I’m sometimes encountered with a conversation that goes like this:
The other guy: “I want to learn how to load my own ammunition, but I don’t know where to begin. Help me!”
Me: “What kind of a gun do you own?”
The other guy: “I don’t know! Just tell me what to buy!”
I might suggest to…
Not all primers are created equal, especially when it comes to pistols. Here are a few things to note amongst the major primer brands, at least in my experience.
Amongst the competition shooting set, Federal primers are the most prized because they are the softest. This means that they are the most likely to go bang, regardless of the strength of the…
When a handloader sets out to develop a new rifle load, he is met with a whole world of bullet choices and may want to dip his toe into the “monolithic” pond of solid bullets.
Conventional bullets are typically made with a copper jacket surrounding a lead core. Solids, on the other hand are… well, solid. They are usually made of copper because it…
If you hand load ammunition, then you deal with “grain” as a weight all the time. We measure our bullets in grains, and we measure our powder in grains. If you’re into archery, it’s also the standard form of measurement for weighing arrows.
But… do you actually know what a grain is? First, be aware that a granule of powder is not…
Something to bear in mind when hand loading is the amount of power you’re going to get out of an amount of powder will be dependent, in part, on the caliber of the barrel, thanks to a concept that has several names: “volume ratio” and “expansion ratio” are the two most common terms applied to it.
Bullets are propelled by cartridge pressure, which is calculated by the…
Sectional density is one of those ammunition terms that sounds super-complicated, but it really isn’t that difficult of a concept to grasp. By definition, sectional density is the ratio of a bullet’s cross-sectional area, relative to its mass.
I think where people go cross-eyed is with the phrase “cross-sectional area.” Basically, if you sliced a bullet across the widest part of its diameter,…
Steel shooters have long bragged about their “sub-minor” hand loads reducing split times between plates, resulting in near-magical score improvements. The oft-repeated phrase is that “10 seconds gets chopped off the top” just through load development. This is a great story;however, the evidence tends to be anecdotal. Being a person who prefers hard data to “everybody knows,” I recruited a couple friends to put this shooting legend to the test.
To explain: Steel Challenge Shooting Association (SCSA) events utilize eight standardizedstages that are shot for speed, one shot per target, and the accumulated time is counted for score. A full SCSA match will incorporate 124 scored target transitions. “Transitions” mean time, and time means score.
One way to reduce transition…
If other progressive hand loaders are like me, they prefer to adjust their Dillon to a particular load and then leave it alone. In my case, after I set my Dillon Auto Powder Measure, I cover the adjustment nut with painter’s tape and write the powder name and grains on it. This way, the adjustment…
Over the past few years, the Pistol Caliber Carbine (PCC) has gained popularity in competitive shooting, which has spilled over to home defense where PCCs maintain the controllability of a long gun without the overpenetration of a rifle. For the long-gun shooter, a point of attraction towards PCCs is that – relative to bottlenecked rifle…
Okay, you’ve got your cases sparkly-clean and are now ready to introduce them into your reloading machine. But wait! There’s still one more preparatory step, one more thing you need, to do the job right, and that’s case lube. This is a liquid lubricant that, when you apply a thin coating over the cases before…
Some people opine that handloading is not worth the time. For some cartridges, I get that, you can buy factory ammunition that fully meets your needs. Having said that, in many cases, you can’t. In the overall scheme of things, there really aren’t that many factory loads. It might seem like there are, but the…
When a gun misfires, in other words we pull the trigger and get a click instead of a bang, the cause is typically one of a short list of things: (1) we’ve lightened springs, in pursuit of lighter trigger pulls, to the point the firing pin has insufficient impact energy to pop the primer, (2)…