While I have been a born and bred gunny my whole life, one aspect of it has been missing during the adult portion of it.
Reloading.
I just never had the time or the funds or the space to get a home rig set up. That changed a couple weeks back when I walked into this for a song.
Just a Lee single-stage press, tumbler, micrometer, hand primer and some case trimmers (and there is a powder charger somewhere there too). I bought dies for both calibers the next day.
From my years of attending Boomershoot and firing factory box ammo (and doing rather well, I might add), I figure that I have collected 1000 pieces of .308 Win. brass and more than 500 pieces of .22.250 brass. I came to this realization after I got laid off and was cleaning out the garage and sheds during the end of summer.
So, after getting this sorted out and set up I went about finding bullets, brass and powder. While finding bullets has been hit and miss, I have enough primers and IMR 4064 to reload each piece of brass twice.
My current chosen projectiles for the .22-250 are the 55gr Sierra GameKing HPBT, and for the .308, the Sierra MatchKing 155gr Palma HPBT.
Mickey the MouseGun shoots the simple .22-250 Remington greenbox 55gr Core-Lokt into 4x4x2in boomers at and a little beyond the 500 yard line with almost frightening regularity for a factory rifle (a trigger job and an over sized stock is all I’ve had done to it).
Barak (it’s a long story) will hopefully enjoy eating a steady diet of the 155’s since that is what I built him to consume. I have been using Federal/PMC/PRVI factory loaded 168gr HPBT’s which have been working well enough. But the 27 inch long, 1-in-12 twist barrel should like the slightly lighter bullets better.
I’ve been prepping brass for a week now, off and on, and should be able to get down to actually loading cartridges today. There may be a range trip this weekend to test some different loads.
Next up, .300 Win Mag. I may be getting a T/C Encore frame from Santa and I’ve always wanted to reach past 1000yds with authority.
Welcome to the mysterious world of reloading. My suggestion is to buy every reloading manual you can find, as they (sometimes) differ considerably.
Merle
My suggestion is to get a bullet puller and use it. Any time you have any doubts about a round, pull it. Right then and there.
Takes no time at all, you can re-use the components, and pulling a bullet is cheaper than paying a doc to pull gun parts out of your face.
WTF?
No clue where that e-mail address came from. Should read, “you can re-use the components”
I did something of that sort, Merle. Loadbooks USA copies the data from a lmost a dozen different projectile and powder makers and puts it together by caliber. For $6-7 buck, it makes sense right now. Maybe if I ever start loading 15 different calibers, I’ll start buying loadbooks. But for now, I’ll load with these.
And you’re right about the differences in the numbers.
Guy, I’ve had a bullet puller for a good long while now for “setback” projectiles in my semi-auto pistols. Which reminds me that I should find that box of projectiles before I start loading pistol rounds.
Now that you are reloading, you might want to move away from dry tumbling and to wet/stainless steel tumbling. I think it does a better job of cleaning the brass, if you deprime before tumbling it will even clean out the primer pocket.
The Hodgdon/Winchester website has their current load data
http://data.hodgdon.com/main_menu.asp
for just about everything. Alliant has some, too
http://www.alliantpowder.com/reloaders/default.aspx
And yeah, just about every load manual has some different stuff in it.
Big thing is take your time, and don’t be bothered by looking back over everything to make sure it’s right.
Hodgdon and Winchester have load data on their website
http://data.hodgdon.com/main_menu.asp
Alliant has some, too
http://www.alliantpowder.com/reloaders/default.aspx
Yeah, the manuals differ a lot; some have loads only for their powders or bullets, some have all kinds.
The different Loadbook manufacturers cater to different needs/aspects. Sierra the bullet makers don’t care about powder as much as projectile performance, and will list a variety of best-use powders for various of their projectiles, and other standard projectiles, while coming at it from the other end, Hogdon likes to list their powders with all sorts of various projectiles… Potato, Tomato….
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Sorry for the repeat; no idea how I managed that