The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: Reloading....And Only Reloading

Episode Date: March 30, 2026

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Welcome back to Matterfax podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping guns and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at MWFpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host Phil Ravaleigh. Andrew, Nick, are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. All right. Now, Nick, I need your solemn vow now.

There will be no screwing around. There will be no getting distracted, no chasing squirrels, no hurting cats. We're not going to talk about government malfeasance today. We're not going to get distracted every five minutes. We're not going to let the people in the chat get us off topic. We're going to talk about reloading and only reloading on this show today. We're not going to talk about the patrons or the or not going to talk about the patrons. We're going to do the admin work in two minutes.

All right. Flat. And that, that's it. We're going to get to the reloading. We'll try. Okay. We're going to see how this works. This is the matter of fact's podcast.

I'm Phil. This is Nick. There are patrons who are in the chat right. now actively trying to distract us from the topic of which we'd said we were going to talk about last week, and we totally bullowed that all up by talking about pretty much everything except the topic, but we're not going to do it this time. We're going to stay on track this time. We are going to mention merch at the Southern Gouse, the links in the show description, along with the link to become a patron if you like to support the show and support a local small business.

And if you like coffee, you should check out disaster coffee and you should use code MOF at checkout to save a few percent on coffee because this is what's going to fuel this level of mayhem tonight. We are not going to indulge in booze and spirits because that always gets a soft topic. So I fucked that one up right off rip. Son of a bit. Nick! So you remember how I mentioned in the Patreon chat, how I think I made a new drink using vanilla vodka,

slices of lemon, some bitters, and some honey? Well, yeah. It's pretty tasty. I will say that if you ate six the bitters and you swap the vodka for whiskey, you have Cajun cough syrup. I mean, I will probably try that the next time I remember to buy whiskey. Yeah. Double shot glass. It's a little bit less than half whiskey, a little bit less than half lemon juice, or no, a little bit less than half honey.

And then you fill the rest up with with a. Lemon juice kind of stir it around with a, with a, usually with like a straw or with a toothpick. Sure. And then shoot it down. And that will clear up a severe sinus infection enough for you to sleep. Nice. I'm not sure if it's the whiskey that does the trick or if it's the lemon juice that helps open everything up or the honey soothes the throat or maybe all the above. But I know that that has worked for like every one of French Cajun descent for years.

Yes, Raggle, since we're off topic. So let's address something in the chat real fast, real, real fast, because you all brought this up. So Raggle was talking about there's a pizza place in Houston that's decided to make Budan bacon pizza. And he said, if it ain't Billy's Budin, I don't want it. And you said, I'm not Southern enough to understand this comment. This is accurate. What do you not understand? Do you not?

I don't know what Budan is. I have no idea what that is. Holy Jesus. I failed you. Yes. so since we're off topic and now talking about boudan which i'm assuming is a food so okay budan is um it's rice pork and seasoning in a traditionally in a pig intestine although more more modern it's a just you know like a sausage sausage casing it's kind of so the best analogy i can get to none kind of sort of i will try this it's

it's it's budan look if you if you shove meat and saw and stuff and seasonings in the casing i'm probably going to eat it like i will say that as far as like you you really do have to cook it but as far as cooking it like personally i like to like get a get a skillet throw some butter in and like kind of fry it to crisp up the casing you can also um frankly you can also just cut it open scatter the the guts all over the place and just like you know flash fry that and eat it like there's lots of different ways. I don't have to give that shot. But I apparently have failed my patrons on the camping trips and not brought any up in a while. To be fair, I've only been to one of them. So yeah, but they failed on one. And there was cracklins and all

kinds of other fun stuff there. Oh, we did bring chicken cracklings. You did. And then there was just the absolute metric ton of sourdough, which turns out amazing. Yeah, that was Victoria. Yeah. Hell of a good little bread. That little lady was killing us with sourdair. We are already off topic. God dang it. Not even six minutes.

Okay. Five minutes, 30 seconds and we're going to talk about reloading. We're going to talk about reloading for a whole show. So, since we were to stop, rattle, stop, stop, stop, stop. Because we both love food. You can't do this to us, man. I am, my middle name is

Thickham's. Obviously, I like food. But we're going to talking about reloading. Yes. So, since we didn't get that deep into the subject last time, I think it merits a slideshow. So we have some visuals. But reloading in the simplest terms is we're taking components. Usually, the brass would be salvaged from a previous run of shooting. Sometimes you've gone buy brand new brass.

Most of the time, we're talking about buying projectiles. Some people like to cast their own. But regardless, we're talking about taking four principal, components and we're putting it together in the proper sequence and the proper amounts that we don't blow our guns up. Yes. Ideally. Ideally. So we have our,

our brass has cartridge case. And please for the love of God, don't refer to these as bullets because bullet is the projectile. The whole thing is called a cartridge. It might sound like the old clip magazine argument, but it's just you'll get every reloader. There is a point to the clip magazine argument.

Distinction. Yeah, there are clips and there are magazines and some magazines also can hold clips. And there are bullets and there are cartridges but they are not the same thing. And you will give every reloader a mini stroke if you refer to a cartridge as a bullet. Yes. So please don't do that.

But we have our brass cartridge case, usually brass. I mean, we'll get into that a little bit further. Stealing aluminum, you're typically not going to home roll. You're not going to reload at home. Yeah, and if you see like the really shiny cases, those are

actually nickel-plated brass. So they're still brass with the nickel-plated, and that's not just for the sake of vanity. Like, the nickel-plating actually helps with extraction from the chamber. It does. Why you see it on premium defensive ammunition so much. Also corrosion resistance.

Yeah. Well, that and when you pay a buck around, you know, you kind of expect your ammunition to be pretty. So some of it is probably just there for marketing. It depends on the caliber you're shooting. At a buck around, it could be a bargain. Yeah. But you have your case. You have your primer, which is the thing in the bottom that makes it go bang.

You have your powder, which is pretty self-explanatory. And you have your bullet that gets set into the top. Now, in the simplest terms, seating the bullet, seeding the primer into the primer pocket, seeding the bullet into the mouth of the case takes nothing more than a finely calibrated mechanical press. Because that's all a reloading press is. is literally a linear ram. I mean, like, let's obfuscate all differences between single stage,

turret, and progressive press for just a moment. We're talking about a linear RAM. Yep. And via some kind of a leverage system, a way to increase, he's the mechanical advantage to give us more power for a given amount of arm strength. Yeah. That's all the press is. And you calibrate the depth of things via how far into the press you start.

screw your die so that at full RAM extension, God, there's a lot innuendo in this show. There is. But if at full RAM extension, when the case is as far up as it's going to go, the thing holding the bullet is going to be what sets the depth that the bullet is pressed into the case. Or the neck tension, or how much you're expanding the case, or the outside size of the case, whichever step in the process you're in, essentially you're using the fixed stop position of the as your zero location. Yep.

Yeah. So I always have to start with like what are the parts of a cartridge and how does a reloading press work to put things together? Because for some reason, the uninitiated think that making your own ammunition requires like an industrial estate. Like people are shocked when I show them how simple it is. And they're like, that's that it's not a harder than that? I'm like, no, it's not really that hard. I mean, I'm not the brightest crayon in the box. And I can figure it out.

haven't blown myself up. Well, it's no different than baking. It really isn't. You're following a preset set of instructions, and if you deviate from them and don't know what you're doing, terrible things will happen. Terrible things. All right. Now advancing forward, what is burn rate? Why does it matter? So I inserted this in here because I actually had this lingering around as a topic from like months and months and months ago to kind of do. not a whole topic, but a mini topic on what was burn rate of reloading, why does it matter, and so on and so forth. So I don't want to like murder it to death in this show.

But I did think this was the appropriate place to talk about what is colloquially known as burn rate. Because, okay, again, for the uninitiated, the critical difference between smokeless powder and black powder, other than the fact that smokeless powder doesn't make a lot of smoke by virtue of its name. Is smokeless powder burns black powder explodes? It sounds like a no-dove moment, but hear me out. If you take a pan of black powder and throw a match into it, it just goes poof all the once. And even the fastest smokeless powders, if you throw a match into them, first of all, I've put lit cigars out in piles of powder. It doesn't light that easily.

Like it takes some energetic, it takes a fairly energetic headick starters, you know, ignition. But once you get it to light, it doesn't just poof all of it. once, it burns. It can burn very quickly, very vigorously, but it's a controlled burn. If you can take a line of smokeless powder, light one in and watch it burn in sequence. It's a fun thing to do with mixed powders. You don't know what they are. Yes. Also, if you need to destroy mixed powders, honestly, give it to your wife to put in the garden. Yeah, it's a high nitrogen. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably why the irises that are in my front yard right outside my garage are always, is so pretty.

