Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Fire-forming AI's with corn-meal and Unique and elmers glue???

A fellow at work was splainin his recipe.

A little Unique; rest corn-meal, no bullet just elmers glue to seal the case.

Fire-forms beautiful 270AI cases for his rifle... he says.

Any other recipes that work real nice for you? I like saving bullets and minimizing throat erosion for nuthin.

Reason I am asking; I am seriously thinking of going all crazy and wild and frothing at the mouth lunatic and getting my 260 gouged out to the AI version.

I think it probably ain't worth it but I seem to have the mental illness shared about around here... it rubs off on a fellow don't you know.

I have seven AI'd rifles, and I have never fireformed a single round without a bullet.

Yep, there's no reason to shoot an AI with anything except bullets. Every one I've owned was quite accurate with "fire-forming" loads.

There are reasons, however, to do more complex fire-forming jobs with cereal and fast-burning powders.

Anybody foolin w/Unique and the like may pull the trigger and get a surprise...Kaboom! powdr

No reason not to shoot it; fireforming is a great reason to pop caps!

Seems you are giving up the opportunity to find out how well your rifle shoots standard loads. I was delighted to learn that my 257AI shot Roberts loads accurately and at good velocity, without ever screwing up a case.

I, for one, am quite fond of the fireforming without bullets method.

Had a fellow at work, was all hot and bothered for a fast twist 243AI. Had my guy build him one, Benchmark 1:8, trued action, nice trigger, etc. Fellow spends all the time waiting by buying every piece of 243 brass he can find, finally amasses five hundred pieces or so. He orders a set of Redding AI dies..hes excited. The gun finally gets done, and he starts cream-o-wheating brass. After about a week of this, he has maybe a hundred rounds fireformed, and is pissed.

Long story short, he got fed up with the "hassle," of an Ackley, and told me if i would pay for a barrel in 22-250, he would give me everything he had. I got 500pc of brass, 200rd factory 243, a Benchmark barrel with ten rounds through it, dies, a few pounds of H1000, 300 Berger 105 Hybrids, 400 various 243 bullets...all for the price of a barrel.

So yeah, I like the cream of wheat method.

I used to fire form my 280 AI with a small load of Bullseye with a quarter square of toilet paper tamped on top to hold the powder in place. Was told that little bit of information by the gunsmiths that built my Jarrett rifle. It worked like a charm until Nosler begin selling preformed brass.

I just didn't feel like wasting bullets if I didn't have to. Worked for me.

If you are shooting them you arent wasting them.

^^^^^

This.


I have some that fire forming loads shoot to the same spot, and in others they wont. But at least I get a little trigger time learning that.

I shot a small deer with my 35 Whelen while fire forming to AI. The cheap 200 gr bullet did a number on him at about 40 yards!!!

I guess I'd have to agree with that AI's can just as easily be formed with a bullet. Can take care of barrel break in (if you do that) and get some trigger time.

With that being said I did have to use the COW method when I built my 400 Whelen. I had both reloading dies and expander dies on order but that was a few weeks out. The only way I was going to get cases was to fire form them with COW. I used annealed 30-06 cases, 16.8 grains of Bullseye, filled the case up with COW and jammed a crayon in the neck and broke it off. One pull of the trigger gave me a 400 Whelen case. After that I used 41 mag dies to neck size the cases. Once the dies came, I was able to form the Qual Cart brass and Norma cylindrical into 400 Whelen cases. That was a bunch simpler.

The COW method works well to turn 30-30 brass into .375 Win brass. I don't mess with Elmer's glue. Crayons are slightly over 30 cal., so I insert about 1/2" of a crayon and break it off.

For my 35 Whelen AI, I just fire factory ammo and end up with AI cases. Factory ammo kills deer just fine in the AI chamber.

+1!

Graf & Sons has Prvi Partisan bullets cheap and practice only hurts my prey.

I used the COW method with Bullseye and toilet paper stuffed in the neck. Worked fine but I soon learned that it's a whole lot more fun tossing bullets with my Rob AI.

My .25-06 AI shoots factory .25-06 all over the map, it's no fun. I now use 10 grains of bullseye and a case full of corn meal or cream of wheat. This has worked beautifully for me.

And kill deer, I shoot the little 117 gr Sierra btsp fireform load in my 25-06 AI, once you chamber one you need to kill a deer or a dirt bank on the way back to the truck, there about 20 thou in.

The one big plus in this non-bullet method that I can think of is that not having a bullet rattling down the bore removes the need to do this at the range. Granted, I have the luxury of a shooting bench all of 10 feet from my bed, but when I'm back in suburbia during the week, I might want to take a project like this out to the garage.

Try this with bullets-

Fireforming brass in the garage. Get back to me on how that went for ya.

I used to fireform 6.5-06 AI in my garage with cream of wheat and a proven recipe. I stopped though, because even though the chamber was headspaced correctly (had it checked by a GS) I was getting funky results and case separations. Never did figure out why, just went to shooting an FF load.