What did you do in the reloading room today?

[dansedgli]

Bolted a new lee classic cast press to my bench. The Dillon 1050 roller handle is a perfect fit. Solid steel too.

[JeffG]

Did 2 heat and cool cycles on a new NOE H&G 51 replica mold received today.

[Tom W.]

Loaded up what few .357 empties I had.

[KrakenFan69]

Went to the range to build some props for the club. While there I scooped up 2,500 9mm, 600 40 S&W and a few handfulls of .45 ACP brass from the weekends Steel Challenge match. Also pulled 30 lbs of projectiles form the berm to melt back down and test for hardness to see if I can use them for slugs. Got home and decapped all the 9mm brass and SS tumbled it. Ready to roller size.

Kraken Fan #69

[Reverend Al]

Sorted more clean brass, put another batch of dirty brass in the tumbler, sized, trimmed, and primed about 80 rounds of 7mm Rem Mag, ran another few hundred rounds of brass through my Annealeez machine ...

[DerekP Houston]

I assembled my RCBS upgrade kit from my2ndright.com. This includes a lid to keep the heat in and a neat alum platform with adjustable side rails to make casting from this big bottom pour melter easy. The mold guide that came with the RCBS is a metal rod. That is the problem it is metal. Not aluminum. My aluminum molds gall on the steel rod and it makes getting the stream of alloy into those teeny tiny holes in the sprue plate very difficult. Now with this aluminum shelf it should be smooth casting.

Hmm thats a pretty nifty upgrade kit. Thanks for the link I'm going to add it to my christmas wish list

[KrakenFan69]

Melted my berm harvested projectile lead and a bucket of previously cast projectiles back down into ingots. (Separately) 15 lbs of ingot form the berm and 30 lbs of ingots from my culled misshapen casts over the last couple of years. Ordered another 60 lbs of #2 Hardball too. Giggity Giggity

Kraken Fan #69

[Wayne Smith]

Cast total of 149 .395" round balls of pure for the coming flintlock. New Lee mold, worked well. Did this in two sessions - had maybe five of the first session that I threw back, mold not completely clean. Still warm here, but tropical low offshore so good casting weather.

[KrakenFan69]

Not in the room but for the room. Picked up 5 boxes of Winchester WAA12 wads in the old box $8 each. From Townpost. 1,250 in all. Vintage stock. lol


Kraken Fan #69

[JBinMN]

Tumble lubed some 44mag boolits & the sized them, then tumble lubed them again. Also sized about 100-110 more that I had pan lubed. Citrus and tumbled cleaned 50 cases, primer pocket cleaned & chamfered them, then flared & primed them. They are just sitting in the block waiting for powder & boolit seating. Later tonite/early AM if I can't sleep & hoping to do some shooting tomorrow. I have a bunch of different calibers set up for ladder testing & choreographing. Been waiting for a decent day to do it.

[lightman]

Not at the loading bench but I sorted another bucket of wheelweights. The more you do the easier it gets. Kinda boring though!

[Crash_Corrigan]

The last time I posted that I had installed my2ndright.com upgrades on my RCBS Pro Melter. Since then I have cast about 2,000 boolits with it. I am convinced that this is a worthwhile investment. I had recently bought a Mihec 8 banger mold designed to make a 130 gr 357 dia mold without lube grooves to make powder coated boolits. Wow what a great mold! Once I got it heated up enuf it rained those little boolits at an insane rate.

When I had made about 500 or so I took into my kitchen and powder coated about half of them. The came out looking neat and clean in a coating of Smokem's Bacon Grease. Kinda looks like a rich cream color but much too fat for 9MM's. They will require sizing.

I put away the PC'ing stuff and went back to cast for a few days. With a Lee 6 banger I cast about 600 230 GR Round Nosed .452 boolits and then turned to the NOE Mold which produced 255 GR Keith style WFN boolits. Yesterday I spend the whole day powder coating all those cast boolits. When I got done I realized that all of them were needing resizing as they came out anywhere from .4525 up to .462 in diameter. I do not have any weapons that utilize a .462 boolit. I also cast 172 boolits in a RCBS two cavity mold that produced a 98 gr boolit in .312 dia of the SWC style. These also came out fat and will require sizing as well.

So today the effort will be to mount my Star Lubrasizer onto my inlinefabrication plate so I can utilize it on my ultramount and size those boolits down to a useful diameter. I do not expect to hook up the air pressure system to lube these as they require no lube. I just wonder if all the work of powder coating and then having to resize these boolits is any easier then just sizing and lubing them in one shot? I can expect less smoking when firing these rounds off but is that worth all the trouble?

Well if not then I really am not out a lot of money since I did not have over $75 invested in the powdercoating adventure. However I did learn something along the way. Maybe the lack of smoke and the lessening of the necessity for cleaning my reloading dies (every couple of hundred rounds) and the cool look of colored boolits will make up for the extra steps in the P/C process. Anyhow my wife declared that she wants her boolits in RED once she saw some of my experimental boolits.

I started out with Harbour Freight's dark red PC and then added some of their Yellow to the mix and obtained a reddish/orange boolit which is pleasing to the eye but still required sizing. I still have Traffic Orange and Yellow along with John Deere Green to play with............

[jimb16]

Sorted and cleaned around 500 pc. of LC .223 brass. Will figure out later what I'm going to use it for;.223, 7TCU or .300AAC. or maybe all three.

[waco]

Got 20lbs of COWW plus 2% Sn in the pot now for some NOE SC311-165-RD boolits for the 30-30
Blacktail deer season opens next weekend.

[DerekP Houston]

Back home finally and had a bucket of evaporust waiting for me at the door! Going to start working on some more of Terry's tools and getting them scrubbed up for return, results were pretty awesome with the smaller bottle I had tried so looking forward to some nice looking gear again.

Took inventory of my remaining rounds to load and noticed I'm out of 38 spec HP wadcutters. The last batch accuracy was "ok" but I think I went too light on the charge. Going to cast up some fresh ones this weekend and get them coated and loaded up.

[KrakenFan69]

Went back to the range and farmed another 40 lbs of recovered lead from the berm in about 45 min. Came home and loaded 700 rounds of 9mm for an IPSC match and Canadian Steel Challenge Nationals this weekend.

Kraken Fan #69

[JBinMN]

Cleaned & reloaded 50 9mm rounds ( 356-102 -1R) for a couple I know who wanted to try shooting some cast boolits in their Glock. I already had some (TL356-124-2R) loaded for them to try.

I am also going to take some of my handguns over to let them "Fam. Fire" them.

Been overdoing using my right arm since my surgery & it is starting to ache pretty bad, so I am gonna take a break from the reloading press using that arm. I have been doing things "lefty" , but I started using my right arm as a sort of PT(Physical Therapy), and along with everything else I have prolly bit off more than I should have so soon.

[DerekP Houston]

Stomped around on the roof of my reloading room does that count? Had to replace the chimney siding with some hardie board. Surprisingly easy to work with, was kinda fun.

[KrakenFan69]

Decapped and SS pin cleaned 2,500 rounds of .223 brass. Next up is hitting it with the Super Swage then size, trim & chamfer. Ugh. I hate that part.


Kraken Fan #69

[Moleman-]

Started cleaning it, then got distracted by a partially used bag of 9mm boolits. So to "clean up the work bench" I ran them through the progressive press and filled up a medium coffee can with plinking ammo. The reloading room still needs cleaning, but that Ziploc bag is off of the bench now!