S&W's Performance Center® M&P®40 M2.0™ C.O.R.E. Pro Series®Part II

01/31/2021

The M&P40 M2.0 C.O.R.E. Pro Series makes time spent on the range… easy. No loud magnum barks and bites, no subcompact reciprocating slide wrist rotating, no tiny grip clutching. The M&P40 is mild mannered in every way with the exception of the bullet leaving the barrel. The handloads that follow cost effectively cover a good range of applications. They are all well established with good performance documented over the long haul. I am not suggesting that new products don’t perform as well or even better, but I am suggesting a number of them have not seen service long enough to confirm performance.

As noted in Part I, the 40 S&W is a flexible cartridge that lends itself to both cast bullet and jacketed handloads. In this instance, the cast bullets are from Acme and the jacketed bullets are from Speer, Remington and Hornady. As they appear left to right in the picture above, they appear top to bottom on the table below.

The Acme bullets selected are cast from 92-6-2 lead alloy; 92% lead, 2% Tin, 6% Antimony with a Brinell Hardness of 16, which qualifies as hard cast. Unlike hardness derived from heat treating softer lead alloy, these cast bullets are of a consistent hardness throughout. Not so hard as to shatter when striking bone, but hard enough to break bone without fragmenting on impact. Because there is little expansion in tissue, the cast bullets can penetrate two 16″ long blocks of ballistic gel placed back to back.

Both the Speer and Remington expand to more than double diameter in soft tissue, but don’t fragment and retain weight. Pushing an ever expanding frontal area, penetration in ballistic gel is in the 15″ range +/-.

The Hornady 200 grain is probably a better fit for the 10mm Auto with elevated velocity where it is listed for security duty as well as for deer hunting. In the 40 S&W, expansion is less and ballistic gel penetration is in the 25″ to 30″ range.

All of the assembled ammunition fed without glitches and the Smith & Wesson cycled and fired without incident.

Warning: Bullet selections are specific, and loads are not valid with substitutions of different bullets of the same weight. Variations in bullet length will alter net case capacity,  pressure and velocity. Primer selection is specific and primer types are not interchangeable. These are maximum loads in my firearms and may be excessive in others. All loads should be reduced by 5% as a starting point for development where cartridges have greater than 40 grains in capacity and 10% for cartridges with less than 40 grain capacity following safe handloading practices as represented in established mainstream reloading manuals. Presentation of these loads does not constitute a solicitation for their use, nor a recommendation.

Summary

I did not strap the S&W down in a rest and shoot 25 yard groups to test mechanical accuracy. I did, however, break out a fresh deck of 2.5″ x 3.5 “ playing cards and past them up on a target set out at 10 yards. It was not a problem for any of the loads listed on the table to keep five shots on a card at that distance. That is not to suggest that the S&W could not do better… if there was a couple of feet of snow on the ground, if the wind wasn’t shoving large trees around and I was not stomping my feet to keep warm and swearing at my shooting gloves for not keeping my digits warm. Maine!

The S&W Performance Center M&P40 2.0 C.O.R.E. Pro is a seriously nice, high quality pistol, even if one in need of a much abbreviated nickname.