Return of Super Vel Ammo

[CXM]

Thumbing through the NRA magazines that arrived today, I noticed an Ad in the new NRA magazines for Super Vel ammo announcing it is back... I was surprised to see the brand coming back.

If I recall correctly Super Vel was the stuff to have in the mid-late 1960s and early-mid 1970s... it impelled the big name makers to offer JHP ammo in their product lines.

This seems to be the site for the new product...

www.supervelammunition.com/buy-ammunition

Reading their web site it indicates the new Super Vel has been around since 2015... somehow I missed the re-launch of their products..., It should be interesting to see what they have to offer and how it performs. The site has some test data for their products... as expected there are some high velocities there...



FWIW

CHuck

[HRFunk]

Wow! There's a blast from the past. The price seems to have gone up a bit.

HRF

[gt40doc]

I still have a box of SuperVel ammo in 380, and 38 Special(I am a pack rat). For the time, it was some very hot ammo, and was responsible for blowing up some of the super cheap Saturday night specials made from pot metal!!

[jaypee]

The old Super Vel company was founded and run by Lee Jurras and was responsible for forcing the major factories to get started making decent defensive ammo and finally abandoning round nosed lead bullets. I had just begun a LE career and Super Vel was a godsend to the cops who were permitted to use it. I began my caeer in 1965 and I first saw their 110 grain .38 Spl loads in 1967. The thing that caused the demise of the old Super Vel company, according to a friend in a position to know, was their failure to reestablish their pressure data when powder lots changed. They started cracking a lot of forcing cones and that pretty well scared off the police market . They weren't really set up to compete with the big guys for the commercial market, so they went under in around 1975 I believe. But it saved a lot of cops lives and deserves a lot of credit for bringing police weaponry into the modern age. I really doubt that we would have good JHP's even today if it hadn't been for Mr. Jurras and his Super Vel company. It's sure good to see the name again.

JayPee

[Deleted]

I still have about a dozen rounds of .357 magnum Super Vel. It was illuminating (sorry) to shoot it at night in my snubby M-66 off duty, and each empty cartridge had to be punched out individually with a pencil.
My duty weapon at the time was a heavy barreled 4" S&W M-10 and the official duty load was 158 grain RNL. This load had a poor reputation and our guys were cutting Xs and holes in the tips of the round nose lead, handloading reversed hollow-based wadcutters, buying Super Vels - you name it.

The brass knew that they weren't ever going to stop the use of these "street loads" by issuing a memo, so they shrewdly adopted the Winchester 158 grain lead semi wadcutter hollow point , also known as the "FBI load".
Very soon thereafter, one of the detective nailed a bad guy with the FBI load out of a Chief's Special. The bad guy was rendered instantly inert and thereafter the guys stopped messing with the duty loads.

Super Vel had some popularity in handgun hunting circles. Lee Juras went all over the globe to handgun hunt with his new ammo and his exploits made interesting reading. As a duty load though Super Vel was a bit too much of a good thing - unless you could be guaranteed that you'd only need 6 rounds to settle the fight.

[Jäger]

Burgs' post is a good summation of the state of things for many of us whose first exposure to carrying handguns was being issued something along the lines of a Model 10 or something similar.



Super Vel and the buddy on one of the other watches who was a handloader were some of the options those who actually cared resorted to.  I was one of the "that buddy" options...  Meanwhile, a lot of cops didn't bother; they realized their chances of actually firing their weapon in self defense were tiny - the results could be catastrophic, but the chances were still lottery level, statistically speaking.

What (I believe anyways) is an interesting side effect of Super Vel is the mindset that continues to this day for many that there is a direct, linear relationship between velocity (and weight) and terminal ballistics effectiveness. Mo' velocity = mo' stopping power; mo' weight = mo' stopping power. So Double Tap, Underwood, Buffalo Bore, etc make a very nice living as boutique manufacturers who take bullets from the same companies and wring every last fps of velocity out of them. Some buyers scratch their heads when the bullets come apart, or expand sooner but don't penetrate as far, etc.

It's like Federal, Speer, Remington, et al, are too dumb to design their bullets around maximum terminal effectiveness within a specific velocity envelope.

And so, for example, you have SME's like Dr. Gary Roberts who will tell you that Federal's 147 gr HST standard pressure offering actually provides better terminal ballistics performance than their +P version that delivers a whopping 50 fps more velocity - but people still pass over the standard pressure offerings to find the "super vel" +P version that is 50 fps faster but marginally less effective.

Nobody ever lost money promising more speed...

[sistema1927]

It was SuperVel that led me to believe, erroneously and for many years, that you needed 1000 FPS at contact in order to get expansion. Old "truths" die hard.

That may have been the truth when I began shooting handguns in the early 1970's, but the bullet manufacturers have done considerable work in ensuring expansion at lower velocities in recent decades. I don't know how many rounds I have both loaded and fired that met that 1K threshold that were stouter than they actually needed to be, long after they needed to be.