Reloading for Handgunners - Patrick Sweeney

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the bottleneck that slows down loading. When I started reloading, I had a tumbler (that actually tumbled) and it cleaned 200 empties in two hours. It was just too bad that I could load 200 rounds in about 35 minutes. I was running that tumbler day and night, even when I wasn’t loading, just to keep me in clean brass. Something like the Dillon 2000 (and you know how they named it) will clean brass in two hours, but at the end you have up to 2,000 clean, empty handgun cases.

      The tumbler usually takes ground corncobs or walnut hulls, but I have heard of people using rice. It just goes against my grain to use a food product to clean brass, so I’ve never tried it, but there are those who swear by it.

      The polish is easy; just dump a capful or so into the mix before you start it up, and your brass will be cleaner.

      While we’re here, let’s take a moment to discuss lead. It will be in many of the components you’ll be using. It is the densest common metal, and on the periodic table it is noted with the symbol Pb from the Latin plumbum.

      Some will tell you lead is evil, and nearly as lethal as plutonium. No. One of the first things we learn in chem lab (and, apparently, med school) is the old adage “dose makes the poison.” Lead, being a metal, washes off. It is not absorbed “through the pores of your skin” and it certainly (as I was solemnly assured by an FBI agent) does not pass through your skin and directly into your brain if you used your hat to collect brass at the range.

      You get lead into your body in the simplest and most prosaic way by ingesting it, usually from your hands or food/drink. Or you inhale it from fired powder smoke or on the cigarette you smoked at the indoor range. The bullets you handle and the brass you are cleaning will probably have lead on or in them. So, don’t eat while you load, don’t suck your fingers while you load, and after you wipe the tumbler clean, wash your hands. Smoking? Smoking is verboten for this, as well as, another reason; you’ll have powder and primers close at hand, and a burning anything is contraindicated while reloading.

      Once you’ve cleaned your brass, place it in clean containers, not the same boxes the ammo came from, that is not at all useful. You’re going to be loading hundreds of rounds. You do not want to be individually placing fifty empties at a time in a box. The only reason to save the box is if you plan on flying to a match, and then you’ll need “factory ammunition boxes” in which to schlep your ammo in your checked luggage.

       RELOADING PRESS

      Presses come in two flavors: single-stage or progressive. Each have variants, but for the moment we’ll consider those two. The single-stage press only holds one loading die (the cylindrical tool that performs some operation in the loading stream) at a time. So, to size all your cases, you screw the sizing die in, and pull the handle down-and-up once for each and every one of them. You then unscrew that die, screw in the next one, and continue.

      With a unit like this, to reload a single round requires that you pull the handle (down and up) on a single-stage press five to seven times, depending on just how many steps you can double-up in dies. For instance, the sizing die can also de-cap, that is, press out the expended primer, and seat the primer in one step. So, 100 rounds means 500-700 handle cycles.

      Police departments do not reload, if you have an “in” you can quickly acquire a lifetime supply of brass.

      If you shoot Glocks, or your buddies do and you often end up with their brass, get this die.

      Redding makes a storage bottle, to catch your .40 brass once it has gone through the GRx die.

      A progressive arranges a full set of dies in either a circular or straight-line array, and each time you pull the handle you process and then move all of them one step. Each die performs its operation, and once the press is fully loaded, you produce a loaded round with each pull of the handle. Some progressives require that you move the rounds between handle pulls, and some (known as auto-indexing) automatically move the array at the beginning or end of each handle stroke. Start to finish, loading 100 rounds requires 105 to 110 handle cycles.

      Here I’ll deviate from the orthodoxy, and suggest that you start out with a single-stage, and then buy a progressive once you know how reloading works. That might happen quickly, in a few weeks. It might take longer, even a couple of years. The idea is simple; with a single-stage press you learn each step by itself. Then when you are comfortable, you put them all together in the progressive. Advocates of each will tell you (and for various reasons) that you do not need the other. Me, I figure that the single-stage press doesn’t go bad on the shelf, and can be used for other purposes later on.

       DIES

      First things first. Do not succumb to the “savings” of buying uncoated, steel dies. Get either carbide dies (they have carbide insert or inserts in the wear areas) or titanium nitride-coated dies. Hardened steel dies require lubrication, or you will get a case stuck in them. Lube is messy and can add problems of its own. If, and only if, the caliber you absolutely have to load is not available in either carbine or TiN, consider a plain steel die. And then think about it seriously. That would be one use of your previously “unused” singlestage die. Use it to size and de-prime your clean and lubed brass. Then re-clean the lube off, and feed the prepped brass into your progressive to load it.

      Once you have carbide or TiN, then we work from there.

      Sizing

      The die squeezes the brass back down to proper size after having been fired. Depending how much pressure the load used generated, sizing can be easy or difficult. For instance, a .38 Special, using PPC-level loads (the classic 148 grain wadcutter and 2.7 grains of Bullseye) will require little effort to re-size. A .44 Magnum load, meant for hunting, with a 290 grain bullet and a case full of slow-burning powder, fired in a Ruger Super Blackhawk (because it would be very hard on the gun, or even break it, to shoot such a load in an S&W M29) will almost require that you stand on the handle to re-size the case, which should be a clue. A case so-hammered is not going to last as long as the one we used in the .38 Special example.

      Depending on the type of match, your handgun may need ammo with more or less power. Reloading allows you to choose.

      The feature of a progressive press that makes it a progressive is the rotating shell plate. Not many presses are straight-line any more.

      Your reloading bench should be kept clean. And, against my advice, this bench has more than one kind of powder on it. Tsk, tsk.

      Most die sets are arranged so the sizing die also de-primes. That is, it presses out the fired primer, making it possible to insert a new one. All you have to keep an eye out for are berdan cases (they don’t have central vent hole, and thus can’t be de-primed by your die) and crimped-in primers. The military insists on crimped primers so an over-pressure round won’t blow the primer out, and the lost primer tie up the weapon at an inopportune moment. (And when someone is shooting at you, almost any moment is an inopportune one for that.)

      If you are loading heavy loads in the .44, it might be a good idea to not only use carbide dies in your single-stage press for sizing, but apply a bit of lube, too. Something like Hornady One Shot is easy to apply, easy to remove and will make your sizing operation a whole lot less like manual labor.

      Belling

      To get bullets seated without a fuss, you have to bell the case mouth. Some die sets do this as a separate operation, many progressives do it as the powder-dropping step. Belling is a caliber- and bullet-dependant setting. If you are loading bevel-based

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