Marking your reloaded cases - 11/13/17
About a year ago on a sticky threat titled "Good 7x57 Reloads"; I saw the following post by Long John, "The 160gn Woodleigh thing ended badly, the cartridges "somehow" were dropped and the box flew open. Result all the carefully arranged loads got intermingled."
If your reload than I will assume that we have all encountered similar incidents of this nature. Early on to help "clean up and rearrange" I came up with a method that works for me and I would like to share. I started marking the brass cartridge heads and primers with colored "sharpie" type pens. For example, say you had a range of powder loads from 42.0 to 44.0 in .5 grain increments. I would mark my loaded test cartridges something like this;
42.0 grain load ----- primer marked green
42.5 grain load ----- primer marked black
43.0 grain load ----- primer marked blue
43.5 grain load ----- primer marked green with red slash on the brass part of the head.
44.0 grain load ----- primer marked red
You can develop your own mix of colors and designs for a greater range of loads. I tend to reserve the red color for my hotter load levels.
I then print a gouge sheet showing the case head colors and patterns with the matching load data (including powder type and estimated or anticipated velocity, coal, etc. and put that in the box with the reloaded test rounds. The colors usually come completely off during the next de-priming and brass cleaning. I am sure others have similar procedures, but this has worked well for me!
CJ
If your reload than I will assume that we have all encountered similar incidents of this nature. Early on to help "clean up and rearrange" I came up with a method that works for me and I would like to share. I started marking the brass cartridge heads and primers with colored "sharpie" type pens. For example, say you had a range of powder loads from 42.0 to 44.0 in .5 grain increments. I would mark my loaded test cartridges something like this;
42.0 grain load ----- primer marked green
42.5 grain load ----- primer marked black
43.0 grain load ----- primer marked blue
43.5 grain load ----- primer marked green with red slash on the brass part of the head.
44.0 grain load ----- primer marked red
You can develop your own mix of colors and designs for a greater range of loads. I tend to reserve the red color for my hotter load levels.
I then print a gouge sheet showing the case head colors and patterns with the matching load data (including powder type and estimated or anticipated velocity, coal, etc. and put that in the box with the reloaded test rounds. The colors usually come completely off during the next de-priming and brass cleaning. I am sure others have similar procedures, but this has worked well for me!
CJ