Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters 06/200 @ 2700 question

Well excuse me for quoting the 24hourcampfire May 2009 Newsletter right here on the fire with the header saying and I quote again:

Please take a moment to FORWARD JOHN BARSNESS'S COLUMN to a shooting or hunting buddy!

http://www.24hourcampfire.com/newsletters/May_2009.html

If I offended or hurt your little feelings for quoting a 24hourcampfire newsletter from May 2009,I publicly apologize to you.

Jayco

I will have to try it.

Key words in your paragraph above are "in their typical pressure range." When I loaded hotter, I can remember several times where adding a grain resulted in a big jump in velocity, which I always took as a sign of excessive pressure. I don't remember if this ocurred with double- or single-based powder or both.

It can occur with both because higher pressure can change the burn characteristics of a powder. Double based are more sensitive this.

That why typical pressure range is specified.

As a fun factoid, due to it's sheer awesomeness, the .358 can push a 200 as fast as a 30-06.

Oh no a battle of gack.

Of course it'd have the BC of a Jelly Bean...

Dober

Well there is that <g>!

by DJ Paintless
And not to mince words, was it here or on AA where someone trying to duplicate Seafire's Blue-Dot loads blew up a rifle?

just like we use to sing when marching in basic training:
"here we go again, same old chit again..."

The gentleman who did so, admitted privately and then publicly that he had accidentally double charged, if not Triple charged his 257 Weatherby, by getting distracted Multiple times by his wife, poking their heads in the garage and asking " oh honey can you help me, it will only take a minute"....message was "don't get distracted at the reload bench".. secondly loading light powder charges in a case is nothing that handloaders of pistol cartridges don't do every day...

that was admitted to be operator error.. and the recommendations were per his request in private PMs, he was told about working up, and he was an accomplished reloader with years of experience...

so if you want to post the incident, that's fine, and I have no problem.. but get your facts straight before you do so...
something too many folks on here don't need to see the need for...

have been off of this thread for a couple of days and was wading thru it...

I am surprised some of the guys who I follow their posts, are not into annealing...

Life runs together here as we get older..however I have not been annealing that long it seems...4 or 5 years maybe...

but it surprises me how many shooters on here DON'T do it.. my experience is all self taught with input from reading folks on the campfire here... from Mr Barsness right on down to new folks..

someone gave me an older 7 or 8 gallon propane tank from a sold RV, that I went down and filled...I had a spare attachment that someone left at a Scout Camp that was never claimed...and then went down to Grover's here and picked up a plumbers torch for about $6 or $8.... and a spare milk crate to put the tank in so it wouldn't fall over.. and finally a couple of small galvinized metal bucks that I picked up at Walmart in the Craft dept for a $1.00 a piece...

so I don't have a big cash investment involved...

then I just couldn't see what the 'drop in water' cooling did for me, that plain old air drying didn't...if I needed to cool them quick, I could just put the bucket in the frig or freezer located 2 steps away in the garage where I do that stuff..

I played with annealing every other time to as far out as every 8 times...Like Brad, I settled on every 4th time..

my whole goal here was to see how far one could stretch out brass life, if suddenly it wasn't available to us, courtesy of radicals in the government who want to erase firearms and hunting from our country...

I neck size as much as possible...also make sure the brass will chamber in the rifle, so I don't get out in the field where something won't chamber.. I walk outside of the garage and do so, instead of accidentally putting a hole in the wall like a neighbor did...

My regimen is:
1. deprime with a universal deprimer.
2.use a bore brush and brush out the throat
3. using a pair of needled nose pliers, hold the brass into the flame for X amount of seconds...5 seconds for 223, 6 to 8 seconds for 22.250 and 308 based cartridges..10 seconds for 30.06 based cartridges, 12 second for the 7, 300 and 338 Mags..
4. usually do 10 at a time, almost all my brass is segregated into lots of 10, and put in a zip lock bag, with a 3 x 5 card, that will list the entire history of the brass...
5. let air cool in bucket...
6. clean neck and lube with bore brush
7. resize, either with neck sizer or full sizer if needed..
prefer to bump shoulder back with a body die nowadays...

