I was just curious to see if anyone had used Swift's handgun bullets. If you have, how did you like them and what was the experience(s)?

Just curious. Thanks

Brewtcl,

I have not used these bullets on game myself but have developed hunting loads for a customers 44 mag with the 300gr HP and a 454 with the 325 gr pill.

As far as quality and accuracy goes, I was quite impressed. In both revolvers, both Ruger SRH's, I managed to get a load for each that averaged under 2" at 50 yards with iron sights.

Also penetration and expansion tests showed that these are truely premium bullets. They often expanded to over 1.5 diameters and they only bullets I've seen drill deeper is a hard cast of equal weight.

Velocity was pretty good for a pure copper jacketed bullet. I believe the 7 1/2" 44 Mag got just a hair over 1300 fps and I ran the 454 up to 1575 fps with good safe loads in any weather.

There are two areas that I have to comment on about the Swift A-Frame handgun bullets.

#1- They are VERY expensive for a handgun bullet. While they are great bullets, they are often 3 to 4 times as pricey as bullets such as the Speer Uni-Core line which work very nearly as well in these types of handguns, and a good heavy LBT designed hard cast will out penetrate these bullets nearly always and usually can be driven faster for equal bullet weights. Which brings me to:

#2- They are very long for their weight, especially for use in a revolver, in a single shot handgun this means very little as you can seat the bullets out quite far with very little crimp, but in a revolver they can often take up alot of case capacity.

One example of this is with the 44 Mag that I worked with. My customer furnished a supply of Federal brass and when I seated the 300 gr Swift to the correct depth, it buldged the case because it was to long for the cases internal taper. I found that this problem did not happen with Starline and Rem brass so check for this if you use the 300gr .429" Swift in the 44 Mag.

All in all they are great bullets but cost to much for me. I feel if I want a jacketed bullet I will just go with the Speer Uni-Core SP which also have bonded cores and are quite stout for only $9.00/50 bullet, or I will use an LBT designed heavy hard cast bullet, again far less expensive.

Just my opinion, by the way, that customer never was able to go on the hunt he had planned so I have no on-game results to tell you.

If you can afford them they won't let you down but neither will alot of much lower cost bullets.

Good Hunting!!!

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