wdlong1

I add about 2-3 Tbsp of dillon polish per batch of 200-300 cases. Works really good. I do tumble for a long time though. 8 hours/day and will often do one batch for 3-4 days. Stuff comes out so shiny it looks like jewelry!

tried it and everything he said is true -- lots of recoil and dirty as hell from unburned residue. But I would not have believed any of it without trying so you should certainly work up a load and see what you think. I now an strictly n320 for 40 major.

beautiful guns all -- would love to have one to ring some RO's with!

great post - right on target for me. I am a mid B level shooter and having been pushing hard (in matches) to improve performance. Big mistake -- have been shooting way more Mikes and Delta's then I did when I was "learning" to shoot competitively. You iterated perfectly what I have been recently realizing that I need to do. -- shoot all alpha's. A GM told me once that if you shoot 95% of the points without racing that most of the time you will be at or near the top. As another poster said -- it really is all about discipline in a match to shoot for all A's (or nearly all A's) and not accept delta's and mikes in the name of speed. Thank you for this post.

yea -- I am going to try the red lenses i guess. Also -- I am sure there is a rule somewhere that I can only use this excuse once for blowing an entire match.

wanted to throw this out there and see if anyone else had has this experience. Before shooting USPSA I shot skeet and sporting clays and had a pair of Pilla shooting glasses with lenses designed to make the orange target stand out. (orangeish lenses)Anyway when I started shooting pistol I just used my same glasses and lens combination. Several months ago while shooting a match I engaged a hardcover metric target and could not see the black -- it just all looked brown -- had 2 mikes in the A zone. I wrote this off as a fluke and a mental error because when I went back and looked at the target I could see the black -- it was faint but noticable. Yesterday i shot a match with several hardcover targets per stage. I ended up with 10 mikes! all in the hardcover and all alphas. I realized on the 4th stage that I was not seeing the black of the hardcover. I could see it when not looking at the front site, ie during the walkthrough, but while shooting and focusing on the front site the black faded and the entire target looked brown. When I put my gun down after shooting -- I could see the black, but put the gun up, focus on the site and whoosh it was gone. This is the freakiest thing that I have ever experienced and was very very frustrating. When I came home from the match I made several hardcover targets with varying degrees of black, some lightly painted, some darkly painted. Both with the naked eye were obvious but with my glasses and looking at the front site -- the black/brown looked pretty much the same particularly on the lightly painted targets . The effect was dramatically worse in full sunlight. Tried with no glasses -- could easily see the black even when looking at front sight. I wanted to see if anyone else has had this experience and what color lens is the preferred. I see a lot of red/rose colored lenses.

so I guess the shooter packs are not happening? We are getting really close!

Yes, in theory. In use, it is close, but not spot on. Especially between different lots of powder. I use it, and like it. I load 2-3 different 9mm loads, 2-3 different .45 and soon .40. It's nice to be able to get close, then fine tune. It saves me some time. I agree once you get it dialed in you do not have to change it and the stock one is fine but for working up loads or using same powder drop for multiple calibers/loads, it is indispensible. Saves a lot of time and I found once I figured out the correction factor is it very, very accurate and saves a lot of time. It gets you very close very quickly -- Again -- highly recommend and I got mine straight from Hornady.

yep that is the same problem that I was having. I figured out that I was having the problem after I put the ballbearing modification to stop the snapping plate. I had put these on and tightened the main shell plate to the point that it would turn but not snap. Apparently I tightened it too much, with out the "snap" the shell plate just did not turn quite enough to put the pocket right over the primer, very close and for some cases was fine but for 1 in 20-40 not enough. I loosened the "clutch" so to speak just a little bit and viola -- no more crushed primers. The plate does snap a little bit more then it did but for the 40 and 45 machine that is not a problem for the 38SC adn 9mm Major machines I just have to slow down a little bit to avoid powder splashing. Anyway -- that may not help but was my experience. Also all of this presumes that you thoroughly clean your machine before making any adjustments, as cleaning will solve 90% of issues in my experience. Hope that helps.

Excellent -- thanks for the follow up. The laws of physics breath a sigh of relief.

Me too. I also dislike the very nothing of "balancing" the points and speed. It's like a dog chasing his own tail. Any time we pit this VS. that we set a limit. It places the focus in the wrong area. We end up with thinking we will give up one thing in favor of the other. (And, since we all wanna-b-speedy ...we know how that ends up.) Instead, we need to develop (and maintain) the mental discipline to truly allow our vision to drive us while shooting. That is the beauty of this sport. I prefer to shoot as fast as I can and be as accurate as possible. But I admire the accuracy only guys and I admire the speed only guys (although to be honest a little less...my seven year old is pretty fast) There is certainly room for everyone and we seem to have evolved a scoring system that rewards and punishes both equally.

I would love to get one of these, but am having trouble getting a response from Limcat.

