Matter of Facts: Reloading....And Only Reloading

Welcome back to the Matter of Facts podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping, guns, politics every week on iTunes, Ditcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at mwefpodcast dot com. On Facebook or Instagram. You can support us be a Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Raveley 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. If there will be no screwing, there will be no screwing around. There will be no getting distracted, no chasing squirrels, no hurting cats. We're not gonna talk about government malfeasans today. We're not going to get distracted every five minutes. We're not gonna let the people in the chat get us off topic. We are going to talk about. Reloading and only reloading on this show today. We're not gonna talk about the patrons or the or We're not gonna talk about the patrons. We're gonna do the admin work in two minutes, all right flat, and that's it. We're gonna get to the reloading. We'll try Okay, We're going to see how this works. This is a Matter of Facts 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 bolowed that all up by talking about pretty much everything except the topic. But we're not gonna do it this time. We're gonna stay on track. This time. We are gonna mention merch at the Southern Galos links to the show description along with the link to become a patron. If you like, support the show and support a local small business. And if you like coffee, you could 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 us off topic. So I fucked that one up right off, rep Son of up it, Nick. So you remember how I mentioned in the Patreon chat how I think I made a new drink seeing 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 cagun cough server. 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 and or no, a little bit less than. Half honey, and then you fill the rest. Up with a lemon juice kind of stirred around with a with a usual with like a straw or with a toothpick, and then shoot it down and that will clear up a severe science 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 sews the throat, or maybe all the above, but I know that that has worked for like everyone of French Cajun descent for years. Yes, Ragle, since we're off topic, so let's address something in the chat real fast, real real fast, because y'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 budan, I don't want it. And you said, I'm not Southern enough to understand this comment. So what do you not understand? You do? You know? I don't know what. I have no idea. Holy Jesus, I failed you. Yes, So since. We're off topic and now talking about buddhen, which I'm assuming is a food. So okay, budan is. It's rice, pork and seasoning in a traditionally in a pig intestine are the more more modern. It's a just you know, like a sage casing. It's kind of the best analogy I can. Yeah, non kind of sort of. I will try this. It's boot. It's boot. Look if you if you shove meat and saw and stuff and seasonings in the casing, I'm probably gonna 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 skill it, throw some butter in and like kind of fry it to chrisp up the casing. You can also frankly, you can also just cut it. Open, scatter 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 have to give that shot. But I I apparently have failed my pain 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 cracklings and all kinds of other fun stuff there. Oh we did bring chicken. Cracklings did and then there was just the absolute metric ton of hour though, which turns out amazing. Yeah that was Victoria. Yeah, that hell of a good bread. That little lady was killing us Saturday. We are already off topic. Got not even six minutes, okay, five minutes thirty seconds, and we're gonna talk about reloading. We're gonna talk about reloading for a whole show. So since we were stop raggle stop, stop, stop stopping. I'm my middle name is thick Hums. Obviously I like food. But we're gonna talk about reloading. So since we didn't get that deep into the subject last time, I think it merits a slide show. 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 run of shooting. Sometimes you'll go on by 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 principle 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 we have our cartri our brass has cartridge case. And please, for 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, it might sound like the old clip magazine argument, but it it's just you'll get. Every 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. You mean, we'll get into that a little bit further. Just stealing aluminum, you're typically not going a home, You're not going to reload it at home. Yeah. And if you see like the really shiny cases, those are actually nickel plated brass. So there's still brass, but the nickel plated. And that's not just for the sake of vanity. Like the nickel plating actually helps ensure it helps with extraction from the chamber. It does why you see it on premium defensive ammunition so much as resistance. Yeah. Well then, 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. 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 a pretty self explanatory, and you have your bullet that gets set into the top. Now, in the. Simplest terms, seeding the bullet, seeding the primer into the primer pocket, seating 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 let's obfuscate all differences between single stage turret and progressive press for just a moment. We're talking about a linear ramp and via some kind of a lever system a way to increase he's the mechanical advantage to give us more power for a given amount of arm strength. That's all a press is. And you calibrate the depth of things via how far into the press you screw your die so that at full ram extension. God, there's a lot inu inoing this show. There is. But if a 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 ram as you're 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 the 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 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 hunt in the box, and I can figure it out. Haven't blown myself up? Yeah, it's no different than baking. It really isn't. You're you're following a pre set 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 ray? 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 is 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 the virtue of its name, is smokeless powder burns. Black powder explodes. It sounds like a no dumb 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 Litz cigars out in piles of powder. It doesn't light that easily like it takes. It takes some energetic It takes a fairly energet headache starters, you know, ignition. But once you get it to light, it doesn't just poof all the once it burns. They can burn very quickly, very vigorously, but it's a controlled burn. 