Definitely. Because like whenever, whenever I have some powder to throw it, I just chuck it right there into that little patch. And I mean, right last I checked, they're like waist high. Nice. Yeah.

But I bring this up because I want to have discussion about burn rate. So there is no, there is no like measurement system for burn rate. It's not like the weight of cases where, or the weight of bullets where they're all weighed pretty generally in grains, unless you get into the really big silly crap that's weighed that's weighed in grams or ounces. But like it's weighed in grains. It's kind of the industry standard.

There is no measurement for burn rate. What we have here in a burn rate chart is all the powders we know of are ranged from fastest, slowest. And it's not as if like number two on this list is twice as fast as number one. It could only be a percent faster. It could be 99 percent faster. It doesn't matter. All it means is that two is faster than one, three is faster than two, and so on and so forth. But the reason why I think it bears pointing out is that when you start to look in a recipe book,

you're going to see most tradition. I really wish I'd have snapped a picture of my horny manual so I could show you. But like, envision this, if you will, you will see for a given cartridge, given bullet weight. You'll see a line of different powders and then different charge weights that, equate roughly to certain speeds. And you'll start to notice that, like, the, the slowest powders on the light, on the, the lightest bullet in a series, like for nine mill.

My, uh, my lightest nine meal recipe is a 90 grain bullet. It's a 380 ACP bullet. But the, the, the slowest powder in that, in that, that 90 grain chart, I want to say is accurate seven. Accurate seven is. Sounds right to me. Accurate 7 is, by the way, almost like perfect middle of the road powder for like a 124 grand bullet. And it's just a little bit on the fast.

So just a little bit on the edge for like a hundred and was 148 grand, 147 grand. 147. Yeah, really heavy 9 mil. But the heavier the bullet goes, you tend to veer towards slower powders. So what was almost too slow of a powder for that 90 grain is almost too fast of a powder for the heavier. bullet. And that is the relationship you see between burn rate and the weight of the bullet. Lighter bullets tend to favor faster powders. Heavier bullets tend to favor slower powders. That's largely due to the acceleration factor that you can get. It takes a longer time to get a

bullet up to velocity so the powder needs to be burning longer so that you're getting full effect from that charge. Stuart said there is a measurement. they just don't share it because it isn't it ain't simple well unfortunately in stewart i am simple and no i'm not a vampire for end user perspective there's not really a published burn rate for all of these i mean could you find it if you call the manufacturer yes you probably could it's not published in any of the manuals so really for most people's purposes it doesn't exist yeah yes scientifically it does, but it's not relevant to a user. Yeah. But like Nick and I were talking right before the show, like the thing you have to bear

in mind is that for anybody that understands like how pressure works, how boils law work, a given volume of gas within a given volume of a of a container, if you have X amount of gas and you make the container larger than the pressure drops, if you make the container smaller, the pressure goes up. Now, when we're dealing with propellant that is actively burning, that is expanding and growing in volume, that's going to, if we took the bullet and we didn't allow it to move at all and we detonated all that powder, that's what's called a squib. It makes your gun banana peel open. It does bad things. So what makes this situation work is that as the propellant is burning and making more gas and expanding, the bullet starts to move out of the end of the cartridge and it starts to go down the barrel. So as it does that, the space between the back of the bullet and the innermost end of the case, the case head, that volume is growing because the bullet's moving.

And as the volume is increasing, the propellant is also expanding in size. So this is why to think about the relationship between like the propellant burning and the weight of the bullet, you're not dealing with one fixed. variable you're dealing with two that are moving at the same that are moving in concert with each other you're dealing with a propellant that is going to expand at a certain rate based on the burn rate and a bullet that is going to move down the barrel therefore increasing the volume of the chamber that the propellant's burning in according to how fast that bullet moves so a very lightweight bullet will move much quicker will open a bit of volume much quicker hence the the propellant burning faster has more volume to expand into on the other hand a bullet that's

much heavier is going to want to move much slower. So you need a slower burning propellant to not over, it does not exceed a maximum amount of pressure. Making sense? Yep. So what, what you're doing here is like all discussions about, all discussions about the, the accuracy of a round, the precision of a round, the velocity of the round are kind of all downstream from that relationship above, this is the most pressure we can make without blowing this gun up. Like that is down to the manufacturer that's down to the same expect that says, thou shalt not make more than this amount of pressure. To stay under that ceiling of pressure, you need a powder that burns just slow enough

that before it can eclipse that maximum pressure amount, the bullet has moved far enough and created enough volume for the powder to burn in so that we get up to that pressure and then we stay just below it until the bullet exits the barrel and the pressure just goes away all at once. That's the game. Now, from that, we are going to look for different things

in the ammunition. We might be looking for a certain speed or a certain precision or everything else, but ultimately we have to start from a standpoint of, I don't want to exceed this much pressure. And that is a balance between the powder used, the volume of powder used, because more powder means more gas,

means more pressure. You can, yeah. Stuart, I'm going to force you to come on the show. Matter of fact, one day, I'm going to force you to come on a show and just talk for an hour, and Nick and I'll sit here and get drunk. Yeah, we could do that. Speed of the burn is related to the pressure, greater pressure, faster burns. It's also related to a few other conditions, but for simplistic purposes, for learning to reload purposes,

stay with published recipes, just like canning. Those published recipes are known safe. once you get a little more experience with it and you know what to look for as far as overpressure and under pressure signs, then you can talk about fooling around and making some spicy loads like I do with my 300 win mag. Although that being said, just as an anecdote, and it kind of goes to what Stewart's talking about here. So when I first started reloading 38 special, I was loading that round to the minimum. And I started to notice, I was using a fairly fast powder, but not like crazy, fast. I was using a Hodgson Universal, which

sure is actually not on this list because I think it's a little bit further down. This cuts off about halfway down. No, Stuart, I'm not ready to be triggered unless that's a double entendre in which case it's funny since we're talking about reloading. But I noticed that I was having issues with a little bit, not a lot and not

consistent, but a little bit of unburned powder. Stewart ordered coffee. Did you use the promo? You bastard, did you pay full price? I hate capitalism and making money. Did you use the promo code? I will straight. I bet you he didn't. He probably didn't on purpose.

He didn't. He didn't. And he did it intentionally just to needleman. He did. Just upset you. Here I am. Just killing myself. Trying to be a cool person and give people a little break on their coffee.

But no. Somebody wants to support disaster coffee at full freight like a good friend. Thank you much. To be fair, we are also endlessly hassling rebel about raising the price on his backpack so I can buy one. Yes, I am up rebels behind about bringing the Phoenix back in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, it's a good pack. I need one. I want one badly. I would pay more than he's charging for one.

Stop getting us off topic, Nick. I can't. My brain. Anyway, so what I noticed was I was having an intermittent problem. them with unburnt powder in the gun. Yeah. Like, because you weren't loading enough.

Well, I was loading it to minimum. Now, what I noticed was that when I increased that load, I think two or three tenths of a grain of powder. So not much, just like a little smidge. And I increased,

I crimped it a little bit more exuberantly. Not like crazy. Certainly not even as, as hard as I crimped my three, my three, seven magnums. Those I crimped pretty authoritatively. Yeah.

But I crimped the, I got a factory crimped dye. I started crimp with the rounds just a little bit harder. I started putting just a little bit more powder in. The next thing I knew, that round was much more consistent. No more issues with unburned powder. It was more accurate. Like, there is something to be said for,

there is something to be said for increasing your powder charge. And even if it's not going to increase the burn rate of the powder, it does improve the burn of the powder. Well, because what you're really getting there is you're getting a consistent spacing between the grains of powder. When you have a fuller case, you have an equivalent amount of oxygen everywhere in the casing. Like you can see in this picture here, you've got most of the little balls are all pretty much the same distance from each other. There's a little bit of changes in spacing.

But if you're, say, your rifle case is only half full of powder. And your powder's all on the bottom of the case. It's not going to burn evenly. And the other thing is. Once you get it horizontal and you've got a half. empty half full case. You're going to get some weird burning. And I was going to say, Nick, only in Chicago do they typically fire guns where the bullet

is pointed straight up in the air. Everywhere else on the country, they point them horizontally. So what you have is, like, think about taking this cartridge and putting it outside. And when that primer goes off, that spark is actually traveling along the top of the powder instead of starting the ignition here and the powder burning nice and consistently up towards the bullet, it actually almost wants to. night across that whole bed of powder all at the same time. This is why completely different ignition.

