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)…
There are basically four types of bullets, re what actually touches the firearm’s rifled barrel, we might choose to handload: bare lead, jacketed, plated or coated. Bare lead is the oldest approach. The great positive for handloading bare lead bullets is they tend to be the least-expensive option, even if you’re buying the bullets,…
When we fire a cartridge inside a gun’s chamber, gas pressure inside the casing causes it to expand. This in turn causes the case walls to press themselves out against the encircling steel chamber and form a good gas seal behind the bullet. Therefore, the pressure of expanding gas from burning gunpowder can push the…
For most serious handloaders, perfecting a particular handload, getting it EXACTLY the way we want it, can be a time-consuming, painstaking process of adjustment until everything is just-so. Okay, we’re not getting the velocity we want; we adjust the powder bar. The load is not feeding; we adjust the overall length to give rounds a…
Lead bullets typically feature one or more grooves in the rearward “straight” portion of the projectile, which will be filled with bullet lube. What is bullet lube, what does it do, and how does it do it?
After firing cartridges, the cases are covered with a thin coating of sooty powder residue. If you’re picking cases up off the ground, you get the added bonus of dust, which can be abrasive. Before reloading, you want to remove that external residue. The best way to do that is with a vibratory case cleaner.…
Once you become grooved-in on the operation of your Dillon reloading machine, you’ll find you get an immense amount of feedback through the handle. The sensations that come through the handle as you’re cycling it to operate the machine can alert you to potential problems before they become real problems.
I strongly suggest NOT operating…
One of the operations necessary to reload a round of ammunition is opening up the case mouth to accept the base of the bullet at the bullet seating station. This is typically called “flaring” – though occasionally you’ll hear it called “belling” – the case mouth.
This is accomplished by, as you operate the handle…
A primer is basically a little metal cup filled with priming compound, a material that’s pressure-sensitive and ignitable, in other words, you hit it and it burns. The primer really is the spark plug of a cartridge, it provides fire to ignite a flammable material, in this case gunpowder.
Handloaders have a great advantage over folks who only buy factory ammo: We can deliberately load cartridges to a specific overall length (OAL) such that we can be sure they live eject from our guns. Those who rely only on factory ammunition can’t.
Recently a friend asked me, “Why do you handload?” To me the reasons are so obvious, so much a part of the way I think, I rarely put them into words. By the time I’d gotten through answering his question, I thought, “Wow, that would make a great article.”