For accurate, inexpensive revolver practice, it’s hard to beat Hornady's hollow-base wadcutters from a .38. For a bit more distance, load Sierra’s 170-grain silhouette bullets in your .357 Magnum.

Swaged (cold formed) lead bullets shouldn't be pushed much over 1,000 or 1,100 fps, and I prefer to keep velocities under 900 fps with them. Cartridges such the .45 ACP and .38 Special, combined with a bullet in the mid- to upper weight range, are perfect candidates for those velocities.

When you step up in velocity to anything in the 1,100 to 1,600 fps range, you need a hard-alloy cast bullet. The alloys necessary to make a bullet hard enough to withstand these velocities are too hard to be swaged from cold stock. Most revolver and some semiauto cartridges--such as the 9mm--fall into this category.

If you intend to push cast bullets faster than about 1,600 fps, you need a hard-cast bullet with a gas check. Basically a very short copper cup that crimps on over the base of the bullet, it protects the base from hot gases and lessens the effect of dramatically increased friction. A gas check will allow you to shoot cast bullets at well over 2,000 fps.

For cartridges that will likely be loaded in bulk for competition, the author prefers smooth-contoured roundnose bullets.

Grease grooves and crimping grooves can play an important part in choosing a cast bullet, especially the crimping groove. Grease grooves simply provide lubricant to help avoid excessive fouling and leading, but occasionally, on multiple-groove bullets, the forward grease groove also acts as the crimping groove.

Cast bullets, by nature, seem to grip the inside walls of the cartridge case quite well--better than jacketed bullets do. And some light-recoiling calibers may not call for a crimp.

However, a crimp should be used--in broad terms--with almost all handgun handloads, and the crimping groove must be in the correct place on the bullet shank to allow the bullet to be loaded to correct overall length.

How do you tell? The most reliable method is to measure the bullet with a caliper. If you know the correct overall length parameters of the cartridge you're loading, simply subtract the correct case length, and the remainder should roughly equal the distance from the forward edge of the crimping groove to the nose of the bullet.

Bullets for semiauto pistol calibers often don't have a crimping groove. This is because many such calibers headspace on the mouth of the case, and should a well-meaning handloader aggressively crimp the mouth of the case into a groove, it would cause excessive headspace--and that's bad.

In most cases, it's best to give cartridges that headspace on the mouth of the case only a mild crimp. If no crimping groove is present, the mouth of the case will simply press into the shank of the bullet slightly.

Don't get too hung up on the groove issue though. If a bullet is designated for a particular caliber, the groove--if present--will almost always be located correctly.

If a bullet with no exposed lead is called for when building practice, plinking and/or competition ammo, I really like Berry's plated bullets. Less expensive than jacketed bullets, they shoot well and feed well in most pistols. They don't lead your bore, and they're available in bulk. My friends and I have shot literally thousands downrange with no issues.

I also like full metal jacket bullets very much, but they start to get expensive--not as expensive as hollowpoints but too expensive to fuel my shooting addiction. I do use them, but not extensively.