[Johnny Guest]

It is entirely too easy to become confused between Hodgdon's Clays and Universal Clays. Most loaders seem to call the latter just "H. Universal."

THAT powder, Universal, is almost a weight-for-weight substitution for Alliant Unique, and is reputed to be "A LOT CLEANER." I have mixed feelings about these assertions. First, the "Dirty" aspect of Unique was pretty true back in the days of dead-soft lead bullets, llubricated with the old Lyman Ideal bullet lube, a black, gooey, soft thing that only hardened up somewhere below absolute zero. It would leave a LOT of gunk.

With more modern lubes, the Alox stuff, colored, usually, blue or green, Unique shoots a lot cleaner. The "fouling" experienced in this combinaiton is more of a sooty deposit than narsty fouling. It tends to brush right out, or swabs out pretty well with a dry patch. Even after a couple of hundred .45 ACP lead bullet loads, my usual cleaning routine is one solvent patch and two dry ones. I hit the breech face, feed ramp, and the locking lugs with a nylon brush and call it done.

In actual use, I find that Universal yields slightly less velocity than Unique, all other components being equal. This is not usually a problem for me--they are practice loads only.

As to loads I have used--Universal powder, Winchester primers--

9 mm 124 Rem JHP 4.6 gr. about 1080 fps

.45 ACP 230 LRN 5.8 to 6.0 gr about 840

.45 Colt 255 LSWC 8.0 about 800

The latter two loads are also fine with jacketed bullets.

I've also used a fair amount of Universal in .44 Special cases, using the one-to-one-with-Unique rule of thumb. My loads were way beyond what is currently given as max, so I won't even discuss it here and now. Some other time, when we're dealing with hot loads, and will insert the appropriate bold-print cautionary notes, we can go into those.

Best,
Johnny