Chav, my problem with Blue Dot, a good powder for high velo's, is the super brite muzzle flash! And like Unique, it tends to be very dirty, which would only be meaningful in an extended range session. As I load a goodly portion of my ammo for self defense, that muzzle flash is downright nasty. Same with Unique, HS6 and several other powders as well. Accurate #9 does ok but it too can generate a pretty brite flash with some loads, mostly the highest velocity loads, of course. While the Accurate powders are "reduced" flash, they are not "flash suppressed" like the powders available to commercial loaders. For reasons unknown to me, flash supressed powders are simply not available to us peon reloaders!
And before anyone gets their panties all twisted up, my reloads (and a few new manufactured since I often use new brass) are 100% reliable, compared to (maybe) 99% for factory. Because I can control every step of the process, I know that each and every round I put together meets my very demanding standards. While I do all the checks possible on factory ammo I carry, short of weighing each round I cannot tell that the cartridge case has a completely drilled/punched flash hole, nor do I know it has as much powder as it's supposed to. With my ammo, I am absolutely certain!
As to jacket shedding, it is never a good thing! The jacket, when it is shed, is left in the wound track so does nothing to enhance wounding. Without the jacket, if the bullet core strikes anything remotely solid it will simply deform and maybe even change direction. The jacket helps to prevent that. In addition, the way I test bullets may have something to do with jacket/core seperation, since I use 6 ziplock sandwich bags full of water, with plastic jugs of water after the bags. I've experienced seperation at velocities that seem to perform well in gel, even if the bullet jacket gets loose on the core. In water, the seperation seems to happen much easier than in other test mediums, although they tend to seperate fairly easily in actual shootings. I have no explanation for it but the reason I continue to use the bags of water is that if I were to switch now I would essentially have to toss out decades of tests I've already done! The only thing I can seldom measure closely is penetration depth, which I can usually only approximate. Other than that, expansion total and such are the same as in gel. Even my penetration is usually very close, so I see little reason to switch at this late date!
I have tested a lot of 10mm bullets, especially those in the 165 gr range and while some have perfect expansion, their penetration is very poor. The Hornady 155 gr. gave excellent expansion but penetration was a miserable 10 to 11 inches! And that was at a relatively low 1150 fps! At least there was no jacket/core seperation as I have seen on most other XTP bullets in .45 ACP and 9mm.
The absolute best bullets I have found so far are the Lehigh Xtreme Defenders and the Speer Gold Dots (which were my carry rounds until I met the Lehigh bullets!). However, with the Speer bullets now being in the "unobtainium" column, I am experimenting with other bullets - and generally speaking not having a lot of luck! I am going to be testing some Berry's 165 Bonded bullets soon but from what I've seen on u tube, they don't seem to be the answer either! Come on, Speer, let's get off the pot and get some bullets out to us poor deprived (depraved?) reloaders!
Cheers,
crkckr
P.S. A lot of bullets I would like to test are not available as components, such as HST. I haven't seen any of the bonded Golden Saber bullets for sale as components either! Very frustrating since so many of the 10mm loads in those factory boxes are little more than 40 S&W! Watered down 10mm seems to be the norm these days! Even the Speer factory 10mm ammo is loaded for those folks who couldn't pass the standard FBI test with "real" 10mm ammo! Disgusting! If I'd of wanted 40 Short & Weak performance, I would have bought one! As far as I know there are only 3 companies that produce real, honest 10mm ammo: Underwood, Buffalo Bore and Double Tap. All others are little more than pretenders! I have high hopes for Defiant Munitions but so far he hasn't produced any 10mm or 45 ACP. Time will tell!