Boerrancher
06-08-2008, 03:20 PM
I know that many of us have purchased gas check makers to make checks out of pop cans. The day before my surgery I discovered that all aluminum cans are not the same thickness, but only after loading a bunch of ammo that prolly won' shoot well. For some strange reason I decided to mic some of the materials (can stock) that I was using. Here are the results:
Coke can: .005 thick
Sweet Valley (Aldie's Brand): .004 thick
Arizona Ice Tea can: .006 thick
I should have miced the material before I Ever Started, but didn't think it would matter. It wasn't until I started getting some odd groupings and leading that I tried to sort things out and made the discovery. It would seem that to shoot in my 30-30 I have to have a gas check that measures .311 once it is seated on the boolit. I started with a double layer Arizona Iced Tea can for my first batch of checks, and they shot very well. I grabbed and cut out a bunch of Aluminum sheets from the cans I had laying around and started making disks to make checks out of. I made a bunch of dbl layer checks and seated them on boolits. The next time I went to the range I shot really crappy groups and had lots of leading, with the exact same load as before. Nothing had changed but the gas check. When I went back and started measuring the unloaded checked boolits at the base the gas checks were all different diameters.Ranging from .3085 to .311. I can measure the unloaded boolits and remelt, or remove the undersized gas checks and put the prober sized ones on, but what to do with the loaded ones? I don't have a way to pull them, and it seems a waste to shoot them.
Best wishes from the Boer Ranch,
Joe
Coke can: .005 thick
Sweet Valley (Aldie's Brand): .004 thick
Arizona Ice Tea can: .006 thick
I should have miced the material before I Ever Started, but didn't think it would matter. It wasn't until I started getting some odd groupings and leading that I tried to sort things out and made the discovery. It would seem that to shoot in my 30-30 I have to have a gas check that measures .311 once it is seated on the boolit. I started with a double layer Arizona Iced Tea can for my first batch of checks, and they shot very well. I grabbed and cut out a bunch of Aluminum sheets from the cans I had laying around and started making disks to make checks out of. I made a bunch of dbl layer checks and seated them on boolits. The next time I went to the range I shot really crappy groups and had lots of leading, with the exact same load as before. Nothing had changed but the gas check. When I went back and started measuring the unloaded checked boolits at the base the gas checks were all different diameters.Ranging from .3085 to .311. I can measure the unloaded boolits and remelt, or remove the undersized gas checks and put the prober sized ones on, but what to do with the loaded ones? I don't have a way to pull them, and it seems a waste to shoot them.
Best wishes from the Boer Ranch,
Joe