So there's two things I point out here. First of all is that it's kind of generally except in the reloading community that for best, for best consistency in a round, you're usually looking for about 80 to 90 percent case fill. So in any, for any given bullet weight in a reloading manual, the slowest powder is probably not the best one and the fastest powder is probably not the best one you're looking for something that's going to mostly fill the case 80 to 90% case fill um you can cheat that a bit with your pistol rounds because they tend to use much faster powder and they tend to be a little bit more forgiving of not having a really aggressive case fill things like bullseye or tight group

but the slower the powder is the more tom foolery the less tomfoolery is the less tomfoolery it's going to tolerate as far as having a barely filled case. True. So anything you do at that point that changes your ignition pattern is going to affect the perceived burn rate at the end. Yeah. So all that to say. And even though this isn't like strictly reloading thing, this is kind of a just general gun ammunition thing. But like, the powder you choose is largely determined by the cartridge and the weight of the bulls.

you're trying to reload. The weight of the bullet, however, is determined by your barrel. Yes. Ultimately, if you try to put too heavy of a bullet in too lazy of a twist rate, it's going to go through the target turned sideways. And that's not usually great for anything. So just bear that in mind. Like to work backwards from what do I load or what do I even buy to load, start with a firearm because that tells you what cartridge you're going to reload. And the twist rate of the barrel will probably tell you.

you what range of bullet weights you should be looking at. There will be a maximum and minimum recommended bullet weight for that twist. Yeah. And if we're talking about pistol rounds, usually, you know, things like twist rate aren't that big of an issue. Then it's almost more down a user preference. Like I like 124 grain 9mm. Other people like 115.

Some people like 147s. I like 147s. Yeah. And there's kind of just seems to shoot the best out of my handguns. And I've got CZs that like eat like a fat kid. at an all night diner. Like they just don't care. Ironically, my CZ 97B really liked

lightweight bullets in 45. Mm-hmm. I don't understand it. But all of my 9mm like really heavyweight bullets. Yeah. See, I am heavily invested in 124 grain 9 mil, and with the exception of that few boxes of 90 grand hollow points I have on the shelf. But there's just,

those are zippy. There's just something about like a nine millimeter that can drive like 14, 125 feet per second. It just puts a big grin on my face. You know, Regal, he brings up the Helix 147 grains as well. And part of the reason why I got into trying 147 grains was I was shooting knockdown steel targets for a couple of the matches I was I was shooting at fairly regularly. The 115s would occasionally, if you got a slightly below, did normally. normal alpha zone hit wouldn't knock that steel over and you had to double tap or triple tap 147s that was never an issue i mean more mass i mean that's that's fair yeah i mean i i noticed and that was

shooting at the time i was shooting factory fmjs 115's versus and then i try 124s it was a little bit better 147s it was never a problem so depending on your application is is also going to drive your bullet weight a little bit. You know, the one thing I did not do to prepare for this? I should have told the two of us to grab our recipe books, not like the factory reloading manuals, but I'm assuming, Nick, you keep like a little book or a log or something that's your recipes.

Oh, yeah, I have an Excel spreadsheet that is my recipe logs and all of my wind calls and ballistic drop data from negative 20 Fahrenheit to 110 Fahrenheit. Try to log that in your memory, bank, maybe next week, we can come back and do like a little follow up to this with our recipe books. Mine are actually just written in a notebook over in my reloading bench. But it's like it's after I've done all the workup to determine what my guns like the best. Like this is the thing this gun likes. And we should have brought that to this, but we'd probably get off topic

and run out of time anyway. It's that is a longer in my opinion, more in-depth topic. That would be too much with this because that's like a just doing the rifle round development alone is is a topic then let's table that for next week let's bring our recipe books for next week and let's have a discussion about like our methodology of load development yeah absolutely steer away from that for this we'll focus just on reloading techniques gear but next week we can follow up and talk about that yeah we'll talk load development outstanding a love one i got some i got some pretty neat tips tricks that I learned from some very excellent shooters. Yep.

And I have a whole bunch of self-taught. No idea if it's the right way to do it or not, but it's my way and I haven't killed myself yet. So, hey, man, as long as it's safe and it works. I mean, it's safe enough. It seems to work pretty well. All right. The stuff.

So the rest of this slideshow is really like from me and Nick's own personal stock, like pictures we together of our stuff. and depending on whose stuff, they're going to have to speak to it. So this slide here's my stuff. All right. What you see on the left, well, yeah, it's my left, is an MTM case guard box with some loaded ammunition in it. On the right is a box of powder-coated bullets that I get from my bullet guy. He's located just in town by me here about 10 minutes away.

It's fantastic. The reason I took a picture of this case was to show one thing in particular that I don't do, but a lot of old school reloaders do. You will notice there's a case that's different than all the rest of these, Phil. It's got two different colors of Sharpie on the backside of the case. It's got black and it's got red. All right. One of the guys that I used to get spent casings from, he would only fire pistol brass three times. He would buy a brand new pistol brass and he would fire it.

The first time he colored half of the back of the case black. The second time he loaded it, he would color the other half of the case red. If it was black and red, he never loaded it again. Now, I tend to load my pistol brass until the brass is shot, until it is cracked or damaged beyond repair. Yes. Because, number one, I'm not shooting ultra-precision pistol, competitions. I'm not. I'm shooting a

defensive focused style of pistol shooting. I'm putting rounds on target within 25 yards. It's really looking at like A and B zone hits on a torso target. Not highly precise. No, that's perfectly fair. I was going to say that like personally, I load brass until the neck splits and that's yeah. I mean, here's so here's the thing. If you have brass that is difficult. to get like a really odd cartridge or something you have to fire for them or something you have to, if it's difficult

to go out and buy it in bowl. You're not going to pick it up as range scratch. Exactly. Then it pays to like get into case annealing so you can make the brass as long as possible. I don't do that because everything I load. I can pick up on the freaking range floor whenever I want it. Yeah. And

I load my brass until the next splits. The minute that happens, like you just, it's time to junk it. I will only case a kneel rifle rounds. I won't even I will not bother with piss. I don't anil anything because I mean like the the hardest round the hardest for me to replace

would be my 308. And it's not like three way brass is hard to get. No, but I've got 80 cases that are the exact, that have been fired the same number of times that are all the exact same head stamp that I have water checked to make sure they are consistent volume and that the webbing is the same dimension throughout.

that that that whole stack of cases once those start to crack i got to junk the whole the whole batch and i got to go get 80 or 100 brand new pieces of the same rack sure i'm probably i was actually kind of thinking about have you heard of peterson they're uh yeah i kind of thought about just dropping the money getting a big batch of that and putting it on the shelf so that when this wears out i've got something else to roll to but like i was fortunate enough to luck into a couple of buckets of Lapua brass and 30-od six and 300 wind mags. So I will not need either for a very long time. But man,

there's nothing wrong with buying nice brass. Yeah. But in any case, the only thing I do is that because I still hand prime all my brass just out of preference. And if I put a primer into a case and it just slips right in like a hawk dog down a hallway, sure. I will take and put a big old, I have an orange sharpie. and I put a big orange X on there.

Sure. So that when I fire it and I go to pick up my brass at the end of the day, if I find something with an orange X on it, it gets, it gets stitched. That's fair. Because if the primer goes in that easy, I'm concerned that sooner or later, I'm a blow a primer out the back of the pocket. And AR-15s don't really like primers running around loose in the fire control.

And the fire control group? Yeah, they get a little pissy about that. So, you know, it's one of those things where it's like, if I've already got a primer in there and it it went in I'm going to shoot it one more time because I'm not loading this for like you know mad max stuff it's training no no and what's what's the nicest way to say if I have to practice field expedient clearing of a primer from a fire control system that's just the way life is on the range that day hey you know what sometimes man it's a good way to train yeah but in any case like that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's the only thing I do is I load my brass until it splits, but if the primer pockets start to get really, really, really, really out of line loose, I will mark that. I will date, I will eight six at brass just because. Yeah.

And actually, more than that, we'll talk about probably in the next slide. No, it's one more slide past this. But anyway, that's all right. So when I, I dry tumble my brass before I start messing with it, just to get the worst of the crap off it before I start running into my dyes. Sure. And if running it through the vibratory tumbler is enough to make the primer back out of the pocket, I ditch that brass immediately. That's a good call.

Yeah. I would agree with that 100%. Yeah. It's just, you know, to me, there are very few wrong answers, and there's a whole lot of like your process, your preference, what you're comfortable with kind of thing. Jim just joined us. Late joining, but hello, all, I love reloading. Nice. You sadistic, you self-hating masochistic bastard.

Hey, hey. Reloading is a good hobby. Reloading is a good hobby. It keeps me out off my wife so she can tolerate me better. So this is my reloading bench. And I talked about this on the show last time when I told Nick how this bench was built, which by the way, this is like a completely scratch-built bench. The legs are, you don't need a lot.

No. The legs are four-by-fours that were actually salvaged from a, what was it? What did I salvage those four by fours from? It was something here at the house. Some home improvement project I had forever ago. I don't think it was. Oh,

that's what it was. So in the interest of full disclosure, when we first moved in here, us and our neighbors had kids that were about the same age and they played gear all the time. So we like. Swings. Well, no, no.

