wsimpso1

Ever since I found out the standard Glock chambers, I have been expecting that we would all hear about about blown cases and ruined magazines. The Glock chambers are big and they have a bunch of the case unsupported, resulting in the Glock "guppy belly" on the fired cases. The story is that Federal was making 40 S&W cases with thin heads, and the story goes that they changed to a beefier case head to prevent blown cases. With time we have been expecting early Federals to get used up and go away. This was all written about in the reloading column in Front Sight recently. All the same, I expect that this is only part of your story. Next is that autoloading pistols do tend to blow the magazine out the bottom when the case goes. This nasty surprise is usually attributed to double charges, firing a good round behind a squib, and too much chamber relief to improve feeding. Now the broken barrel and blown magazine makes me suspect the double charge or the squib. While you did not find any more in your ammo, you might have only been interrupted once. I would tear down the rest of that batch... Will the new barrel prevent recurrence? Maybe. Read the Front Sight relaoding column on the topic (I think that it was this year) and be an excellent reloader. Billski

Honady has five stations, works nice, costs a bunch less than the Dillon 650 and makes great shooting ammo. The press works great for rifle as it comes. When I was playing High Power, I loaded everything on it, including my 600 yard ammo. Loading VV N135 and Alliant RL15, the measure threw within 0.1 grains. I used Bonanza/Forster dies with the micrometer adjustment. For pistol, the Hornady powder measure would occaisionally throw a light charge. I never could figure out how to make it behave properly with those little charges, so I fixed that by fitting a Dillon measure with a Uniquetek micrometer adjustment for pistol loads. Works great. Billski

Midway 1200. The old one (25 years old) finally had the motor give up, so I figured if it is that durable, I should just replace it with another one. Billski

Hmmm, With one IDPA, one USPSA, and one Steel Match every month at your own club, you have bunches of options. USPSA and IDPA rulebooks are all the respective websites. I would have gotten an IDPA legal belt holster, and used that for both USPSA Production and for IDPA Stock Service Pistol. My bet is that the local matches will allow the Blade-Tech, but if you decide to do bigger IDPA matches, another holster won't be a big deal. IDPA has shorter COF, so two mags on the belt sets you up on those days. Enjoy. Billski

Actually, the rules don't say that the mag can not hit the dirt, they say that you must retain a mag changed with the slide forward. One (very slow) method for doing this is to do your speed reload and then pickup and pocket the dropped mag. You retained the mag! I have seen many folks drop the mag, finish the speed relaod, recover the mag and keep going for no penalty. The best excuses I can give for the rules are: In a real fight, trained shooters generally do not know how many rounds are left in a mag; In a real fight that has gone on long enough to justify a reload, you may need those rounds remaining in the mag. Don't sweat it so much, practice reloads with retention, practice tactical reloads, practice speed reloads, and practice slide-lock reloads. Mentally rehearse using the right one in the right place. After all, the rules only pertain to how you get to the shooting. And the shooting, while it is an end unto itself, is just a tool in a bigger picture too. Billski

Single mag pouch reload - Bullets forward just like a pistol reload, except that the index finger wraps the mag instead of along the front of the mag. Works great in both 20's and 30's. Multiple reloads - GI pouch (4x20) and it still looks like my pistol reload except that the index finger wraps the mag. At the NY state match they had a stage that had three mandatory mag changes. It worked OK. Billski I do a push-pull insertion and this works great.

