What did you do at your reloading bench today?

Muleskinner said:

Christmas came a bit late today

Click to expand...

Muleskinner said:

Christmas came a bit late today

Click to expand...

Melnic said:

What are you going to use those 30 cal pills on?
Guy I know has been looking for 3 cal heavy pills for subsonic 300blk.
Was having problems sourcing components.

Click to expand...

lazarus said:

Loaded up my first ladder load for .308.

Highest power caliber to date. A little nerve wracking watching the auto drum powder measure, powder level dropping noticeably with each round.

Hoping around 48gr of CFE223 is accurate for the Hornady 150gr FMJ. Don’t need to push these to the max. I’d like to get around 2650fps out of my 18” AR-10 or 2750fps or so out of my 23” Sako. Somewhere in that range. Something lighter for plinking. Not trying to replicate M80 with these.

Click to expand...

Muleskinner said:

300 blackout subsonics. Supposedly these bullets will expand that velocities as slow as 900 ft per second. I'm going to load them up around 1050 out of my 10.5-in 300 blackout with a can. If they expand as well as Hornady claims they will I'll probably take it with me out to Oklahoma for some hog eradication. I loaded up a bunch of 220 grain Berry's plated 30 caliber bullets and with 10.1 grains of h110 I get an average of about 1,035 ft per second but there's no expansion. Basically it has just a little bit more energy than a 230 grain target load out of my 45 ACP... Fun to shoot but pretty much useless for hunting since all it pretty much does is poke a hole. While I'm sure with good shot placement I could kill a hog with it it just seems a little unethical. If these don't expand the way the manufacturer claims they do I won't be using these either. Normally I would have only bought one box but since they became fairly hard to track down I went ahead bought five. I think I got them at Mid-South

Click to expand...

85MikeTPI said:

That should be a good load. I'm loading 168gr SMKs over 47.5gr CFE223 to test in my 24" DPMS AR-308.

Click to expand...

lazarus said:

I’ll have to go check, but the Hornady load data has it loaded SHORT. Their crimp ring is seated really far forward. So 2.700” COAL. Not sure what that is going to do for accuracy. I can always load longer and crimp behind the groove.

Anyway, I think I have 6 rounds at 45.5, at 46.7, 48.2 and at 49.3. Max was listed at 49.6. That’ll give me 3 rounds to test at each charge weight in my AR-10 and in my Sako.

If accuracy is just bad with all, I’ll try loading longer and hone in around that 48gr level.

Click to expand...

85MikeTPI said:

The online Hodgdon data is listing them at 2.800, which is where I seated my 168gr's, but the max charge is listed higher so that may be reflected in your COAL from hornady..

Click to expand...

lazarus said:

I suspect it is. Most FMJ I see loaded around 2.780-2.810” in my other manuals. But since Hornady’s data is specific to their bullets, I assume they have it seated at 2.700” because of where they decided to place the crimp ring. Still seated awfully far forward on the bullet. Most of their 150-155gr loads are loaded really short. Their 155s are loaded a little longer. IMHO, they should have designed their bullets and developed load data separately for 150s and 155s. That said, other than the 150FMJ, everything else is easy enough to load out to 2.800 and adjust the max charge to reflect that.

But 2.700??? I haven’t looked in quick loads, but I’d bet you could probably crank up the load to ~50gr of CFE223 and get velocities up to more like 2850fps by loading it a full tenth of an inch longer. Not that I’ll likely try with the Hornady FMJ. The others where the crimp ring is seated further back on the bullet I’ll develop separately. For now though, I’ve got plenty of Hornady 150gr FMJ (at least 500 bullets).

I’ll bother working out a load for the other FMJ I have some other month (or year!) once I’ve worked through most of my Hornady FMJ unless I can’t get it to shoot for anything.

I’ll work on either 175gr SMK, Speer 168gr GR or Hornady 150gr SP .308 loads next. Then work up an M2 .30-06 load. Then circle back to 6.5 Grendel for awhile.

In between load a bunch of 9mm and .45 as I have plenty of loads worked out for those.

Click to expand...

erwos said:

Prepped some more 223 brass on the Evo, and loaded it into the wet tumbler. Learned the hard way while prepping that missing any stainless steel media absolutely sucks when you're prepping that stuff. Had to actually take apart the press once to get at a piece of stainless steel media that was in just the right place to totally gum up the works... gonna be a little more thorough next time with my media separator (speaking of which, maybe it's time to upgrade from my FA rotary...).

Click to expand...

85MikeTPI said:

Are you crimping your 308 rounds? If not, the cannelure location shouldn't matter..

Click to expand...

trickg said:

I've read a lot of stuff on reloading groups on FB that you don't really need stainless pins if you're wet tumbling - lots of guys are just tumbling the brass.

Click to expand...

erwos said:

Prepped some more 223 brass on the Evo, and loaded it into the wet tumbler. Learned the hard way while prepping that missing any stainless steel media absolutely sucks when you're prepping that stuff. Had to actually take apart the press once to get at a piece of stainless steel media that was in just the right place to totally gum up the works... gonna be a little more thorough next time with my media separator (speaking of which, maybe it's time to upgrade from my FA rotary...).

Click to expand...

C.Alls said:

They definitely expand. I use them for subsonic groundhog eradication locally. I'm shooting them over CFE-BLK and have a 304 and a 305 yard kill after dialing up 34 MOA. I shoot them from my TC Encore and they print sub MOA groups everytime. Took 70ish groundhogs the past two seasons with only one making it down their hole after being hit. The thump is WAY louder than the muzzle report.

Click to expand...