Labor Week continues for me this week. I've got a surplus of vacation time from work and am in a "use it or lose it" situation, so I decided to take the full week of Labor Day off so that I could get some personal projects done. One of those projects is to get ahead in my reloading so that I'll have enough practice ammo to carry me through most of the rest of the year.
The past couple days I reloaded 9mm Luger until I ran out of Blue Dot powder. That gave me 700 more rounds—which seems like a lot until you realize that I try to shoot 100 rounds a week to stay in practice. Once out of Blue Dot, I turned my attention to .223 Remington—and that's where the fun began this morning.
First, I have a bunch of empty cases that I've already prepped and that are just waiting to be reloaded. If you're not familiar with reloading, to reload a rifle cartridge you need to apply some lube to it before you resize it, otherwise it'll stick in your resizing die. Well, I had already resized all these empty cartridges so they already had some lube on them, but that was from about six months ago…
…and it turns out that lube doesn't stick around for six months.
So, the very first case I started reloading this morning got stuck in my resizing die. ("Man, is this going to be a great day, or what?" I thought to myself.) I then got the joy of using my "stuck case removal kit," a bench vise, and a drill to get the recalcitrant case out. This wasted a good hour of the cool morning time.
Then I relubed a batch of cases and started reloading again, checking the powder weights and overall length (OAL) of the completed cartridges. Here's where I hit my second snag: the OALs were varying about by about 0.010", and I usually shoot for no more than 0.002" variance. You're naturally going to have some variance since bullets aren't perfectly uniform, but I didn't recall having this much variance with this particular bullet, Hornady's 75gr Match bullet.
I know that with some of the longer bullets there can be a little more variance than normal, so I grabbed a handful and measured them:
Wow! I didn't realize these bullets varied so much. Their standard deviation was 0.004" around a mean of 0.993". I picked out 10 of the bullets that measured the median value of 0.994" and set my seating die to give me an OAL of 2.250" and called it good. All that fun wasted another hour, but after that I was able to get down to business and crank out about 350 rounds.
After some lunch I was still a bit curious about the OAL issue so I decided to measure my other go-to bullet in .223, Swift's Scirocco II:
OK, that looks better. A nice, regular distribution (with just a single outlier) and a standard deviation of only 0.002". Of course, the Sciroccos cost about three times as much as the Hornadys, which just goes to show that you get what you pay for.
I really like the Scirocco's terminal ballistics, but I haven't worked up a load for it yet. It should be pretty similar to the Hornady, but because the bullets are a bit longer I'm pretty sure I won't be able to use the same amount of powder, and I'll probably need to increase the OAL closer to the .223's maximum of 2.275". I'll have to work up some "ladder loads" that gradually work up to my normal 24gr of Reloader 15 and see if there are any signs of overpressure.
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