Steel Match (Hornady trial 2)

          This is the second part of my trial and review of Hornady ammunition. This time I decided to try out an economically pleasing brand they have called “Steel Match”. These bullets are encased in a steel shell as opposed to brass. The down side of this is that they cannot be reloaded, however, if you don’t reload your own ammunition anyway and you’re looking to save some money than this is for you.

                I fired nearly forty rounds of these 180 grain steel match hollow points before taking a few moments to evaluate their performance. I found them to be a very smooth shooting round and again, true to Hornady form, pretty accurate for a factory load bullet.  I did however encounter one small problem shooting these from one of the guns we had. The Ruger P944 .40 auto seemed to have a little difficulty ejecting some of these cartridges. About one in every five failed to be pulled out with this guns extractor pin. In the interest of fairness we decided to shoot the last of them through a different model .40 caliber handgun and had no problems.  This is probably because the Ruger’s extractor is a fairly thick sort of spring steel and just didn’t match up well against the steel cased cartridges. I would definitely recommend this to anyone with a polymer type or lightweight handgun such as Glock, H&K, Sig Sauer, High Point, or the like, but the heavier steel constructed firearms may have a problem cycling this ammo. You can find these bullets at Hornady’s website here.