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 high nygroen gen. Yeah. Yeah, that's probably why the the irises that are in my front yard right outside my garage are always so pretty because like whenever, whenever I have some powdered throat, I just chuck it right there into that little patch, and I mean, right last I check. They're like waist high. Nice. Yeah. But I bring this up because I want to have discussion about burn rates. So there is no there is no like measurement system. For burn rate. It's not like the weight of cases, where are the way the weight of bullets, where they're all weighed pretty generally in grains, unless you get into the really big silly that's weighed, that's weighed in grams or ounces, but like it's weighing grains. It's kind of inver 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, arranged 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 ninety nine percent faster faster. It doesn't matter. All it means is that two is faster than one, three is faster than two, and so on 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 gonna see most traditions. I really wish i'd like snapped a picture of what of my horny manuals I could show you, But like envision this, if you will. You will see, for a given for a given cartridge, given bullet, given bullet weight, you'll see a line of different powders and then different charge weights that equate roughly to certain beats. And you'll start to. Notice that like the the slowest powders on the lighted on the the lightest bullet in a series, like for nine mil, My my lightest nine mil recipe is a ninety graind bullet. It's a three eighty acp bullet, but the the slowest powder in that in that that ninety grain chart I want to say, is accurate? Seven accurate? Seven is sounds right to me. Accurate. Seven is, by the way, almost like perfect middle of the road powder. For like one hundred and twenty four grand bullet, and it's just a little bit on the fastest, just a little bit on the edge for like one hundred and was one hundred and forty eight gred and forty seven grand seven Yeah, really heavy nine 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 ninety 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 bolts 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 that from that charge. Stuart said, there is a measurement, they just don't share it because it is and simple. Well, unfortunately 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 was told 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 container. If you have x amount of gas and you make them the tanner larger than the pressure drops. If you make the tanner 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 it 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 the case the case his head. That volume is growing because the bullet's moving, and as the volume is increasing, the propellant is growing is also expanding in size. So this is why. When you 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 increase in the volume of the chamber that the propellants burning in according to how fast that bullet moves. So a very lightweight bullet will move much quicker, will open a volume much quicker. Hence the bird 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 maxim amount of pressure. Making sense yep. So what you're doing here is like all discussions about all discussions about the accuracy of around, the precision of around, the velocity of the round are kind of all downstream from that relationship of 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 expects 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 a barrel and the pressure just goes away all at once. That's the game. Now from that where we are going to look for different things in the ammunition. We might be looking for a certain speed, or 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. Can ye, 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 the show and just talk for an hour and Nick can I'll sit here and get drunk. Yeah, we could do that. Speed of the burn is related to the pressure. Greater pressure, faster it 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 spice loads like I do with my three hundred win mag. Although that being said just as an anecdote, and it kind of goes to what Stuart's talking about here. So when I first started reloading thirty eight 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 Hotchington 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 unburnt powder. Stewart ordered coffee. Did you use the promo Castard? Did you pay full price? I hate capitalism and making money. Did you use the promo code? I will, I will straight. I bet you didn't. He probably didn't on purpose. He didn't. He didn't, and he did it intentionally just to needle man. He did. Just upset you here. I am just killing, killing myself, trying trying to be a trying to be a cool person and give people a little break on their 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, I am up rebels behind about bringing the phoenix back in in in it. 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 with unburnt powder in the gun. Yeah, like because you weren't loaded enough. Well, I was loaded to minimum. Now, what I noticed was that when I increase that load, I think two or three tenths of a grain of powder, so not much, it's 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 crept my three seven magnums. Those I crimp pretty authoritatively. Yeah, but I crimped the crimp. I got a factory crypt ie. I started crimping the round. It's just a little bit harder. I started putting just a little bit more powder in. Next thing, I knew that round was much more consistent, no more issues with unburnt powder. It was more accurate. Like, there is something to be said for there is something to be said for increase in your powder charge. And even if it's not gonna 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 your say, your rifle case is only half full of powder, and your powder is all on the bottom of the case, it's not gonna burn evenly. And the other thing is, you know, once you get it horizontal and you've got a half empty, half full case, you're gonna get some weird burning. And I was gonna say, Nick, only in Chicago do they typically fire guns where the bullet is point straight up in the air. Everywhere else in the country they point they point them horizontally. So what you have is like, think about taking this cartridge and putting it on its side, and when that primer goes off, that spark is actually traveling along the top of the powder instead of instead of starting the ignition here and the powder burning nice and consistently up towards the bullet, it actually almost wants to a nite across that whole bed of powder all at the same time. This is why completely different ignition. So there's two There's two things I point out here. First of all is that it's kind of generally accept in the reloading community that for best for best consistency in a round, you're usually looking for about eighty to ninety percent case fil 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 is going to mostly fill the case eighty to ninety percent case phil. 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 tomfoolery that the less tom folury is 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. 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 bullet 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? Two load, start with the firearm because that tells you what cartridge are going to reload, and the twist ry of the barrel will probably tell 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 one hundred and twenty four grand nine milimeter, Other people like one hundred and fifteen. