s/1940s manuals).
When I got to putting the rounds downrange, I noticed the LRNFP projectiles performed more accurately than the JHP ones, despite being the same weight.
There’s still a bit of tweaking to do (I need to adjust the sights on the revolver, for starters), but I noticed this load had a more significant feel to it when fired than the usual .38 Special loads (around 4.7gr of Unique behind a 158gr projectile), which usually seem a bit lacklustre to me.