I've noticed if one can live with brass being loaded to the old specs of older Mausers, right around 40 to 45,000 CUP pressure, neck sizing, dedicated to same fire arm, bumping shoulder back as needed with a body die, one could get a fairly long life out of a piece of brass...

the less you overwork it, the longer it will last, and keep it clean, keep the necks cleaned out...

Now I'll put on my flame retardant suit, because here's the part that the naythesayers have been waiting for....because this isn't published in any book to my knowledge...

I saw going thru Lapua's web site, on their brass where they claimed that they have reloaded components 300 times, yes, you read that number right....

I know Lapua is the Cadillac Standard in brass, but that planted the old 'what if' in my mind, so I had to experiment to see what good old American stuff could do...

so I decided to do testing of two calibers.. both in 22 caliber.. the 223, and the 22.250.. I had a good stash of 22 cal 55 grain FMJ setting around and going nowhere...

so with 10 pieces of brass for each test group, off we went...

this involved loading up, going 2 miles around the corner to forest service land, and shooting them...a couple of trees were picked as back stops... and the number of times they were shot with 55 grain FMJs actually ended up cutting them down over time.. so 3 threes sacrificed their lives for this test...

the 22.250 brass, I tested was Winchester.. with this regimen and a charge of 20 grains of SR 4759.. that batch went 40 reloads with no problems experienced at all... no casualties, etc...I quit at 40, as I was going to spend the rest of the time on the 223...and then maybe come back and see if I could push the 22.250 brass any further... in the end, I didn't see the need to.. results from the 223, gave me more than enough info to see one could stretch the brass life if desired, way beyond what any of us would consider sane or normal...

now the 223. shot out of an ADL...Load was 12.5 grains of Blue Dot...small pistol primer and smile rifle primers used intermittently... brass was Remington, that was picked up at the range off the ground..tumbled and cleaned...so no cost to me..
Results:
they required having the shoulder bumped back every 7 to 8 reloads...

they were annealed every 4th reload..

necks were cleaned out each time with a bore brush, which helps eliminate neck splits by being clean....

neck sized each time

I can draw this out, or just come to the final results..

it took 2 months to do all this...load, drive 2.5 miles from the house, shoot and come back home...reload etc..

ended up putting a thousand rounds down the barrel of the ADL..

burned up a hair less than 2 lbs of Blue Dot...

put 500 plus miles on my car, driving back and forth 'around the corner'...

went thru $30 worth of primers...

lost 3 pieces of brass at the reload bench, due to operator error...

but what was left was 7 pieces of the raunchiest looking brass from Remington.. probably due to over annealing for too long.. like 12 seconds each..

but those 7 pieces of brass left, had shot 100 bullets each for the test...the replacements ( nickel so they'd stand out) had shot less...

but annealing, neck sizing , body dies, a little conservative on the reloading scale, taught me a lot...

about loading techniques, annealing and just stretching out brass life, if that is all I could get..

7 left standing, Remington 223 brass that was picked up off the ground at the range.. shot in a bolt action ADL stood up to 100 reloads!..

no split necks, no case head separations, no loose primer pockets..

and the three casualties, were each, missing the spindle on the decapping die, and instead of punching out the primer, plowing a big valley right down the side of the brass....

so if ya want to, or have to stretch out brass life... learning how to not work it much, you can stretch the life of it out pretty darn far...

hence why I never went back and tested the 22.250 stuff any further.. not considering it part of the test, that 'test' batch went back into varmint service, and that season, shot another 20 rounds of 30 grains of RL 7 behind a Speer 52 grain HP.. so they hit 60 reloads...

still have them in a ziplock bag, somewhere out in the garage..

of course in my garage, you could park the Queen Mary out there and it would take a week to find it..