Thanks for the advice. The crescent moon wear mark is about the radius of the 45 ACP cases that it has fed so many thousands of and appears to be above where a firing pin bushing would go, but below where a chambered case sits, both locked and unlocked. I shall set about the task of measuring the face relative to something nearby, dress out the surface, and then measure again to determine how much had to come off. If that looks small enough (I HOPE that it is less than it looks like it is), then I will fit the new barrel. If it looks big, you folks will hear some more about this... Thanks again! Billski

My much modified and shot old Colt M1911 has the breach face of the slide looking terrible. Where the rear face of the barrel hood hits it, there is a clear indent with a slightly raised burr above and below. Just above the firing pin hole there is a crescent moon wear mark. Locking lugs in the barrel and slide look perfect, with no rounded ends or battering. It has rarely had trouble feeding lead bullets, and when it does, the case rim is stopped in the recess on the breach face. Jacketed bullets work fine, but I wonder for how much longer. A new Scheumann barrel and other parts are sitting ready, but I am wondering if the slide really justifies the fuss. It looks like it will take 0.005 to 0.015" worth of dressing to clean up the face. While the new barrel hood and underlug are oversized, I wonder if they can be made to fit correctly after that much material is removed and it also seems that the extractor will then be too far forward relative to the barrel and loaded round. Is this really an issue? If the slide really is better replaced, whose would you use? Or retire the whole pistol and build from new parts, properly fitted rails and barrel, etc. Comments, advice, and opinions are welcomed here. Billski

Herr Sweeny knows of what he speaks (or in this case, writes). Billski

First off, this is the shotgun forum, and it sure looks like a rifle thread. Next, blown primers are a result too much pressure, which can come from several sources. +1 on Pat Sweeney's comments on chamber reamers. The 5.56 NATO throat generates less pressure than the 223 Rem throat with the same ammo, and might be part of the issue. Since you have never been blowing primers with the rifle before, I would suspect that your throat is not really the big contributor. The other possibility is that the ammo is just loaded too hot. We have some High Power guys who load so hot that blown primers and other high pressure signs are a regular thing during their load development... On bought ammo, you won't be miking bullets and adjusting powder charges, you just turn it in for refund. The whole lot of ammo is probably a bad fit in your gun. Show them the cases with the now oversized primer pockets and primers from your lower, and demand your money back. Oh, and you probably are not the only one... Billski

Yeah, I was going add "Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" too. Nice shot of the Lt Zogg. Billski

I have watched this several times, and I have some impressions of it too. First off, do we know who this is? That could shed a little light on things... First off, he is older and appears to be kind of stout, both of which indicate something other than the typical radical jihadi lifestyle. Poor people are skinny in that part of the world, and fat equals well off. His gun handling and movement is strange to us to the point of being funny. Very funny. Looking at him, garments are not dusty or torn, he appears to be clean and well dressed, which means he is probably better off than most of the committed radical jihadis, who generally live pretty rough, and also means that he is probably on a day trip to go shooting. Naw, probably not one of the poor bastards that has been brainwashed into thinking that getting killed while fighting the infidel will get him a free trip to Heaven. My suspicion from watching this is that he was playing multi-gun for the same reason as we do, it is fun and decent practice. Some how, he learned that the muzzle comes up and the gun comes in tight during movement. While that means that he is unlikely to cover or hit a friendly while he is moving about, he just might get it under his own chin. He probably does not have the role models and mentors that have advanced both safety and shooting prowess to the levels that we have. One other thought, he does make me think of the kids in school that always got picked last for team sports - and who knows where that takes him... Ah well, it is funny. Billski

