rutilate

Natchez has lots of Tula right now. Small/Large pistol, small rifle.

LOL. That would've been a good one! No, they were in stock but for only about 1/2 hour after I noticed them.

Cabelas has small rifle primers back in stock: http://www.cabelas.com/catalog/search_catalog_command.cmd?fromProductSearch=true&item1=JC%20-%20210757

I'm considering getting into production USPSA shooting and am wondering what reasoning I should apply to choosing a caliber. I'm brand new to competition shooting. I'm currently set up to reload 9mm and .45, and just before the hysteria, it cost me the same to reload 9mm and .45. It might take me a few months to find 650 conversion kits and dies for .40, but it is certainly doable. Thus, ammo cost isn't necessarily a consideration. What other considerations are there? Should I be considering wrist strength (ie. punishment of the .45 over the 9mm), barrel rise, power factor, what? I find that I shoot the M&P .45 better than the 9mm due to the wider grip. I shot an STI .40 that also had a wider grip that seemed more stable. But that is the extent of my experimentation. Thoughts?

And Natchez has some Winchester large pistol primers. Wideners only has large pistol primers at this point

I found a bunch of primers on Wideners today. They must have received a big shipment, as they had CCI small / large pistol, wolf small rifle and some others I didn't pay attention to. Prices were only marginally higher than pre-hysteria levels. Good luck!

Got an email yesterday from them and Norm said he had no 223 biullets. They do have 9mm JHP in 115 and 124 and they plan to put up their ordering page in a few days. Ah, that's a bummer. I just tried to order a case but this doesn't look promising.

What are the labels below the avatar? It appears that new folks have "Members", and people with 50 to at least 200 posts have "Classified," and some others have "Classifieds" plural. "Forum dealer" is self-explanatory. What are the levels and post count thresholds?

Very well said.

I don't bother cleaning it up, I just keep right on loading. It doesn't hurt a thing. Me either. Although, the first time I tried to vacuum up the spilled powder after finishing reloading I found that the brass station locator pins are mightily attracted to the vacuum nozzle. Luckily I was able to pour them out of the very long vacuum hose after having shut it down in the nick of time.

No, it was very clearly operator error and I was apparently too subtle in my description. The station 1 locator has a long lead on one side that is supposed to go under the cam. The other end has channels that match up and guide the case right into the shell plate. I had put it in backwards, so the long lead was under the shell plate, obstructing the decapping pin. I did a spectacular job of trying to perforate the aluminum station 1 locator with the decapping pin. No amount of quality control can compensate for massive operator error such as this one.

Thanks to all for the feedback. Greatly appreciated.

I had just started reloading on a 650. Got a brand new Lee universal decapping die installed on my new 650 press, ran the handle down and the platform up on the maiden voyage and SNAP! Broke the decapping pin. Wtf? Must be a spectacularly weak pin! Called Lee, complained bitterly about cheap products that break on the first try and managed to get a free replacement sent out in a week. I'm dead in the water for a week! Ugh. Poor quality crap. I start tearing down my .223 setup to start loading .45 and noticed a very pronounced and deep divot in the long end of the station 1 locator. I carefully raised the platform and found that the (broken) decapping pin is positioned right over the top of the divot. How can that be? How are the spent primers ejected if this locator is covering the discharge hole? The instruction manual shows me that the station 1 locator has been inserted backwards. Hmmm. Perhaps what the Lee phone rep doesn't know won't hurt me.

"You can be anyone you want to be." Unless you just don't have the natural talent to do so and then you'd be better off doing something else. In 2001, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton of Gallup put the lie to this popular fallacy with in their book, "Now Discover Your Strengths." Everyone has tendencies or traits that make certain things come absolutely naturally to them--things that seem so easy that they can't quite understand why everyone else around them can't do as well as they themselves can. The core tenet is this: you'll go much farther if you focus on improving your strengths than spending inordinate amounts of time trying to overcome your weaknesses. Tiger Woods' strength is his long game. His trainer spent just enough time practicing extrication from sand traps so that TIger wasn't destroyed by a weakness, and then spent the rest of the time working on his strength so that he didn't end up in the sand traps in the first place. Sure, you can be anyone you want to be. Or you can be stellar at something that plays to your strengths. This applies to a broad career (Michael Jordan may well have sucked at being a CPA, or even a baseball player), or areas within a career (a lawyer may hate business development and join a firm so they don't need to do so). So, to become a champion shooter (or anything else for that matter), you need to determine whether or not you have some modicum of talent in shooting. Having determined that you aren't wasting your time on a weakness, then you can dedicate yourself 110% to excelling.

Good question. I had one failure to feed, but haven't run them through the chrono. I'll do that first before tinkering with the load.

Um. That was what I said in the first post. Why would 9mm be different from .45 or any other? There isn't so much a grey ring as a soot pattern down the length of the case wall.

Good to have that confirmed. Unfortunately, according to Hodgden's online load data, the max load for titegroup with 230gr bullet is 4.8gr, and I'm running at 4.7. Will 1 grain of Titegroup make the difference? Or should I experiment going above max by a grain or two?

I'm not seeing availability on their website. Did they all sell out or has their online inventory not been updated?

I have a number of .45 cases with soot around the case mouth. Does this mean the charge is too low and it isn't pressure-forming a tight enough seal against the chamber? I'm running Titegroup, 4.7gr, 230gr Montana Gold FMJ.

Google is your friend. After seaching, check the cached pages. http://webcache.goog...lient=firefox-a Hmm. Webcache no longer seems to be working. Anyone have a copy of this they can send to me?

Did you ever receive a form?

I noticed that Dawson sells grip tape cut out to fit grips for various guns. Has anyone found sources for the material and cut it themselves?

My OAL is 1.30 and is actually a bit long. I incorrectly assumed that the OAL wouldn't change between Montana Gold and Berry's. I have only enough crimp to remove case belling. What happens if rather than pulling, I merely push them deeper into the case using the seating die? Will this allow greater pressure build-up? To maintain the same power factor (momentum), I need to increase powder behind the lighter bullet. But I confess to being confused as a lighter bullet (mass) should require less powder to accelerate (force), so having the same powder load behind a slightly lighter bullet shouldn't be enough to cause a low pressure situation. There wasn't any wind during this trial.

I'll second the motion. I'm even going so far as to carefully deprime and rescue a primer from a damaged case. Such silliness.

I've read Micah's description of how to do so on a Glock. How do you do the same for an M&P9? ETA: nvm, works the same....