Speaking of Lapua Brass, most of the folks that dote on it (that I've read after) say they get around 15+ loads out of it... that's pretty darn good.

I've only recently used Lapua Brass... the stuff is amazing and I've come to believe it's worth what it costs... for certain rifles anyway.

yeah Brad, someone sent me like 30 pieces of 308 brass that they said they had reloaded some 30 times or so.. but weren't sure..

but yeah, talk about the Cadillac of brass...

I can't verify how many times they were reloaded by the campfire member that gave them to me...but I've reloaded them 20 times so far playing with my 7/08 barrel I put on the Savage action I picked up from another campfire member in the classifieds..

but my loads in that, have been weiner loads..

100, 110, 115, 120 and 130 grain loads over charges like 30 grains of RL 7 or IMR 4198...so it isn't stretching the brass much at all...

If a guy was going to get a new rifle or barrel and handloaded, I'd say a 100 rounds of Lapua brass, and he could wear out the barrel by the time the brass got around to be worn out, unless he redlined the hell out of it..

You might be right... sure wish they still made 270 Win brass.

Well they sorta do, if you don't look at the head stamp too closely....

I don't think they make 7/08 brass either.. but in my case, they make 308 brass that necks down to 7/08...

but then again, I do stupid stuff like that..

Using Blue-Dot in a belted magnum round ended up with a Blown-Up rifle, simple as that.

If he had been using the powders normally used in 257 Weatherby a double charge would not have been a possibility. I beleive that there are good reasons to establish firm safety procedures in reloading to prevent such actions.

One is using powders that have sufficient loading density to prevent the possibility of an double charge that could destroy a firearm and cause potential injury.

Two is not loading 5 grains over listed maximums.

You obviously beleive differently but nobody has blown up a rifle using my procedures..............................dj

and that was a choice of the gentleman who was reloading HIS rifle....

he asked for an opinion of mine.. I shared it with him, per his request.. along with procedures that I use to make sure that I don't do a double charge...

what I believe is that we all are individually responsible for our own loading procedures and choices...

placing blame on a choice and mistake of one individual, on another when it was beyond his control, is asinine...

safety is always our individual responsibility....casting blame on someone else, is a problem in our society....

the gentleman who had the mistake admitted his own fault... but you as a non involved individual want to pass blame elsewhere, strictly because it conflicts your own ideas and parameters...

so if you have a car accident, do you blame the guy at the store that recommended the tires you bought, or the car dealer who sold you the car? I mean, it is evident you wouldn't consider the car accident YOUR fault...

or should the guy who had the mishap, blame the guy who talked him into a 257W, since it was evident that he should have had a 25/35 instead if he wanted to load to a slower velocity?

and then we have guys like you standing by, non involved, but feel it is your civic duty to complain about the details...

congratulations... we appreciate your availability to point all of this out for the rest of us who you don't consider smart enough to go thru life with the direction of guys like yourself..

"................To anger a liberal, tell him the truth." �Theodore Roosevelt"

How true...........

well we agree on something...

hopefully you are not trying to call me a liberal here...

piss on me, piss on my Family... but don't ever call me a liberal..

nothing is lower.. be it democrat, communist or socialist..

Fuggers should be lined up and shot.... grin....

Might have to try some of that fancypants Lapua brass. Sounds like good stuff.

Any company that doesn't make brass for the 270W.....is suspect....

What do the Scandinavians know anyway?.......

But yeah, my 223 Lupua is pretty nice. I guess I'll keep shooting them until I split the expansion ring (that's always a good indicator it's time to get new brass..... )

Casey

And no one will blow up a rifle using proper procedures when using a small amount of faster burning powder. Since 1976, I've commonly used 10 to 14 grains of Unique in my .30'06, 18 grains IMR-4227 in my .300 Savage, 6 grains of Unique in my .30-30, or 11 grains of Unique in my .358. Never, ever had a problem but, then again I follow a strict discipline. No, light loads do not blow up rifles but, improper loading light loads will.