New from Federal Ammunition: American Eagle Syntech Ammunition

1. Sounds like a newer version of the old Nyclad to me sort of.

   • A lot of these polymer jacketed bullets smell like burned rubber when shot. Going through a mag smells like doing a smoky burnout in a parking lot haha (some have the smoke to match). It’s great!!!

     • Glad that I’m not the only one that appreciates how different ammo smells.

       I’m also not afraid to admit that I rather like the ‘super glue’ smell of eley-primed rimfire rounds.

2. $0.40/round is pretty steep for 9mm plinking ammo.

   • +1
     Isn’t polymer generally cheaper than copper? Just guessing, I could totally be wrong.

     • They are supposed to be cheaper, but of course the marketing shekelmeisters are going to push the “clean gun” and “more shots per cleaning” line to bait people who don’t know better into buying it. Much like 40S&W.

     • I reload hitek coated bullets. Their cost is on par with plated lead. And cheaper than copper jacketed.

       • Do you have an online source for those? I just looked them up, and I’m interested, but all of their links are brick and mortar and nowhere near me.

       • Swarf – Missouri bullets has them as well as may others like palmetto state projectiles in red, blue bullets in blue (shocker), and kings shooters supply has them in purple or grey for some cowboy action type. For pistol I use electroplated but I may switch.

   • Extending barrel life is all good and fine, but if you’re paying an extra 10 cents a round, do the math. 1200 rounds and the difference you just paid would have paid for a new barrel. At least if you’re shooting a semi-auto. If you’re shooting a revolver it might make sense, but then if you’re shooting a revolver you can just shoot medium cast lead bullets

   • Yeah I was initially wondering if that price was per 100 or something because that is far too high to justify plinking ammo. I mean, yeah it is supposed to reduce wear and tear, but you can shoot regular ammo, save a bunch of money, and buy a new barrel with the savings. Am I missing something? Same argument for steel case stuff out of a rifle. It might wear out the extractor quicker but extractors arent expensive and with all I’m saving I can buy another ten extractors for the savings from a pallet.

3. Meh. Make it cheaper to shoot, not fancier.

   I wonder if a way could be found to adapt shotgun slug tech for a pistol, i.e. plastic case, metal base, and wad. Do they make .410 slugs?

   • Yes they do. But the main reason is pressures are much greater in a handgun. Plus over time, the plastics would deform in a magazine.

     • Your right, I looked after I posted. Listed as 1/5th oz 1800 fps. 1/5th oz is 87.5gr. Velocity is like out of a longer barrel; have to look what the V is out of a .410 handgun.

       As for the mags, mag fed shotguns exist and I’m only looking to have the mags loaded for a day, enough time to complete a match.

       I wonder what you could get for bullet mass and V out of a short barrel with scaling down the tech.

       And then the big question is is it much cheaper, like old 22 prices but a bigger faster 9mm ish bullet

   • I like this idea. Maybe instead of that plastic, perhaps a thick, hard plastic case with a steel base. They’d be non-reloadable, but cheap enough no one would care.

     The problem would be wall thickness. The case would probably be similar in shape and size to a 45ACP, but shooting a 9mm bullet. It could work, and could make an already cheap round even cheaper, depending on design. Perhaps modified slides to accept the new bizarre ammo.

     • Cheaper yet is aluminum cases like Blazer.

       From it we know it’s *somewhat* cheaper, but not “gee, I’ll just grab an extra box of Blazer” it’s so cheap…

4. I can get Federal American eagle 40 SW for $18 per 50, why would I pay $8 more for polymer coated lead.

5. Another marketing gimmick for people that have more money than sense.

6. i shot 1k of 200gr 45 poly coated Precision Bullets from TX last year and they served me and my barrel just fine. A ton of my local companero IDPA and 3Gun shooters have moved to poly coated; think along the lines of Blue Bullets.

   They are cheaper, somewhat consistent, clean, and work for action pistol sports. Plated bullets are not as cheap. Yeah, I’m a cheap bastard.

   • Oh. Watch your crimp. Similar crimp to copper plated bullets should suffice.