We cut the fence between our two yards from like a really high privacy fence down to basically like a chest high fence. That way you could like, we could pass kids back and forth over and we could, you know, just kind of put the two neighborhood neighborhoods together. And the tops of those four by fours are this bench's legs, along with some two by six as I used to frame it. And then I deck the thing in quarter inch plywood, which has not much strength to it at all, we all know. But what I did make sure that the load from the reloading press and the bench vices, it's on the far left of that, that picture to make sure those loads don't rip the bench apart is I took spare two by four and two by six and built basically a ladder frame underneath the bench top that's all screwed and glued like with deck screws and wood glue into the whole structure so everything that applies a lot of force goes you know through some large bolts and some body washers down through the two by fours and two by sixes nice Which is what that got awful, that got awful right, far right side of that picture looks like.

It's my far right. It's probably the audience is far left. Perfectly functional assembly in the far right picture. Oh, I mean, it's ugly, but it gets the job done. Raggle, yeah, that's, I think that was quarter inch plywood. It looks like half inch from the picture. It might be half. I don't know.

Dude, I built this thing like 10 years ago. Yeah. The plywood is not providing a lot of strength. it is that that that ladder frame is doing a lot of the work it is well even with three quarter ragel you're still plywood is not very good in torsion it's not it's really not um especially not unsupported but if you laminate two three quarters together with a shitload of construction adhesive in between now you're talking i would still put a ladder frame of some kind underneath it but You know, you make do with what you got sometimes.

I kind of subscribe to the idea of like, it's like building a house. Like you could make a house to where the outside walls and the inside walls would fully support the house. But those walls would have to be like, damn, they're solid. Yeah. As opposed to, you have a structural framework and the cladding, the dry wall and the dry wall and the brick on the outside or the vinyl siding in the outside is really just there to enclose the house. structure is the skeleton. That's kind of the way this is. All the structure of this bench is the two by six framing and the two by four ladder frame.

Yeah. And the plywood's just there so I don't have big gaping holes in it. Right. It's best not to have the stuff fall through your bench top. Yeah. You know what's a really good cheap bench top that pretty much anybody can get access to? Phil, I don't know about you. So my local hardware store has a second pile of doors and windows.

Does yours have that? Not my local hardware store, but there is a secondhand store not far from a house. And all they do is building materials. All right. So go in there. Solid core steel exterior security doors. It is hardwood all through sandwich between two thin pieces of sheet metal. You want to talk about a hell of a bench top.

That'll do a good job. all glued together and laminated together in between a few pieces of steel. Is it perfect? No. Will it prevent you from pulling your fasteners up through the hardwood? Yes. That'll do work. It does a pretty good job.

And I can usually get a factory seconds or damaged and dirty door or the wrong size door they ordered for 15 bucks. It's cheaper than a sheet of plywood. So Jim said he had his first stuck case in 20 years. Jim? Yeah. Oh, yes. Coffee cans are every reloader's best friend. That they are.

But Jim, drop in the comment. Matter of fact, everybody else is welcome to as well. Like, what do you use for case loop? Personally, I am a full on redding imperial caseizing wax. Won't use anything else. Yeah, I use.

Actually, it's mold lubricant. It's called super lube. It's a food safe mold lubricant that's water, water soluble. So after I resize my rifle cases, I just run them back through the wet tumbler and then all of the loop comes off because it's water soluble. Works fantastic. I've never had an issue with it, Dickin with my powder and primers. That gets a job done. That's also why a wet tumble is to get all the caseizing wax off. Okay. So that's, that is my reloading slash metalworking bench in my basement right now.

The Rube Goldberg machine. The Rude Goldberg bench. compared to my single stage. Right. So this is a progressive press. This one's a Hornity. I don't know when this one was made. I got it secondhand.

And I've made a couple of modifications to it since then. This bench is a butcher's block industrial, industrial bench top that I happened to get out of the dumpster at work because they were getting rid of a bench. And I was like, hey, free bench top. I threw a couple of pieces of plywood. top and bottom on just because it was full of all sorts of solvents and oil and grease. And you couldn't really get the bench top clean anymore. So I just skinned it. Called it a day.

And then mounted on some 2x4 and 2x6 structure. So this Hornity press here is set up for 9mm. As you can see, it's a five position shell plate. I just recently got the case feeder set up for it. That's this device you see on the left. Um, essentially what goes on is there's a little slider bar you can see right behind that little plastic bin. As you pull the lever down, that slider bar backs up and actuates that case feeder up top of there, drops a case. And when you feed the lever back to the forward position,

it pushes that case forward and seats it into that shell plate. And then it will go through all of the stages of the press and make your bullets. So the first stage after it dropping the primer on there, the next time the turret comes up, it's going to deprim and reform the outside of the case, comes down, primes the case, comes up, bell-mouths the case, comes back down, comes back up, charges it with powder, comes back down, comes up to that empty station there where my bullet feeder is going to eventually go. And then the last stage after the bullet will have dropped down onto there goes up, seats and crimps the bullet.

And then kicks the bullet off into that little plastic tray. So once it's fully loaded, every pull down and up will drop out a live round. Like I said, a Rube Goldberg machine. It is. If you guys can see in the back there, in the back middle of the picture there, there's that wire kind of sticking up and bent into like a little flag shape. I essentially took a piece of one 16th welding rod and just bent a little 90 degree flag on that. What that tells me is when that little flag is touching the top of the brass tube for the primers,

I have one primer left in the tube and one primer in the primer tray down below. So I know I can load two more rounds before I've got to swap primer tubes. The biggest bitch that I've had with this machine is number one, timing in the shell plate. because for whatever reason, Hornity did not make that simple. You got to adjust a couple little cam screws. And number two is running out of primers and not realizing it until five rounds later.

When all of a sudden, you're wondering why you have so much powder just all over the shell plate? Yeah, there's powder all over the shell plate because it only takes, you know, three or four pulls of the lever and you've made five dud rounds. Now, I just shake all the primer out of all the powder

out of those rounds back into the hopper and then fill our TV in the primer pocket. And those are, those are my training workloads, my training rounds. Because they're dummies. There's no primers in them. So you might as well use him for something.

That's true. So to back up one slide. I'm still using my faithful rock trucker, which means unlike Nick's contraption, where every time he pulls the lever, he gets a fresh round. I get a fresh thing that requires two or three more poles. and processes.

And whereas I'm imagining Nick probably processes his rounds a lot like my dad does with his Dylan, where it's like you get the machine set up and you just components in, ammunition out, and it kind of runs in a nice little assembly line. For a single stage, you can certainly do that, but it's just not time efficient because you're having

to swap dyes to go from piece to piece. So what I usually do is I will load usually 100 or 150 at a time because I've got 350 round loading block. right and I will take like 50 of my cases out of the dry tumbler that way they've gotten the the worst of the carbon the lead the dirt the crap off of them before I put them into my dyes start scratching shit up and I'll run them through and deprim them and and resize them then I will from there it kind of depends like for 5-5-6 I also have to also have to run it through my

primer pocket swage to make sure I've got all the factory crimp out. From there I will go ahead and run it through my wet tumbler to get all the lub and everything back off of it. Come back to the press and I will usually go ahead and

bell mouth or depending if it's a rifle round I'll trim it or if it's a revolve around I'll trim it, then bell mouth it then hand prime it because I don't like priming on my press and then I'll load it. But what I'm doing is you take all that in, all those rounds, and you go through one step in the process,

and then you reset, set the new die, get everything configured, run all those cases back through the next stage. So doing that, whereas Nick is pumping out like 500 rounds an hour, it's taking me, it's taking me potentially an hour, maybe more to make 150 rounds. Yeah, that's reasonable. I think I was usually at about 100 rounds an hour loading on a single stage. Yeah. Now, the trick is I can make that same, like, the only thing it really slows me down is I'm loading 5, 5, 5, 6, and only that because, like, I have a world's finest trimmer that I run my brass through or the revolver brass. If I'm bringing that in for the first time, I trim it just one time because by the time that brass expands enough to be out of spec, I'm splitting the neck anyway. But I- More than likely, yeah. But I do, and this is something I've argued people to death about, I do trim my revolver brass just because trim the revolve. Brass directly influences how exuberant that factory crimped dye is going to roll crimp the round. It does. And also the one thing with revolvers that you get that you do not get with semi-autos is you get a carbon ring built up on the cylinder.

And you can actually cause yourself problems if you have a longer round and you haven't cleaned your revolver recently and you seat that brass into that carbon ring. Two things, though. I almost exclusively shoot three sevens out of my revolvers. And no problem there. And I also run a brass brush through those chambers every single time I shoot it. Smart. Jim, I got this press secondhand and I thought it was missing most of the components for the case feeder. It didn't come with the rod for the primer tube.