Edited from another thread that I participate in... Anybody who is thinking about loading their own rifle ammo, here are some thoughts. My view on processing cases is that it takes about 4 seconds a piece for each of deprime, clean, lube, size, trim, deburr, clean again. That adds up to about 16 hours to process 2k brass. If it has crimped primers, you have even more steps. Or pay RVO $40 plus UPS both ways for a 30# parcel. I figure that makes your time worth about $3 an hour if you process your own brass, which is, for me, the ugly part of reloading rifle ammo. I do my own processing for precision ammo. Scharch sells 2k of processed 5.56 cases for $84 to get you started. Pat's Reloading has 55 FMJ for $29/k, Wideners has WC844, WC846, and Surplus IMR 4895 for around $80 an eight pound jug. 2k primers cost about $35. Get them at the same time and pay only one $20 Hazmat charge. That comes to about $240 -$250 to take 2k once fired brass, have it processed, run it across the progressive press, and have it ready to start over again. If you can get brass cased good ammo for $0.125 a round, you are working for zero. But if it costs $0.20 a round, you just saved $150 and got to do the fun part - making the progressive press run. That is about 5 hours of ammo churning, which makes your time worth, hmmm, $30 an hour. If you have overtime available that you are not taking, and overtime pays more than $30 an hour (take home), work the overtime and buy your ammo. I have rarely had overtime available from work, so $30 an hour seems like a good trade. And if ammo is more like $0.25 a round, you are now up to $50 an hour. Or you can shoot Wolf/ Silver Bear/ Brown Bear, with cleaning chambers and the stuck shell and malf clearing potential too, oh, and accepting big groups when trying for precision shots like small steel, long shots, or 100 yard cover and no-shoot shielded shots. So, I reload my bulk ammo this way, and do a downtown job on my precision stuff with 69's, 77's and the like. What's that, press costs? You do already have a progressive for those thousands of pistol rounds a year, don't you? If not, the Hornady is as much press for less money than a Dillon, and I only had to retrofit a Dillon measure for pistol work, but that is off topic. Billski

OK, I never saw this thread before, but I can tell you more than you really want to know about primer mixes and structures. My first job out of college (1980) was as an R&D engineer at Remington Arms, and I worked on primers for awhile. I will try to stay with the thread. Primary explosive for regular non-corrosive primer is lead styphnate. The other primary material is barium nitrate, and then there are some tertiary materials. Oil can desensitize styphnate, but it does not react with any of the explosives. That means that WD40 and other oils may prevent your gun from firing it (and may not too) but if you give it a sharp enough smack, it will still fire. This might be useful for making a primer that is stuck less likely to go off while attempting to get it out... If you want to kill a primer, it needs to hit plain old chlorine bleach. That is what was done in the ammunition industry to scrap primer and tracer mix for generations, and probably still is today. Bleach is also sprayed onto spilled primer and tracer mixes before sweeping them up. Bleach is a strong oxidizer and chemically destroys lead styphnate by oxidation. So if you have primers to dispose of, and you really want them neutralized, into a container of bleach it goes. Something else about primers. In order to fire, a styphnate crystal must be cracked, but there is other stuff around all of those tiny crystals. So you need enough energy fast enough. The slower the load is applied, the bigger the forces needed to make it go off. So, handling live primers is always best done slowly. Vigourous handle movements are bad. Slow handle movements are better. Adding oil to the primer ratchets up the energy needed some more, but bleach ruins the primer. What does this have to do with rounds loaded with backwards primers? To be really safe, get the rounds bleach. In five minutes, you can tear down the ammo, salvage the case and bullet. Powder can go in the garden (it is good fertilizer), but it too is compromized by the bleach. Rinse the cases and bullets in clean water right away to prevent other ugly corrosion from the bleach. They are good for reuse. Other options: You could just pull down the ammo, and decap with a very slow shove, but you still have a chance that the primer will go off, so I still do not advise this. But if you just have to go against all of this good safe advice, decap it slowly on a press where the primer pieces will be directed away from you when one does go bang. Other precautions include a drop of oil on the primer beforehand, keep kids and pets away from the area, hearing protection, and a face shield are good ideas too, but who are we kidding? If you seek risk and ignore our good advice, you are probably not going to take other advice either. All the same, there are many folks who have done it many times and have never had one go bang, but telling you go do it is like advising skipping the condoms or the seatbelt. Should something bad happen, it might be really bad. So, you have been warned. Oh, industry wide, scrap whole ammo is destroyed by burning. Open fires a long ways from people work great, although most gun glubs just dump the few loose rounds into the bottom of the burn barrel, then add other range debris and light the paper at the top. The cases rupture with a pop, and it is pretty safe, but I would still keep people and animals back 50 yards until the fire is out. Billski

