350 Legend Ammunition
BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 11 months ago
Reader and commenter Sanders said this.
I picked up some 145 gr. Winchester White Box at Cabela’s the other day for $10/20. There have been some tests posted online of different loadings. One that was pretty impressive was a test in water jugs using 148 gr. Hornady XTP .357 bullets. It pretty much just exploded in the water jugs due to the higher velocity.
The other tricky thing about this round is the bullet sizes. SAAMI says it should be .355 to .357. Pulled factory ammo is all listed as .357, but actual measurements are showing they are using .355, or 9mm. The best options for hunting bullets are in the .358 range, but I guess those have to be resized down to .357 or they won’t chamber. Also, using Winchester brass, if you use a .357, you won’t be able to chamber the round. But, Starline brass is thinner and works with .357.
Many folks have gone ahead and just re-barreled to .358 so they could use the greater range of available bullets in that size.
So, you see there are still a lot of bugs for reloaders to work out on this round. It will be fun to see what folks come up with.
Funny how this dovetails together with what I found out. I have been looking into purchasing a 350 Legend upper, and one manufacturer told me this.
Accuracy is, at this time, very ammunition dependent. While the ammo is supposed to be .357 diameter. The ammo makers are using pretty much everything that they can fit in the case….for instance, one manufacturer says that while .357 is the call out, they are allowing a -.003 tolerance. This seems to be so they can load cheaper and more prolific .355 bullets. But that doesn’t necessarily work the best with the spec bore diameter.
We’re getting our best groups with handloads. With factory ammo, at this time, we’re in the same 1.5-2MOA range as an average.
Eventually the ammo makers will sort it out and get their loads to match the round’s potential, but until that happens, I think that is as good as it’s going to be with production ammo.
That’s good enough at 0 – 150 yards for hog hunting. But I expect that as time goes by, the ammunition quality issue will sort itself out.
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On December 24, 2019 at 11:58 am, Sanders said:
UPS says I won’t see my upper until Dec. 30th. It is in Memphis right now. Hope it makes it out of there.
Midway USA has mags on sale for $17/ea. Figure they may get here about the same time.
On December 26, 2019 at 4:37 pm, Sanders said:
This guy has done a lot of experimenting and developing loads for this round. While the title of the video indicates mag modifications, a good 1/2 of it is about some of the bullets he has developed loads for.
https://youtu.be/Z9qmdXAJq-Y