Frontier .40 Calibre Match Bullet

Frontier Metal Processing

Frontier Metal Processing was established in 1994 by Nico Economakis and has since grown to a successful manufacturing business of lead and complete metal jacket ( CMJ ) bullets, distributing its products throughout the world.

Frontier ( www.frontierbullets.co.za ) was founded by Nico as an extension of his hobby into a business venture. He is a keen IPSC shooter who used to cast his own bullets, both for himself and for his friends. He soon started to manufacture commercially and eventually bought industrial bullet making machinery. Today Frontier is one of the leading manufacturers of complete metal jacketed bullets in the world.

Frontiers factory runs 24 hours, five days a week to keep up with demand of its products and to ensure the effectiveness of the manufacturing process. The entire management team at Frontier consist of people who are passionate about shooting. The testing, research and development of Frontier products are done at the factory by shooters who are putting the bullets through tests for accuracy and velocity, resulting in a product for shooters tested and developed by shooters.

Reloading the .40 S&W Round

The .40 S&W round was designed to operate in pistols that originally had a 9mm operating platform. The length of factory .40 S&W ammunition is generally around an overall length of 28.80 mm. While this may work OK in pistols such as the Glock and Sig, for those of you who use pistols such as STI, SVI and Para Ordnance you will probably experience failures to chamber properly with ammunition loaded to factory length. The way to overcome this problem is to reload ammunition to a longer overall length. Many IPSC practical pistol competitors who compete in Standard Division on the European IPSC Match Circuit reload their ammunition to an complete overall length ( COL ) of 29.50 mm to 31mm. The COL used in our test was 29.50mm.



 

The Frontier .40 match bullet has a diameter of 0.400 inches and a weight variation of 1.2 grains over the 20 bullets that were weighted.


The following .40 calibre loads were assembled using Alliant Power Pistol, Hodgdon Tite Group and Vihtavuori N320 powders. The velocities were recorded in feet per second ( FPS ) using a CED Millennium M2 Chronograph. As well as measuring the velocity I also tested the accuracy out of a STI Executive with the assistance of a Ransom Rest. The three powders were chosen as they are widely available and see a lot of use in IPSC competition.