     • The polymer coated I get have a thicker coating than electroplated. It’s basically an epoxy coated bullet and most makers put on more than one coat just like paint. There’s a video out there of a guy smashing his bullet with a hammer. It doesn’t chip it just smashed flat, still all adhered. I don’t crimp a lot but more that I would an electroplated bullet.

7. I see that Federal did not say anything about polymer fouling in the barrel and how often you would have to clean that … or how you would clean that. (What solvent do you use to remove their polymer fouling? Acetone?)

   • The hitek polymer coating doesn’t leave behind fooling. I shot hundreds of green coated bullets in my last range session with no visible residue.

     • Then Hornady needs to start using that same polymer for their 12 and 20 gauge SST sabots. I have shot them out of both a 12 gauge and 20 gauge shotgun with a fully rifled barrel. They seem to group pretty well for about the first 7 shots and the pattern begins to open up rapidly after that … due to plastic fouling I presume.

       In the case of my 12 gauge, I think I used brake cleaner to remove the plastic fouling and my patterns tightened right up after that.

       On the plus side: you can simply remove the barrel to remove the plastic fouling which means you don’t have to clean/touch the receiver at all.

       • MPro-7 also softens up the plastic wad residue in barrels. That’s what I love about the stuff. Brake cleaner is good stuff, but if you’re around it enough, I’d worry about the long term health effects.

         Also, you can get a stainless steel brush for your shotgun cleaning that will be a bit more aggressive than the bronze brushes usually seen in cleaning kits.

8. Solid bunch of baloney. Trying to capitalize on the coated lead projectiles you can get from many reloading suppliers for dirt cheap. If you don’t reload then you may not know what a cost savings coated are versus jacketed so that has to be their angle. I can get 203 gr coated lead bullets for 300 BLK for ~$0.10 ea in bulk. Handgun bullets are even cheaper. So there is a lot of profit built into those prices me thinks.

9. I like Federal Ammunition, but I like saving money/buying more rounds more. I’ll stick to chopper jacketed rounds at $10.50 per box of 50. I’ll never shoot a pistol enough to shoot out the barrel, and with the cost savings over the thousands to tens of thousands of rounds it takes to shoot out a barrel, I’ll be able to buy a new barrel, maybe a whole new pistol.

10. In my experience loads with lead free primers produce much less powder/primer fouling. It is immediately obvious when you look inside the casing and it appears almost as bright and clean as the outside of the case.

11. Ha. Sell me 9mm range ammo for $10 a box of 50 that is consistent. Now that I’ll buy. How many people wear out barrels or never clean their firearms after a few trips to range? It’s a non-issue. Now cheap ammo – bring it on.

    • I wear out a barrel in some gun I own about every other year.

      • Most people don’t shoot as much as you do Jon (I wish I got to shoot that much!).

12. …or you could just watch Fortunecookie45lc show you how to make your own by casting powder coated bullets.

    Powder Coated Bullets: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXrn3Tq9XDpdaoAl4U3Inz_fnHj0vxBGF

13. On sale, $10 for brass and $8 steel 9mm. Get to within a couple dollars of that, and I might bite.

    For double what I pay for brass? No sale.

14. Probably aimed at the indoor ranges that require you to purchase their ammo to shoot.

15. they’re based in Anoka, MN?

16. Nobody wants to comment on the “less recoil” part, perceived or not? How’s that done, through PFM?

    • Coated lead bullets, like regular lead bullets, need less powder to get the same velocity as jacketed. The masses of both the powder and bullet are in the recoil equation.

      • Basically,

        free recoil vel = ((bullet mass * bullet vel) + (powder mass * powder vel)) / gun mass

17. Dont know if it works, but you can try this compromise…

    Shoot your regular cheap ammo all day. Then when you are ready to pack up and go home, finish up with a few rounds of the expensive polymer coat.

18. Winchester white box .45 ACP is $22 at Cabela’s which is 44 cents per round. This stuff is 68 cents per round. As has been said, a new barrel would be cheaper. My 200 gr LSWC reloads, which feed reliably through my Gold Cup, cost me 19 cents each. They won’t wear out my barrel and, to reduce recoil, I can cut down the powder charge to the minimum necessary for reliable operation.

