Reloading for Handgunners. Patrick Sweeney
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some of the more onerous things that rifle reloaders have to do. Primary among them is trimming. I know rifle reloaders who keep brass sorted by batch, and who painstakingly measure the length of the fired brass and track it until they have to trim it to length.
Others just fire up a power trimmer and trim it all, every time. If the brass is still below maximum allowable length, then the trimmer doesn’t trim, but it gets a whack at every piece of brass, every time.
Unless you are loading the real high-pressure brutes, and loading them to the maximum performance they deliver, you do not trim. As I’ve said before, trimming handgun brass for the vast majority of reloaders is a colossal waste of time.
Take the tumbler off, and your brass is in the screen, media in the bucket, and ready for the next step.
Spray glass cleaner into the now-empty tumbler.
Use a new paper towel to wipe the tumbler.
The paper towel will come out green from brass, and black from lead. Toss it. Wash your hands.
You can use ground corn cobs or even rice as a tumbling medium. Lyman makes corn cobs with polishing goop already mixed in.
How much so? A long time ago I got curious about the headspacing of the .45 ACP in 1911 pistols. The maximum case length/ minimum chamber length of the .45 ACP is 0.898 inch. I had just bought my first digital readout dial caliper and I wanted to get the hang of it. So I sat down with a bin of .45 ACP brass and proceeded to measure until I got tired of it. Well, I got tired of it pretty quickly, as I could not find a single case so long as 0.890 inch long.
I then looked at the 1911s I had available to measure and decided I was not going to slip a feeler gauge between the back of the hood and the breechface to see how much extra there was. I’d just measure the depth of the chamber and call it good. The shortest one I measured was 0.905 inch deep. So, best-case, the .45 ACP had something like fifteen thousandths headspace going on in there, and in many instances more.
Your cases are 0.015 inch short and you’re going to trim them to a uniform length? What, are you crazy? Or so bored that you need to find more to do?
Also, you are not going to need to chamfer the case mouths (since you aren’t trimming them) as your belling stem will give you mouth flare.
When rifle reloaders shoot brass too much, the neck gets brittle and the case body can stretch. They have to keep an eye out for incipient cracking near the base, leading to case separation, and for neck cracks. Unless you are loading a bottlenecked case (.357 Sig and .38-40 shooters, take note), stretching isn’t a problem. Cases might crack, but when you jostle a handful of cases as part of your case prep you’ll hear it.
In all, we’re a lucky lot.
Jangled, cracked brass has a different sound than good brass. And each caliber has its own frequency. With a little practice you can sort out the cracked and mixed caliber brass.
If you see this 9mm brass, pitch it. There are batches and brands of brass that get bad reps for good reasons. Don’t be so cheap that you struggle with bad brass.
Chapter Three:
BULLETS
You need something to hurl, in order to be shooting. Otherwise, you’re just making noise. But what bullets? What kind, weight and composition? The common, traditional bullet is lead. Lead has many useful attributes; it has a low melting point, high density, low cost (relatively speaking) and is easily shaped. It is, however, viewed in some circles as being highly toxic. Well, yes. But, “dose makes the poison.” Take the basic precautions and you won’t have a problem.
Lead bullets are commonly alloyed to make them harder, to allow them to fill moulds more readily and to adjust diameter. Diameter? Yes, if you take a bullet casting mould of any given diameter, the diameter of the bullets produced can change, depending on the composition of the alloy you cast in them. Unless you are going to do your own casting, that is a theoretical consideration. But hardness isn’t. To understand hardness and the need, let’s look at the bullet’s flight (the title of a very interesting book by Richard Mann, written in the 19th century and still relevant).
The powder charge goes off and the pressure slams into the base of the bullet. The bullet is pushed forward, exiting the case and then the chamber. If it is in a pistol, it slides right from the case into the rifling. If it is in a revolver, it has to jump out of the case, from the chamber throat, across the cylinder gap, into the forcing cone, and then to the rifling.
If the bullet hardness and the pressure are properly matched, the base of the bullet upsets, or obdurates, just enough to provide a gas seal. The bullet scoots forward, engages the rifling, spins and is on its journey. If the pressure is too high or the bullet too soft, the base over-obdurates, creating increased friction to the throat and rifling. It can also lead to a partially-molten bullet base, which is really, really bad. If the pressure is too low, the bullet won’t upset at all. The gas can sluice past the bullet, a process called flame-cutting. It will melt the sides of the bullet, producing leading and poor accuracy. A bullet that is too hard won’t obdurate at all, and will be similarly flame-cut.
Full metal jacket bullets usually aren’t, they have the base with the lead core showing.
This process is obviously affected by bullet diameter. If the bullet is too large, it will have greater pressure. (More resistance produces more friction, leading to more pressure.) A too-small bullet will flame-cut like a banshee.
So, when you are ordering your cast bullets, hardness is not the only thing to look at, and harder is not always better.
We also have the problem of multiple diameters to consider in revolvers. The bore of a barrel is the diameter of the rifling cuts, down to the bottoms of the troughs. Let’s use the .45 colt as an example, as it has been made for a long time and subject to a lot of changes. Until the 1950s, the common bore diameter of the .45 Colt was held to be .454 inch. With the rise in popularity of the .45 ACP, manufacturers drifted down to its bore diameter, .452 inch, as the standard for all .45-caliber firearms, ACP and Colt. So, you can have a Colt revolver from 1920 and a Colt revolver from 2010, and they can have different bore diameters. A 1911 from then and now is much less likely to wander.
But it gets worse, a lot worse. The portion of the chamber, forward of where the case rests, is smaller than case diameter. Called the “throat” in many circles, this should be the diameter of the bullet being propelled, or only a smidgen larger. It has, however, been all over the map. It is not uncommon to read of reloaders in decades past who measured their Colt to find the throat diameter at .456 inch, .458 inch or more. A .454-inch bullet, sluiced through a throat of .458 inch will lead, and it will arrive in the forcing cone already shedding lead. The throats will lead, the forcing cone will lead, the bullet will suffer grievously and accuracy will suck.