IPSC Open Gun shooters tend to use small rifle primers to prevent piercing - 38 Super/9mmMajor loads run to rifle level pressures. From there the use has grown into 40 S&W ammo too. It also simplifies things if you are a 3 Gunner, because then you only need one type of primer to load Open and Limited Pistols and your AR15, and you minimize your chances of a mix up... The small rifle primers have more priming mix in them than small pistol, which means that it will tend to light off the powder in a pistol a little more vigorously. That means two things: You need to develop your loads with the Small Rifle primers; They might burn cleaner, although that is also a function of bullet fit in your barrel and which powder and bullet type you use. Small Rifle Primers work fine in 1911 type pistols. Now if you are shooting other types of pistols, you might want to test first - malfs in matches really take off the fun. Billski

+1 on what George said! Billski

The comment about recycled cannon powder is true. Winchester bought up huge amounts of cannon powder (stick powder kernals the size of pencils on up to thumb size), built huge concrete vats that sat below ground level, and stored the surplus powder in them (cool and under water). That was their nitrocellulose source for Winchester Ball powders for decades. Story is that they ran out in the 1990's and have been making NC ever since. They have had to make their own nitroglycerine the whole time. Everybody else has just been making NC and NG. I personally witnessed NC production at Hercules' site in the 1980's. It truely is amazing how energetic things can get when you wash organic chemicals with nitric acid... When Hercules had a fire there, the local government told them to go elsewhere to build a new powder plant, and they did. DuPont used to make NC at a place called Carney's Point, and they had a fire there that caused them to develop the whole process of Failure Mode and Effects Analysis. The site managers thought that any fire they had would be contained in one spot, but it went from building to building until most of the site was toast. DuPont figured out that they were not really making any money in that business and so they did not rebuild. Expro (Valleyfield, maybe other names) has been the maker of IMR powders ever since, and they were (maybe still are) making NC & NG near Montreal. Billski

+1 on what the other guys said. It will make minor and work fine on IPSC paper to 100 yards. I am a run-what-ya-brung type of guy. Shoot it, have fun, and then decide if you need to spend more money. Billski

+1 on the development process. My experience in the industry was in the first half of the 1980's, but I do not suspect that things have changed that much. Most of the powders will always be a commericial variant of something like what we use. Our handloader powders are made up by blending different batches because we need it to be niform in pressure behaviour from batch to batch. They do less of that for factory powders, and the load is adjusted for each lot of powder. Names are different. Some cartridges do have powders that are specially adjusted to circumstances - flash inhibiters and coatings o slow down the initial burn, but most are just variants of what we use... Powder makers are several (still in touch a little), IMR (Valleyfield, DuPont, etc), Alliant (Hercules), Winchester (Olin), then in much smaller amounts, the Scandinavian, South African, Israeli, and Austrailians. Shipping large amounts of powder is tough because it still has to be in relatively small kegs, so, you will not see much of it... So Grasshopper, why do you ask? Billski

16" middies should run very well. It is inherently a more appropriate system for 16" guns, and should not need a pigtail or fat tube. I will also bet that Paule is using high quality barrels, chambers and parts, and that his shop also understands what they are doing. Those things all make a difference too. Billski

Thanks to all. I understood that I was going to be fitting the barrel to the frame and slide (and looking forward to it too). That the chamber was intentionally roughed only and that the tiny marks are intentional was all news. No big deal, but it was news... I shall fit the barrel, and finish the chamber only after the rest is done. Thanks again. Billski

After a five week wait, my Scheumann barrel arrived. As part of my inspection (don't want to spend the time and effort of fitting a barrel that is not right) I checked a round in the chamber... Well, I tried to get it into the chamber. Nothing doing, my handloaded rounds would not slide into the chamber, so I started opening boxes of factory ammo and trying them. To my amazement, I had partial boxes of Rem, Win, and S&B. Nothing would just slide into the chamber. Some rounds I could get to fit by pushing them in, and then they needed a push with a squib rod to get them out... I have a match chamber reamer, so fixing the chamber and then polishing it can be done in a half hour. Then, I noticed faint circumferential marks on the rifling lands. Somehow I expected more from a barrel maker of this reputation. Is this normal for Schuemann barrels? Would you guys fix the chamber, accept the bore, and just shoot this barrel, or would you ship it back and risk another five weeks delay? Billski