    • I pay 18 cents each for my reloads w/ 230gr RN poly coated bullets (probably could reduce that by another 2 to 4 cents if I shop around for cheaper primers/powder and buy 1000 qty/box instead of the 500 boxes.) 68 cents is just obscene. (About as obscene as American Eagle 10mm FMJ FBI load for 70c/round at the local Bi-Mart…)

19. Hummm… unless a shooter is really hot-rocketin’ their loads (which means they’re shooting reloads, because you won’t see really hot factory ball ammo), I’ve rarely seen “barrel life” to be a consideration in pistols.

    Hot loads in revolvers – yes, there I’ve seen barrel erosion forward of the forcing cone, because there’s an issue with the bullet taking a moment to fully obdurate in the forcing cone.

    Pistols? I’m not seeing it. Maybe I’m not getting out enough in this Brave New Polymer Pistol world.

    Want to get your cost of shooting down? RELOAD. Want to get it down even further?

    Learn how to cast your own lead pills. Go down to your local metal recycler, ask for where his 55 gal. barrel of wheel weights is, and take a five gallon bucket down to load it about half-full of wheel weights. Melt those down, pull out the clips and dross off the top of the molten alloy, cast some ingots and then locate some dies. Start casting your own.

    But even if you don’t cast your own, you can buy pre-cast lead pills very reasonably these days. Buy your primers and powder in bulk, save your brass, scrounge brass off the range (or buy it from recyclers), start reloading.

    • I’m reluctant to trust any brass that I didn’t buy new or from a reputable reloader. That way I know it started out good and I know what has been done to it. The history of brass scrounged from the range is unknown.

      Unless you load hot, brass lasts a long time. Most people start out shooting either brand new ammunition or factory reloads. If they saved their brass, they have enough to keep shooting their own reloads for years.

      • If you just go to the range, by yourself, and practice, or shoot slow fire, single position, precision matches where it’s easy to recover all YOUR brass, yeah that kind of statement makes sense.

        Shoot a 3gun/USPSA match where you are picking up brass at the end of the day, after 60-100 shooters, and there is no way you can sort your stuff from what you pick up. Even if you make some unique obvious mark on them, you’d have to seriously hate yourself to sort yours from what you pick up. And you’d likely only get a small % of your stuff back anyway.

        Pick it all up, clean it, sort it, resize it, check for defects (cracked necks, bulges, imminent case head separation, loose primer pockets), load it, and check for defects again (cracked necks usually from bullet insertion). I case gage pistol after completion of loading (because progressive press), and rifle after resize and again after completion of loading. I check primer pockets on pistol after cleaning (mainly to sort crimped brass, but I also throw out anything that feels too loose, using http://ballistictools.com/store/swage-gage-small-primer-pocket), and rifle after primer pocket swaging. You can do this by feel during TV.

      • I get what you are saying and I carefully inspect each case after cleaning but odds are pretty good if left laying around on the range that it’s once fired.

    • This exactly. Reload if you want to save money, cast your own boolits if you want to save even more and if you like your barrel lead and copper fouling free – powdercoat them.
      http://castboolits.gunloads.com/forumdisplay.php?184-Coatings-and-Alternatives

20. I dont know how many rounds the 1911 I have has shot, but the rifleing is getting smooth. Its about shot out, no corrosion, the lands just arent as pronounced as they used to be.

    • Being that it’s a 1911, you should have no problem finding a replacement barrel for it.

    • You can buy drop-in barrels for 1911’s all day long. You just break the gun down, pull your barrel out, drop in the new barrel, re-assemble the gun and you’re done. If you get a barrel+bushing set, it would probably run you $190 or so, plus applicable taxes and shipping.

21. Nothing new here. Looks like they read some old posts at http://castboolits.gunloads.com and took the next step. I got my powder coating equipment for bullets back in 2013.

    • I’ve been powdercoating my boolits for only about a year. I didn’t like electrostatic method, too much wasted powder, mess and flashing around bottoms. But “shake and bake” is just the ticket for me. No more sticky lubes and smoke! Plus my ammo looks great.

22. Wait a minute. How many rounds of standard ammo would you have to fire to wear our your gun? I’m guessing thousands and thousands. With the extre cost of these rounds, plus the stink, I’d rather buy a new gun after wearing my current one out! It would probably end up being cheaper to do that 8n the long run.

23. So, when will we see this in .38 and .380 ?

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