So I had to get a fad one. I didn't know they came with one. I mean, all of my reloading stuff has been bought secondhand, uh, typically, except for dies. Yeah. Now, the one thing I did want to point out, although I'll probably hold on to it because I think it'll come up in later slides. But that's kind of the long and short of like the differences between our setups is, you know, single state, I'm on one side of the single stage. Nick has a progressive. Well, I also have a.

rock trucker single stage, I do all of my long range rounds I'll with. All my rifle rounds get done on a single stage. Dude, I don't so far do the amount of progressive. I'm telling you, it is freaking hard to beat an old school single stage for, for repeatability. For precision repeatability, I'll tell you right now, the, the hornity that I have here is really only good to five to seven thousandths for case overall length with seated bullet. Five to seven thousands is about where it's at for, for tolerance. My rock trucker is about one to two, and that largely depends on the bullet tolerance.

I was about to say, like, especially if, like, I was loading hall points the other day. And, bruh, you would not believe how much variance in the bullet itself. Because, like, you got to bear my mind. When we talk about doing rifle loads, we'll get into how anal I get about my bullet choice. And how out of a case. Hopefully, I will remember to tell you, I'll, how nonchalant I have gotten about low-loading those precision rifle rounds because I used to get super duper and or tentative about like seating depth must be exactly the same. And then I realized that variance I was chasing was not from the candle lure to the to the to the bottom of the case.

It was from the tip of the bullet. And when you line and when you line up 10 of them things, they were all different. And I was like, that depends on what bullet you buy because match kings are pretty damn consistent. It is Match Kings. You're having a problem with... No, no, no. No. Don't use the word of problem.

And don't beat me to the punchline. We're getting off topic. What I'm saying is that you have to bear in mind that the way a hollow point jacket is made is that normally with a jacket at bullet, the jacket does this. The lead goes in this side. And the top is and it wraps. It's the exact opposite for a hollow point. So if what you're measuring from is the cantalore, which is a is, you understand this, and I understand this. Like the cantalure is a dat is a datum line on the round.

Yes. The candelor is going to be very, very, very consistent. And it is also the place where typically a reloading die interfaces with the bullet is at the cantalore. Correct. But the very tip of the bullet could be slightly jagged or slightly misaligned because where the jacket got formed, and deformed could be a couple thousands off, but it doesn't impact the fact that the candler is in the right spot. Yes.

So that's why I stopped chasing absolutely to a thousandth of an inch, picture perfect seating depth. And what I do is that I have a dummy round that I screw my dye down until it contacts a dye, and I know the candler is going to be in the right spot from that moment forward. And I load all my rounds, and I stop measuring the overall length. interesting and you know what that was enough to like cloverly four rounds together a hundred yards interesting the cantalures are all the right height even though the the tips of the bullets are a little different oh damn it stewart's right i'm thinking about that the candelor is where the uh the bullet

crims to what am i thinking then it's not candelor oh yeah with uh with the the tangent point where the it's a bullet it's a sea word is over from me Is it a C word? Oh, there's so many words. I could think of a C word. Describes. We'll find it for when we get to the... O-Jive!

Oh, Jive! You know what? Stewart's going to have to come on the show, and you and I are just going to get drunk and just let him talk. That's fine. But yes, Stewart is right. It's O-Jive.

Not candle word. Anyway... Well, the point stands. I understand where you're coming from. So I took admittedly we are we are talking thousands of an inch. Oh, we are. We're talking thousands of an inch and we're and we are talking about percentages of bullet diameter difference in impact at 300 yards, which is well over the top for most anal retent cases. But. But, you know, I took actually a box. I took a thousand. I took a thousand. bullets of CR Match Kings and I selected a

random 50 out of there and I took them to the comparator at work which is essentially what it is is a shadow projector with a scale on it. It's a very accurate shadow projector with a scale and I grafted where all of the important points

were on those bullets. They were consistent to within 2,000. Now let me flip your lid. What I just get that this is so far off topic Like, we're going to, I'm going to drop this and then we're going to stop talking about. We're going to move on. To convince myself that I wasn't screwing the pooch on this.

Sure. I did a couple of things. I took a box of 50 CER matchkings. I weighed every last one of them. And from the heaviest to the lightest, they were within, I think, three tenths of a grain. That sounds similar to what I've found. Yeah. Very, very similar weight.

And that has a big impact on flight path. But the other thing I did was, remember how I said I was measuring off the ojive, right? and I stopped chasing that perfect down to the thousandth of an inch. Because originally what I was doing was I was literally like backing out the cedar on the die. And I'd put, I'd press the bullet in and I'd pull it out and I'd measure it. And then I'd screw the seating die down an eighth of a turn at a time until I get the perfect. Oh, yeah.

No, that's, no, that's way too, that's way too picky. So what I did was once I discovered this whole, the very tip of the bullet is slightly different in this lot, is I took my dye out of the press. I put it upside down in a padded vice. I dropped a bullet point down so that it just, the ojive sat in the seating die. Sure.

And then I measured from the base of the bullet to the face of the dye, using my dial calibers. I did that on 10 different rounds, and they were within, I think, one or two thousandths of an inch. Yeah. So from the ojive to the base of the bullet,

we've got amazingly consistent bullet size. Yes. But from the, from the base of the bullet to the tip, I was getting five, six, seven thousandths difference. And it was all down to that little dimension between the OJive and the tip where the jacket formed together.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. I was, I didn't realize you were resetting your dive for every single round. But again, like we talked about before, I was largely self-taught, and I didn't know what, I didn't know how much of a difference it made. So when I set out to make a quote unquote precision rifle round, I overdid everything, except for neck turning. That's the one thing I never got into was constrictory and neck turning.

I understand it makes a difference, but. Well, okay, I, we can't, you know, we'll get into that when we get into the rifle round loads. The point remains. That's, I was, that's a 20 minute talk on it. own. My point is, is that I was chasing ghosts. Yes, yes, you were. But I didn't. You were chasing burrs on the tip of the bullet. It's really what you were chasing. But I didn't know until I tried. No, you don't. And that's, that's part of it. Yeah. Anyway, um, okay. Trimming. So two things I wanted, a couple of things I want to point out here. On the left, that is the perfect amount of ghetto rig on the right. Um, yeah. That's perfect. Let, let, let me get there. So on one side is my line.

hand-powered case trimmer. That's what I use for my 308 Winchester, and it's also what I use for my revolver rounds. And for the revolver rounds, I trim them one time, and once brass is into my workflow, I don't go trim it a bunch of times or measure it. It's just one time, make sure it's within a couple thousands of an inch, one way or the other for my case trim length.

And if it's not, I junk it, and if it is, like if it's too long, I'll trim it. If it's a couple foul too short, I'll just put it in circulation. It'll be fine. It'll stretch. Yeah. But the 308, I measure that every single time I shoot it. And if it's a little long, it gets trimmed.

I have a couple of doodads on here from reloader tools, through which I'm shocked. I checked the other day, their site is still up and they're still selling. They do, it's a little one-man garage outfit. And he makes like 3D printed reloading accessories. I've talked to him before. I actually tried to interest him coming on the show years ago and he just really wasn't interested because it's kind of like a side gig for him.

Sure. I think the way he put it to me was he was concerned that if he got too well known that the demand would outstrip his ability to 3D print the things. That is an extremely fair thing. I have seen a few single man operations get well ahead of themselves and then just crumple under the load. because then it takes it from a fun side job to

well now this has got to be all weekend every weekend yeah but what we have here is his tray and it's not the easiest thing to see but there's actually a little plastic collar around the the collet and that is just to make sure that as the brass shavings come off they go down into the tray and stuff flying all over the place

and the tray is really just there to like you know kind of catch all the brass make it easier to collect and pitch away. Used to, it would just kind of go everywhere, and I'd had a little, I still have a little broom and dust pan that I'd sweep it up with, but this makes things a little nicer and cleaner. Now, I have that mounted to that little wooden pad that has two bolts that run through it. This was one of the things I wanted to point out, because it's something I built into this workbench a long time ago. There is a collection of threaded inserts glued into the bottom of the bench.

Nice. And I have a number of attachments that have strategically drilled holes or they're mounted to wooden blocks that have strategically drilled holes so that I can take those quarter inch by, I think they're quarter inch by a 20 Allen-headed socket and socket bolts and screw things down to the bench. So that as I'm sitting there, you know, working this hand trimmer, I'm not having a hold over there with another hand or fight it or have it skitter around on the bench. It's just run those two bolts down, snug them, and then just go to work. And when I'm done, pull the bolts out, pull it up, put stowed away. And the bench is clear. You know what that's called in the industry, Phil? Thinking ahead.

