8872

fiver

Well-Known Member
well I finally run out of 9m bullets.
the initial short run of 550 [test shooting and set-up] on top of the final 8872 count today got me to 9422.
not too bad for an eyeball count of 10-k.
8 bullets went back either for re-lubing or straight to the pot [ones I missed in the initial look over]
I missed 1 primer [still not over that yet]
had one little mis-hap with the primer slide on the 550 [my fault]
I had to re-graphite the slide once to help it smooth out.
I oiled the machine once and wiped down the ram once.
I double checked the powder drop at least once a 'run' and it never varied by more than .1 heavy, 0 were lighter.
i'll finish up the remaining brass with some 87gr PowRball bullets and once my QA/QC department [Wife/Daughter] gets caught up i'll put everything away.
[carrying them down stairs will be fun]
the 45 acp brass is sorted/cleaned and I now have enough small primer cases to make up a load for the Para. [thinking 4grs of Bulls-eye, the federal match s.p. primer, Federal cases, and the lyman 200gr swc]
so this machine will be set up for the SIL's 40 S&W using a 180gr rnfp for the 38-40 [had to get something cool in there]
and then the 45 small primer cases after that.


I gotta get some rifle stuff done, the rock-chucks are just about to get a free pass.
it's starting to warm up enough to put them back into Hibernation.

so how's your 'projects' coming?
 

Ian

Notorious member
Deprimed and swaged the pockets on about 800 military and commercial .223/5.56 cases last night, by the time I got finished it was too late to run them in the SSTM tumbler (takes a couple hours at least to get them totally clean inside and out and will take two runs to do all those). Going out of town for the weekend so that project is on hold.

Need to do more .45 ACP shooting to verify the Lee TC bullet is going to keep working before I load about 4-5K of those. I don't have enough 231 to do all of them (don't like it anyway) so that leaves Universal, Unique, or Clays. Probably try to make it work with Universal, it kicks less in the handguns and gets more reliable lockback in my carbine compared to 231. Also I need to try the beeswax-fortified BLL before committing to a large run, as of now I have about 300 lubed/sized/lubed and ready to load up for testing.

Then it will be on to the .38s, probably work up a load with Clays for the Lee 158 TL bullet because I have a lot of it. After that, I need to restock my .45 Colt inventory (only about 6-800 of those) but that's easy because I have the load, lube, and bullet/alloy all worked out.

Sometime I need to run a big batch of .30-30 with the Lee 100 grain round nose, just for fun.

I have zero .35 Remington loaded, never did complete load development for that one.

And there's that HV rifle challenge I need to get back to.... and a couple of moulds that need designing....
 
9

9.3X62AL

Guest
My brass is starting to pile up in coffee cans on my loading bench, which means I'M BACK TO FREQUENT SHOOTING AGAIN. Loving that! I spent Monday and Tuesday back in Ridgecrest, emptying out 30-06, 6.5 x 55, and 223 ammo out to 600 yards, but mostly at 200 and 300. I was settled on selling the Ruger 77R in 6.5 x 55, but that rifle kept stacking Lyman #266469s one on top of another at 200 yards so nicely that I KNOW I will kick myself if I part with it. It shoots too darn well with too many bullets to let it go. Has anyone tried the lighter varmint bullets in this caliber? Wondering how they might group.

I'm thinking hard about de-scoping the 30-06 (Husq Mauser from early 50s) and running it with the steel Lyman aperture sight it came with. For most of my deer hunting, a scope borders on useless, and though my eyesight has a few challenges I can still run open irons or an aperture rear sight pretty darn well. I banged the daylights out of the 600 yard dinger plate with the AR-15 (GI A2 irons) both from the bench and position shooting (sitting and prone). Too much fun, even if it was with redcoats.

I picked up my CZ-527 Lux in 22 Hornet yesterday. Beautiful little rifle, it's like the smaller version of my 550 in 9.3 x 62......ovate cheekpiece on the stock, usable open irons that will get dialed in before I install a scope in a month or so.

Last but not least, the first week of May will be spent fishing at Shasta Lake. Can't wait. Boat is almost ready, the tackle boxes are largely squared away--the supplies needed for the boxes arrived yesterday, so I'll install those and renew the battery in the boat (3 years old--I don't trust it), and I'll be ready almost a week early.