Unfounded assumption. then where does the energy to move the slide come from? Its not an unfounded assumption its basic physics. There is a lot of energy in a pistol cartridge beyond what is used to propel the bullet. My seat of the pants answer is that the difference is in the slide velocity at the time the bullet leaves the muzzle. If the actual muzzle velocity is X, and the velocity of the barrel+slide in recoil is Y, The relative velocity of the bullet will be X-Y. Someone else can figure out if the slide actually recoils at 40-70fps at the instant the bullet leaves the barrel. not exactly. It is not that simple. The velocity of the slide has a ton of variables, 1. mass of the slide 2. coefficient of friction between the slide and the frame 3. strength of the spring resisting posterior movement of the slide. 4. angle of the slide with the ground (gravity effects) etc. etc. So it if really more about energy and force. There is infact only a finite amount of energy in a cartridge, some of that energy is spent propelling the bullet, the rest does not. The rest is used to cycle the slide, and a significant amount is felt as recoil and does not contribute to the force applied to the bullet, infact since the vector of force of the slide and the recoil is backwards and the bullet is travelling 180 degrees in the opposite direction the forces are subtracted as I think you were implying, but it is not velocity, it is force which is only part of the velocity equation. And to be precise it is acceleration that we are actually primarily talking about as the bullet is rapidly accelerated via the forces. Anyway -- I think you get the point. It is an interesting question and I still say that unless the spring is dramatically changed that no change in chronograph reading would be expected without very precise measuring equipment and if a difference was noted it should be a drop in velocity with a heavier spring (ie higher resistive coefficient). My brain hurts now --

Unfounded assumption. then where does the energy to move the slide come from? Its not an unfounded assumption its basic physics.

The fact that the bullet leaves the gun before the slide starts back is irrelevant. The force that throws the slide back comes from the pressures created by the shot, that force requires "x" amount of energy and the vector of that force is 180 degrees from the direction of the bullet and therefore is subtracted from the amount of energy available to propel the projectile. It by definition takes energy that would otherwise be used to propel the bullet. Vis a Vis the more energy it takes to cycle the slide back the less to propel the bullet. I loved these type of problems in college physics.

no way that the recoil spring can cause significant (measurable outside of a lab) changes in velocity. I could argue that it takes more energy to push back the 20 lb spring and therefor less force to push bullet forward then the 14lb spring, but still I would only expect that to change the velocity of the bullet at the extremes -- ie bolt action pistol vs 1 lb spring. and even then probably not statistically significant.

I had someone tell me that his 9mm major gun would not run with nickel but ran fine with regular brass. This sounded weird to me, does it make any sense at all? I mean assuming oal, crimp, powder and bullet are the same, it should not matter right? Is nickel thicker or thinner then regular brass? or the same?

scary but true, not as good as lead though

I just dump mine over but hit it thoroughly with the air compressor to get all residual grains out.

In addition to that, always make the final tightening of all the die's lock nuts with a fully loaded Shellplate, and the handle all the way down. (That eliminates any variables in OAL due to the tolerances in the Toolhead / frame, and the die's threads.) Wish I would have read this sooner -- I struggle with that issue -- I am going to loosen them and try this when I get home to lock them into the exact right spot. This falls under great advice that I did not even know how to ask for!

It's all about burn speed, gas quantity, and working with what is effectively a shorter barrel. The Hybrid ports begin bleeding off pressure as soon as the bullet passes by the first port, rather than building it until the bullet clears the barrel and enters the compensator. A load that makes Major in a 5.5 inch non-ported barrel probably won't make it out of a barrel with ports starting about 3.5 inches down the barrel. From what I've seen, Hybri-ports like a faster powder comparatively than a non-ported barrel. The bullet has to accelerate to the desired velocity before it starts passing open ports. Seems like it would have to accelerate above the desired velocity before it hits the gas ports, as it will start to lose umph if you will, once the gas starts to bleed off. or at least that is the way it seems to me. I could be wrong. If this is the case I wonder how much help that they really do for flip if I have to increase power to still make desired PF. In other words -- seems to me that it is going to be a rule of diminishing returns at a certain point.

good grief -- I think that is the best advice I have ever read. Seriously -- that is was makes this forum great.

just to add my tidbit -- most of the advice above I agree with, but most of it is predicated on being able to call your shots. For the beginner (which I am for sure) this can be very difficult, and only now after quite a bit of practice am I just starting to be able to call them without looking and still am often wrong. This is a critical skill and I do not believe is possible if you are just trying to shoot as fast as you can. Of course you could cheat on both accuracy and speed and just go straight to open class, both will improve dramatically instantly. Those damn red dots really do work!!

what you've never met an extremely knowledgeable and very eccentric person that is into guns and reloading?

there is a pretty good video on you tube on how to disable both of these issuses. Check this guy out : these are the methods that I use and they work well. I will say that for load development the LNL is a little easier mainly for the 2 above issues but in every other way as far as I can tell the dillon 650 is superior.