Indexable fixturing. Well, that's a high. The fixture goes back in the exact same place every single time. Yep. And it's this way for this. It's this way for my rifle rest. That way if I'm working, if I'm working on a rifle where I'm like tearing it apart and I need to apply some. force. I can lock the rifle into the rest. The rest bolts down to the bench, my,

my magazine loaders. Those also bolt down to the bench. So if I'm loading a bunch of AR-15 mags, I just bolt the bolt the loader down to the bench and then just, you know, free-handed, not fighting with it. Absolutely. Yeah, you know, it's a very simple thing that just about anybody can do. If you've got a circular saw and either a drill press or a handheld drill, you can do that. I mean, tracks are nice. Oh, well, there's Stuart with T-Tracks. T-Tracks are great and all. You have to insert them into the bench. That's fine if you're willing to build a dedicated workbench with T-Tracks. But anybody can go on McMastercar and get the thread inserts that you hammer in or glue in or press into a piece of

plywood can be modified into any existing bench and it gives you indexable fixtureing like this. And you just cut your sheet of plywood, mark your whole locations, drill your holes, and run your screws in. Yeah. It's very easy. And on the other hand, my ghetto fab, as you so nicely put it, that is my dad's old craftsman corded drill. It's probably about as old as I am. Oh, yeah. That came attached to the world's finest trimmer that my dad gave me.

It came attached to the trimmer? Yeah. That's fantastic. That's my dad's old drill and the world's finest tremor that he gave to me because he upgraded to the case trimmer on his Dylan 650. Okay, that's fair. That, yeah, so this is one of those moments in time. I mean, now I'm going to piss some people off really badly, but I was this close to getting a whole handby down Dylan 650 when he upgraded to a 750. I turned him down.

Why? I have no freaking place to put the stupid thing. It's not, it doesn't take up that. much room. Look, it doesn't take up that much room. It's the same size as my press. It takes up the amount of room as my like, what's that thing like 40 pound vice. I don't know. It's not that big. I have no one to fool around with a progressive press. Move your daughter out. I have no. I have no. Gillian's going to hit me when she sees me. I have no interest in getting a progressive press. Not now and not ever. I can be I can be talked into a turret press at some point. But the truth of matter is that I just, I've, I've, I've helped my. I've helped. My dad set up that progressive press at 650. And I understand the 750s are supposed to be easier to set up. They are. I haven't full with his 750.

He has. But like, I've helped him set up that 650 enough times. I don't like progressive presses. You could, I've literally been offered one for free and politely declined it. I just don't. I even looked at a Dillon 550.

Okay. Manual indexing. Yeah. I kind of like that better than I do is 650. But even then, I'd rather, I think I'd really rather just get like a Redding T7. If I was going to upgrade to anything from a Rock Chucker, it'd probably be a Redding T7. I just can't see myself. For rifle rounds, I agree with you.

For rifle rounds, I agree with you, Reading T7. But for pistol rounds, I just don't like progressive presses. I have no. I have had, I have no mouse in my heart towards anyone that likes them. I am so happy for all of you that you get to giggle at my heart. 150 rounds an hour while you smash 500, 600, 700 rounds an hour out of your progressive presses. I am happy for you.

My heart is overflowing, but I do not like progressive presses. I don't like setting them up. How many do you have? Two freaking many already. No, I'm just, I'm asking seriously, how many discreet hobbies would you say you have? Of which reloading is is one. Well, okay, reloading. We have to count the podcast because this consumes a not insignificant amount of time.

Oh, it does. Yeah. Can I count my family? Because that feels like that. No, that's not a hobby. That's an obligation. Well, it's an obligation that takes a lot of time away from the hobbies. Not a hobby.

There's guns. There's tactical gear. There's night vision. There's radios. Radios is a big, thing all by itself. Yeah, radios do take an awful lot. All right. Let me put it to you this way, Phil.

I'm also a man of many hobbies. As my wife would say, probably too many hobbies, as I have run out of room, even though I say this press doesn't take up that much. much room as you people have heard me bitch incessantly about the county that still won't give me the goddamn permit to build a garage we're going to leave that alone for now we've you promised me we would stay on topic i'm trying i'm trying it hurts but i'm trying oh we can let the dog out we can let the dog out next episode i promise no no no i'm i'm working on it it's in progress We're working on it.

The progressive press allows me to compress the reloading hobby time or compress the time that I would be spending on the reloading hobby time into a smaller time window. It gives me an almost equivalent result. Almost equivalent result to my rock trucker. Is it as consistent as my rock trucker? No. It is not. And I will never try to claim it is. Is it as reliable as a rock trucker?

No, it is not. the the way this thing indexes its cams slowly walks out of time i haven't figured out a way to stop that yeah i know i run out of room all the time it's why i need a second garage also she rachel the one commenting wants me to get the fucking lathe out of the basement that requires a second garage um and some large angry friends well it's not that heavy when you take it apart the heaviest piece is only 400 pounds so it's not that neck shut up Look, my hobbies are heavy, many, and varied. All right.

Not a single one of my hobbies doesn't involve cast iron or lead. So deal. But the point being, I can either spend 100 or 10 hours loading 1,000 rounds or I can spend two hours loading a thousand rounds and get to enjoy my other hobbies as well. No, that that's fair. I just. And really, for pistol rounds. I mean, I can understand why people would be hesitant for progressive press with rifle rounds. You cannot quality check as often or as easily with a progressive press.

Can a Dylan give you high quality rifle rounds for target shooting? Yes, it can. Will it do as high a quality as a single stage press where you're checking every single powder charge and every single case sizing? No, it just will not. but the time savings for me is so beneficial, especially because I am loading for two people, minimum, always. Because either I'm taking my wife, I'm taking a friend, or I'm taking a family member, and a lot of times those people end up shooting my ammo. My wife, because, duh, she's going to shoot my ammo. My dad, because I'm not going to make my dad buy his own ammo when he only shoots with me.

He's just going to shoot my ammo. I want to spend time with my dad. I'm bringing the bullets. I mean, my dad has a 750. He has plenty of his own ammo. Well, exactly. That's different. My dad doesn't hand load.

He only buys the ammunition that he thinks he might need in case somebody breaks into his house at night. So I provide his range ammunition when he comes out or when I am teaching a new shooter. That's all fair. A lot of the time when I'm teaching a new shooter, it's somebody that doesn't even own a gun. I'm supplying the ammunition because they're using my gun. Do they at least buy you breakfast? sometimes sometimes they buy me lunch sometimes they buy me beers after it sometimes it's just it's a person that i know would not teach themselves shooting otherwise and i can give them that i can give them

that experience in that comfort level to go out and then buy their own firearm and then get into the classes i mean that's all fair but back to topic well it is on it is on topic it is reloading i mean The press, look, it gives me a five-fold time advantage. It really does. That's fair. It's just a gigantic pain in the ass I don't feel like dealing with. And I've never been in a situation where I felt like I am outstrip my ability to make or purchase ammo. I can absolutely, even with that progressive press, I can out shoot my ability to produce ammo.

Oh, I sure could if I tried. But bear in mind that I do a lot more dry fire than live fire practice. Yeah, I need a mantis. We can make that topic. I know we can. And I know I should have bought one already, but anyway. I bought a bread instead. So yeah,

on the air side is a world's finest trimmer. It's set up for 556. It's awesome. It's actually, it's host clamped down to that little one buy because I hold clamped that down to my bench with, with, with, little trigger actuated quick clamps.

Those things are fantastic. Yep. And that doesn't. If you don't have them, buy them. They're amazing. I've considered like threading some inserts or bolts or whatever through that like I did with my hand tremor. But honestly, it's just, it's not breaking my heart to just clamp down to the bench and then go for it. And I usually use like the lid from a coffee can to like catch the brass shavings.

It gets job done. So I also have a world's finest for my 5, 5, 5, 6 brass. the only difference between what Phil's doing and what I'm doing is you're using a drill press. I said that drill press back there. Yeah, that's what I use. I use the drill press. It works. Because I have it and it's there. If I didn't have it before I had it, I used a cordless McKita. I will say this much. And Nick might giggle at me because I'm sure he has manned hands and my mechanic hands have kind of worn away from office work. But I personally recommend you keep a glove on hand because, Usually when I'm trimming 5,56 brass, it's like 5, 6, 700 cases at a whack. I'll just sit there for an afternoon and smoke a cigar and just run brass over and over and over. And on several occasions, I've developed blisters from holding the brass while that case feeder vibrates and, you know, kicks and everything.

So two things. One, never use gloves when you're using rotary power equipment. Never use gloves. with rotary power equipment. Second thing, blisters are your friend. Just put a couple bandages on. It's fine. Seriously, though,

look, with the cordy drill that you've got there, it's probably not going to be a problem if a glove gets grabbed by that. The drill press I've got is a half-horsepower drill press. Yeah. It is stronger than me. It'll pretzel your arm. I get that.