Obviously, I've forgotten something. :)
 

Brad

Benevolent Overlord and site owner
Staff member
Haven't loaded or shot in 3 weeks and it sucks. Hope to be back in the game next week.
I have lots of stuff I need to look into. The Marlin 44 mag needs more testing as do the 2 375s.
I am way behind on casting and loading. I should have a few K rounds of 9 mm and 38 special loaded and I doubt I have 500 rounds between them.
Someone needs to get off his duff and get to work.
 

Brad

Benevolent Overlord and site owner
Staff member
Pretty good. I hope to get rid of the brace next Tuesday. I will ask the MD how long before I can shoot handguns. I hope to be back to normal, such as it is, by mid May.
 

358156 hp

At large, whereabouts unknown.
Brads hands have to be shaking from withdrawal, no pun intended (well, maybe a little).
 

Brad

Benevolent Overlord and site owner
Staff member
No kidding!
The withdrawal is bad. My gun room misses me, haven't been in it in weeks. The lathe sits idle.
It is as bad as I expected in some ways and worse in others.
 

Ian

Notorious member
Just got back home a little while ago, first thing I did after firing up the water heater and water pump again was throw that load of .223 brass in the tumbler. Heading out in a few to lube up some .45s with BLL + beeswax so I can try those this week. Might load some more subsonic .223 and do a little backyard shooting before dark.
 

Brad

Benevolent Overlord and site owner
Staff member
Best way to add beeswax to BLL? Melt the wax and add the LLA to it? Since we are talking what, 5-10% beeswax it isn't much. Figure 7% would be 21 g of beeswax, a 4 ounce bottle of LLA, and 6 ounces of the liquid wax.
I don't know it adding a chunk of beeswax to the straight liquid wax would dissolve the wax or not.
 

Ian

Notorious member
I just made some hash marks on a clean bottle, put in six LLA, four JOS, and then added little BW slivers to bring it up to the 11th. Nuked it for two minutes total at 30 second intervals and it was plenty hot enough for the beeswax to melt in. Two coats is more thin and less sticky than the original BLL mix I had been using. I didn't dilute the LLA in that first batch properly, just nuked it until it would pour out of the bottle, so it's more like 75/25.

The .223 is still mousefart quiet, went woods walking with it and took out some cans. Also put a few on some 3/4" plywood, they went through it like it wasn't even there and blew out a good sized hole in the back, so I know these are quite deadly. Still hitting in a quarter-sized group at 20 yards using a 3 MOA red dot so I'm very happy.

Got that batch of brass cleaned and on the drying rack and about 50 .45s coated twice with BLL+BW, might load some later on.
 

fiver

Well-Known Member
it seems odd to use a wax in a tumble lube don't it?
but it works like a charm.
you can use even less than normal and still have a good coat.
 

Ian

Notorious member
Does seem odd. Remember back when I was a pup on the CB forum and tried to make a tumble version of Felix lube? Didn't work so well for reasons which are obvious to me now, so I wrote off the normal waxes in TL after that. Just loaded a box and a half (evidently I lost count when sizing them earlier) of .45s with the bullets coated in BLL + 10% BW, I'm sold on it so far. I bet the wax will even out a lot of things.
 

fiver

Well-Known Member
i remember the felix T/L.

i cast a jaded eye towards any type of T/L for a long time.
but i was actually working on a way to swirl lube the lube groove full of lube and allow it to cool and dry because i didn't want to buy a size die for my 25-20.
i ended up T-Lubing them anyway of course.

so i just went with it and started working on a lube similar to what the 22's use, which of course lead me to reading other things as i went looking for any hint's to it's ingredients.
then i remembered reading an article a number of years prior about melted bees-wax being used to dip paper patched rounds in up to the case mouth to seal everything. [1800's]
[the article talked about how kids/women were used to roll the P/P bullets because they were faster and done a better job too]
but i knew that 22's didn't use straight beeswax and they always felt paraffin type waxy to me which lead me to using the JPW i had on hand as a mix for the B-wax.
then JD contacted me by chance one night in chat. [when i was telling someone about the coating i come up with]
anyway he was having a problem mixing JPW and Alox together and getting it to dry properly.
you know the rest.
 

fiver

Well-Known Member
I finished up the powRball bullets today and double checked my bullet shelf downstairs for any more 9mm stuff.
all I found was some 147gr XTP's [I must have bought for my dad's 357 SIG] and some 100gr plated for a 380 I don't [never did] have.