The powder makers will warn you away from tumbling live rounds because they very likely have not tested the ammo in question and cannot say what it will do. They are risk and liability averse too. And they would just as soon you buy new powder for your shooting too. Since I have (in the line of business) visited the makers of gun powders and seen their processes, I can say that they do a bunch of tumbling of powder to make ammo in the first place. A few minutes to take off the worst of the crusties really should not matter much If you are concerned about the effects of time and temperature on powders, from each batch, pull down a two or three rounds and sniff gently. If it smells of ethanol and/or acetone, kind of sweet and solventy, and is dark grey, it is OK. If it smells of nitric acid, sharp burning smell, or has got a rusty looking dust to it, the powder has atleast begun to go off. Powder that is going off will not be dangerous except if it leaves a squib in the bore, make sure that you only push one bullet at a time through your barrels. If the powder is good, set aside the powder from those rounds. Run the rest of the batch of ammo in the tumbler for a few minutes to remove the crusties and smooth out the case walls; grab three rounds from the cleaned batch; pull down those rounds and examine the powder for signs of breakdown - use a magnifying glass. If the tumbled and non-tumbled pwoder look the same, you have your answer. And if the tumbled powder has more dust, more powder kernel flakes, graphite layer rubbed off of the granules exposing an amber looking substrate, etc, the powder is being damaged by your tumbling, and you should just pull down that ammo. Billski

I can not talk to the efficacy of a particular load activating a target, but I can talk to the physics. Kinetic Energy is the wrong term to chase. Momentum (mass times velocity) IS conserved in the crash of bullet against steel target (or for that matter in rocket engines), so if you know what pistol bullet at what velocity will activate the target, you will have to have that much momentum in your rifle bullet (at impact) to do the same activation, whatever that happens to mean. How to figure? Skip the details and do something elementary - bullet weight in grains times bullet velocity in feet per second - power factor. Now that will require looking at the downrange ballistics of your proposed loads, but that is not hard info to get. Is the physics really that straightforward? Well, you could get into the splashback velocity of the bullet fragments, which adds to the momentum transferred, and other small effects, but you will not make the calculation much better than just comparing the power factors of a known load that works your target vs a proposed one. Billski

George, your rifle does have that whole "JP Serious Race Rifle" look. Also, I look forward to meeting you. www.actshooters.com has the rule book, match photos (in "Match Results") and a forum Yes, it is more like IDPA than USPSA. ACTS uses the IDPA target, but scores a full second added to the time for each point dropped. Cover usage is similar to IDPA. So is the Failure to Neutralize. Big penalty for Fail to Engage. No penalty for leaving a mag on the ground with ammo in it. No pure race guns or gear with the exception of the Open rifle. Since pistol rules are pretty minimal, run what you want as long as it is not an Open gun. That means bring a Limited or Production class USPSA or any IDPA legal pistol. Holster has to be a working style that covers the trigger and a bunch of the rest of the gun, not a race holster. Think legal for IDPA or USPSA Production/Single Stack. Don't sweat the pistol choice much unless you shoot a bolt gun, in which case, the pistol will see a bunch of work (all targets under 25 yards are handgun targets for Precision Rifle). Among the regulars, you will see a lot 16" collapsable stock AR carbines, single point slings, MOLLE vests, and the like. We have also seen FAL/LAR's, an M1A, an H&K 91, etc. A fair amount of operator or police entry type gear is present too. When I showed up for the February match (cold and it snowed) in my snowboarding pants and jacket, my all black 18" flattop AR (Miculek brake, 1.5-5X Simmons, aluminum float tube forend, and M1907 leather sling), a pistol belt with a GI belt pouch for 20's and another for 30's, well, I stood out a bit. They proved to be a good bunch of folks, so I keep going back. Billski