Do not. I mean, it might not. The belt would probably slip. It's fairly old, but. Hopefully. never the only gloves i should i should be clear with this the only gloves you are allowed to use with any rotary powered equipment are those little thin nitro gloves that will tear when you touch them to anything anything else you could lose fingers or lose an arm that's fair i'm a machinist that is a hard and fast rule all of the machines i work with will kill you if you give them the excuse but at the same time i've been using like rotary hand tools for years with gloves. You really shouldn't.

You really shouldn't. That little corded angle grinder will climb that glove and smear your finger. Now I'll just have to lip with that. But anyway, you might. Hey, you know, everybody has to choose their risk. And for me, ever since I was 13, it was, thou shalt not use gloves and moving power equipment. You just do not. no i'll give you that all right two more slides and my goal is to be out of here in 17 minutes and 40 seconds

all right mine's an easy one kennedy toolbox dud rounds and a very old probably priceless antique Dylan electronic scale. I got that when I got my rock trucker from a dead guy's reloading collection through a coworker at work.

I have had that scale since the beginning. I check it with a standard every time I turn it on. It has always been very consistent. It has given me fantastically consistent rifle loads. The newer scales are probably better and faster, but that

one works. Yeah. I think I have an RCBS, just a little electronic scale. I've never, I've never had a problem with it. I will. I do keep a beam scale around to double check against, if I'm ever curious. I was going to say on behind that big old stack of, um, die boxes and everything on that shelf on the air side is a beam scale that I still keep around for occasional sanity checks. I've actually discovered that. the beam scale seems to be a touch more consistent than the electronic scales. Not much, but if you're like splitting like tenths of a grain, it can be in my experience. The electronic scales, if you put something above them, it changes their reading.

Because it alters the atmospheric pressure. Yep. Beam scales are not that sensitive. Also, I don't know. if it's more consistent or if it's one is more sensitive than the other. Okay, here's something interesting. And I cannot confirm, but I was told from someone who had a, they had a fluorescent light fixture above their workbench that turning the,

the fluorescent light on and off affected the scale, the reading on their electronic scale. It can. It can, especially the old big fluorescent tubes. All of my lights back behind me. and actually all the lights in this house right now, they're all LEDs. Yep, same. They don't have enough current to mess with that scale,

but I did notice that my old house, the fluorescent lights would mess with it. Yeah. But once you set the zero with the light on or off, it did not make a difference. But change that light on to off. You had to re-zero your scale. Yeah.

And I run into the same thing when, because it's usually hotter than shit in my garage, especially in the summer. And I'm usually running a window unit and a box fan in there just like circulate the air and keep things moving. Yeah. And I have noticed I have to re-zero my scale because of the air currents in the room. It's just, I could believe that. It is different air pressure.

It is worth pointing out again. The thing of it is, it's like if you're shooting minimum loads or even mid loads, the odds of you being a tenth of grand higher low affecting your ammunition that big is not that. not a huge concern unless you're dealing with something really, really super fast powder where two tenths of a grain might be the difference between minimum maximum. But if you're... If so, you're using the wrong powder. But if you're... Well, you're that or you're using like tight group.

Wow. I don't like tight group for that reason. I don't like tight group for a couple of reasons, but that's one of them. Yeah. Well, it's not a forgiving powder. I'll put it that way. That's all. That's it.

Is that kind of like all machines are smoking? machines if you use them wrong enough it is it is tight group is a fine powder if you use it appropriately but there are powders that are more user friendly that have wider margins for error that are better for either novice reloaders or people that are doing bulk batches like i'm doing yeah but the thing i want to point out on the air side of this was like yes i have a beam scale in the back there uh on the right side of that is a, I think that's a Redding powder tick trickler, which is literally just something that like, if you're, if you're loading precision rounds and you want to make sure that every powder charge is exactly the same, the same, then what I do is I will take and throw a charge

of powder into, you know, the little bowl that sits on my, sits in my, my scale, and then I will trickle it until I get exactly to a tenth of grain, the right, charge and then I'll dump that using a funnel into my rounds. Like, that's pretty common and fair amongst reloaders. For precision rifle loads, or if you're, or if you're tuning a load, that's generally considered the acceptable practice unless you have, like, one of the RCBS charge masters, where it trickles every single load, those are very good. Those are very consistent.

And the only other thing I have in this picture is a couple of the FW arms dyes, which are now owned by Dylan. Like Dylan doesn't own FW. FW sold the patent to Dylan. But I've got the, uh, the auto centering, um, swage dye and the auto centering, um, depriming.

Yeah, depriming dye. I actually don't use the depriming die. I haven't since I got it. Um, stewards, I've thought about it recently because I should, should be using it, especially after I forcibly resize the flash hole on a couple pieces of brass.

Look, you only do that like four times before you buy 20 spare decapping pins. Then never have it happen again. As a matter of fact, I now have 20 spare decapping pins sitting in my bench. Look, you're going to, if you reload, you're going to break some things some of the time. Sometimes it'll be casings. Sometimes it'll be primers. Hopefully it's never your dyes, but decapping pins are one of the things you're going to break most often.

Yes. I mean, well, that and occasion, you will crunch a case. That's, that's fairly common too. But yeah,

when I keep spare decapping pins, it's, they're cheap, they're usually a couple of bucks. So I usually buy a 10 pack for whatever, whatever case size I happen to be buying. Since you mentioned crunching casings,

I have pictures still floating around somewhere of my daughter when she was like five or six maybe. she wanted to help me. Yes, she wanted to help. So she was running the press and she wasn't paying super close attention to making sure that the case mouth got up into the Dye Street. So yeah, I had a nice little collection of brass. I mean, she got about like, you know, eight or nine, every eight or nine out of ten. But I had a nice.

At six, not bad. I had a nice little pile that she just went to town on it. And it kind of accordion the case. Which is it brings up an interesting point about you were talking earlier about using the leverage of the press to multiply force. A six year old can run a press. You should not be horsing on that press. If you are, something is wrong. Yes.

The leverage should do almost all the work for you. Yep. If you have to force it, it's wrong. All right. I think this is. is this the last? Yeah, this is the last slide. So go ahead.

You and I have the exact, you and I have the exact same wet tumbling equipment. We do, but I actually use it a little differently than yours. I don't pre-tumble before I, before I do anything. I just dump them right into the wet tumbler with a, you know, a scoosh of Don. It's, it's, don dish soap,

squirt a wee bit in, fill it up full of casings, fill the rest of the way, full of water, set it for two hours, walk away, go play some counterstrike or whatever the hell you happen to feel like doing, and then run them through the tumbler to separate the media out. And then I usually, I usually try to tumble my casings at least a couple of days before, because I don't tend to deprim them before I run them through my wet tumbler. So a couple of days sitting in front of a fan, at least 24 hours sitting in front of a fan, and then a couple days to a week sitting just out exposed to air and I've yet to have an issue I probably will eventually

I mean it kind of depends on how wet your basement is but I mean I've got a dehumidifier setting right next to where I dry the casing so I mean eventually all the water will be out of them well and think about where I live humidity is kind of just a way of life down here all the humidity but um yes yes Stuart I agree my primer pockets are not getting fully cleaned I would agree with that so Here's the thing. This is why I'm thinking about getting a dedicated depriming dye and depriming them all before they go through there. But at this point, this is the order I do it. And it's been working okay.

Yeah. Now, me personally, I use, so I have a Frankfurt Arsenal wet tumbler and dry tumbler. I have my bench. I dry tumble, which is just like I said earlier to get like the pulverized lead, the carbon, the dirt, the crap off the dyes. And that's two things. First of all, if the, if the brass is a little bit cleaner, then it's less ending. up on my hands and lead exposure is an issue with this hobby. It can be for sure.

To me, I use that first step as an opportunity to get the case is a little bit cleaner, so I'm exposed myself to a little bit less crap. But I'm also making sure- You're getting more of that lead in the air with your dry towel. Oh, you asshole. Well, it's industrial safety standards and practices. You want to wet tumble anything with lead because the lead will stay in the water. Just let me let not get in the air.

Let me enjoy my fantasy for five minutes without tearing it all hard. I'm trying to help you out, brother. You want less lead in your body? Wet tumble first. Screw it. I'm going to start a new trend. Lead is good for you. Well, lead is sweet and tasty for sure.