I went well over the 10-K mark and still have some empty brass so I threw them in the bucket and called it good.
God,,,I'm tired of looking at 9m brass.
I have a basic set-up for the sil's 40 [using the 9m's plate and number-2 buttons] and a spare 35 cal funnel
[I must have swapped off the 40 cal funnel I had]
I need to find a 40 cal taper crimp die somewhere to finish this up mostly right [such as right is with a cobbled up system]
but it's good enough to put some test loads together.
 

Ian

Notorious member
Well, I spent a glorious evening in front of the drill press honing out the neck of an RCBS .223 die so it sizes .345" on the OD instead of .337". GAWD those dies are HARD. Took two hours, but it's done. Now the necks don't go wongo when I run the .224" expander through them. So I rolled all 800 across a case lube pad and through the die. About 20 cases into it I thought about reconstituting the spray lube mix in the alcohol mister bottle, but was too lazy. It only would have saved me 30 minutes.:rolleyes: Tomorrow on my lunch break I'll start trimming them.

When I first got home from work I ran a box of the tumble-lubed .45s though my carbine at various and sundry paper targets. Started with the ten BLL coated ones in the magazine to check first-shot flyers since the bore was well-fouled with such. Shot a nice, five inch group at 25 yards. Yechhh. Switched to the BLL+BW and put the first three touching, then it opened up to about 3.5" for ten. The magazine spring shattered into about eight pieces while loading the next magazine, so I had to go back home and get a spare to finish the testing. The BLL with BW sure does seem to want to shoot better in this gun, it really surprised me and I might just plan on doing everything I plan to TL with the BW-boosted lube.
 

fiver

Well-Known Member
I had the bottom metal blow out of one of my 45 acp magazines the other day.
it started acting up and when I went to pull it out of the gun the whole bottom end come out.
I might fix it or not, I can buy 7rd Kimber mags for 18.00.
I shoulda filled a box up when I could get the colt 7 rounders for 10 bucks each.

today was spent melting down almost all of my soft lead and pouring it into tiny little 1/4-1/3 lb ingots for the 10 lb pot.
I figure about 300 lbs in total.
I still have 4-5 1.5% antimony bars I gotta cut in half and get melted down too at some point.

but God I hate smelting.
the taste of the hot lead in the air is bad enough,, but when it's ww's I can taste the arsenic and I feel like crud for two or three day's.
I only have 4-5 buckets of ww's to do then I'm probably out of the smelting business, unless I gotta clean up range scrap or someone just gives me more ww's.
I'm hoping for 3 cleaned buckets of ingots from the ww's, cause I got about a whole bucket of mish-mashed softer lead ingoted up to mix with it.
that's gonna be later [probably a lot later I don't need them that bad for a while]
 

Pistolero

Well-Known Member
How in the WORLD does a mag spring just shatter? That is SERIOUSLY weird. Was the spring
plated by any chance?

Bill
 

Ian

Notorious member
I wear an AO Safety mask with pre-filter and heavy metal adsorber cartridges in it when smelting, it sure does help because I get metal fume fever or something like it after dealing with WW all day.

Finished prepping 200 mixed .223 cases, just realized I'm all out of lube bullets. Guess I gotta go lube some more of them.
 

Ian

Notorious member
How in the WORLD does a mag spring just shatter? That is SERIOUSLY weird. Was the spring
plated by any chance?

Bill

It was fine, just finished shooting a full stack out of it and then it suddenly shattered into tiny bits trying to stuff #7 of ten in there on the reload. Kinda made a "POP" sound and went limp. Light dusty coat of rust on the spring, something I noticed when I took these apart to de-nib and lube when I first got them. Apparently Hornady One Shot gun lube doesn't prevent rust. What can I say, PRO MAG. But they're the only game in town if you want affordable H&K USC magazines or want them in higher capacities like 15 or 20 rounds.

I can take a picture if you want, the spring is just a pile of J-shaped bits and a couple of larger fragments with a few coils left.