Yes. I mean, between that and flat earthers, you know, we'll have this whole world back on track shortly. But anyway, also it's worth saying that it like your dyes, especially your carbide dyes, do not like dirty. and crap getting shoved up into them. So like, bear that in mind. But I dry tumble my brass. Then I start processing it. And then once I'm done messing around with lubricant,

then it goes into the wet tumbler. But by then I have the primers out of the primer pockets. So there is that. I actually saw something from red eye reloading fairly recently that I wanted to point out because I live and die by this. I do not put D-Primed brass in dry tumbler. because anyone who's done it enough time sooner or later is going to get a piece of media shoved into that flashhole nice and tight and if you're not paying really close attention you're going to be really pissed off when you're flat when the ignition from that primer cannot get through the piece of cornucob i have had steel pins get stuck in d primed 556 cases i've had three of those pins get stuck in the primer flashhole i've been a deep primed case. I will admit, I've had that happen to me one time, but I have had it happen to be many,

many more times where I've got corn caught media stuck in flash holes. Absolutely. Well, it's a semi-soft media. It's eventually some is going to get jammed in there. So like said, that that's me. And as far as like wet tumbling, it's a good old LSD. It's, um, fill it up to, it's five pounds of brass. My, my steel pins. I fill the whole control. The whole control. traction up with scalding hot water up to the brim, put in a one second squirt, finely calibrated, one second squirt of dawn. And then that bottom right hand picture is a dipper I made to measure out the Lemmy Shine. And that is a nine mill casing safety wire to a spare, um, Alan Rich. You know, I've never used Lemme Shine on any of my brass.

Lemmy Shine is not strictly necessary. If you have really hard water, it can, help because it i believe it's it's it's basically a detergent booster yeah it is i mean let me put it this way when i tumble my brass i don't put a finely calibrated amount of dawn in it and i usually fill it i would say two-thirds full of casings i don't weigh it jesus a cement mixer water and dawn did you miss the part where stewart said when i had full autos no no i didn't miss that i i just kind of cry on the inside because I will probably never be able to have full autos without getting an FFL. Stuart is who I want to be when I grow up, which is, which is laugh.

Texan? Well, I'm from Texas. Oh, well, you're halfway there. I was born and you just need to get old. I was born in Texas City, Texas, actually. The most Texan place on earth. The Texas is. Texas is.

We should put that on. shirt. We should. The Texas-eist guy. But yeah. So like that's, I use LSD and then after I'm done personally, I take a, take a towel, lay down to the bench, spread out the pin so they could dry, spread out the brass. I let it sit for 24 hours.

And usually I'll make a point of going out there several times and like, yeah, mix it up a little bit. Yeah. Now, one thing I did try, I do try to get in the habit up and maybe it's just OCD to the max, but I try not to let any cases stand. up so their primer pocket down because then it's primer pocket on top of a towel and it just kind of like seals the moisture in you know i use i grab one of the rubber made tote lids that i have and i line it with paper towel or towel whatever i've got handy throw all the cases on there

and mix them around every few hours and when i don't when i notice that towel is completely dry and I mean completely dry, no spots of wetness at all, then I'm usually pretty safe to load the cases. Yeah. You know, it's, even in southeast Louisiana humidity,

I find 24 hours is usually usually sufficient. I haven't had a problem with that. The one time I tried to shorten it to eight hours, I ran into a little bit of a problem. Well, yeah. Yeah, that'll do it.

But yeah. So that's kind of like the nuts and bolts of our reloading setups, as far as like next week is precision rifle to well and I want to expand next week slightly not just precision rifle but like let's talk about like low development low tuning because like I I go through slip in their danger signs for overpressure rounds yeah and see here's the thing with those when you're dealing with semi autos like for me personally I subscribe to the theory that like my gun is going to tell me when it's grumpy way before the primers do. Like you can feel if you're experienced with firearms and you should not be fooling around with reloading unless you have some firearms experience, but like you can feel the bolt and the slide beating on things they're not supposed to overly.

I can tell you this. I have found if you are training for competition shooting and you're doing, say, triple taps, long strings of fire at. multiple targets. You can get so focused into what you're doing into your transitions, into your reloads, into your target acquisition, you stop feeling the recoil. True, but that does not apply to load development. Because load development, you should be doing it slowly and paying attention to your gun.

You should be capturing your brass, looking at the primer pockets. Like, what you're talking about is training. Training happens after the load development. Load development is an extraordinarily... You would think it should. We're gonna... I definitely got away from myself with the 9-mill loads a couple of times when I was... I just mixed in the load development loads with my regular loads and didn't pay attention to it.

Great. But that was when I was very new to reloading and shooting and I recommend against it. So let me answer this before we sign ourselves out of here. Use lemme shine. Have you made rose gold cases yet? I will warn you that. that if you use LemmeShine, because it is citric acid, and you let your brass sit in that for too long, or you don't do a really good job of rinsing it off,

your brass will turn orange. I've heard very... That's one of the benefit to never use in Lemishol. I've heard varied opinions from lots of smart people, all the way from it literally doesn't matter. It's just cosmetic. All the way, too, you've irrefrily destroyed your brass because it's turned orange,

so it leached all the zinc or something out of the cases, and now they have to be scrapped. Well, I've heard everything in the middle from really smart people and really dumb people, and I don't know who to believe. I know I've got some orange brass and it hasn't blown up yet, and I'm going to keep on proving you all wrong until it does. The amount of time it would take to leach. Okay, it's leaching the surface zinc out, and I can prove this to you.

Do you have a Scotch bright pad? Yes. Grab one of your orange cases. Go at it with a Scotch bright pad. tell me if it don't turn back to brass color. That's a good idea. I guarantee you it will. What's going on is you're getting surface deterioration on the case.

Yes, if you leave your brass case in citric acid for a long enough period of time, will it eventually take all of the zinc out of the case? Yes. Eventually. It's not going to happen in a day. It's not going to happen in a couple of days. It's probably going to take a couple of weeks. Citric acid is a weak acid.

It's not going to eat through all that zinc in a fast amount of time. And by fast, I mean within days. Maybe in a couple of months, depending on the thickness of your case. But what you're talking about is an acid penetrating a composite metal to the full thickness of that case. When you use like a rust remover, rust stripper, that's also, well, Some of them are acids. Some of them are bases. But the point being, you can leave your steel part that is rusted in that for weeks.

That is a far stronger acid than Lemishine ever would be in any concentrated amount they're going to sell you. That makes sense to me. Yeah. Look, you can use, we use products in my industry like Lemmishine and other different stripping chemicals. and different acids one of the one of the ones we use fairly regularly is a muratic acid it will take various chemical compounds off the steel so you can get to virgin steel and then weld it and have the weld stick appropriately um i'll have to look up the difference between citric acid and miratic acid as far as the acidity level of it but i think it's like 1.5

muratic acid is strong enough to give you a chemical burner skin oh it absolutely is you can drink lemmishine. Not that you should, but you can. You cannot drink muratic acid. I used to be a pool guy. So yeah, we used to play around with muratic acid all the time. Yeah, that you could leave your brass in muratic acid for a while and it would probably be pretty okay. Do I think it's a good idea? No, definitely not. Can you? Sure. Probably. Okay. So, hour and a half. We're two and a half minutes over. Close enough. close enough. Okay. Well, we're going to go ahead and pump this one out the door. I am going to go to sleep because I have a nice early wake up in the morning. Me too. And I'm going to make a point of

recording that next week we need to talk about load development and all the, not the how you reload, but the how you reload. The how you tune a reload for your purpose. And we have to remember to bring our recipe books. I will bring a recipe. me book and probably wouldn't hurt to also bring a reloading manual i have a couple yeah we'll we'll try to be i mean i thought we did a pretty good job of being we're going to need sharpies i made a i made a whole ass slide show nick and i did amateur photography work like we were really on the ball prepared for this one we did but next next time we need to bring notes we did not address the potassium nitrate shortage um for those of you that don't know

potassium nitrate is not manufactured much in the U.S. And this is what happens when you import a lot of your explosives from overseas and your propellants from overseas and your fertilizers from overseas and you don't have a domestic supply line for critical goods and services. And I don't do that. Also, copper is up 30% for those of you that have not bought primers, cases, or full metal jacket rounds lately, they are going to be going up in price,

starting next month. I am not trying to panic sell you. If you need some, buy some before the price goes up. Because it's probably not going to come down for the near term. Yeah, I have. And that's from an industrial commodity standpoint.

So that will affect all downstream pricing. It will. I have to put it in order tomorrow. But let's go ahead and punt this one out the door. If you thought we screwed something, up like Stewart inevitably did and he loves to correct us. I encourage you to leave us comments. You can get on MOFpodcast.com and hit the contact form and leave his hate mail. You can harass us in our streams every Thursday on YouTube, on Facebook and on Rumble. Facebook's a little funny,

though. A lot of times they don't show our streams and that's their problem, not ours. But matter of facts, podcast is going to go out the door. We stayed mostly on topic. We got out just a little late and we'll talk to you all next week. Bye guys. All right.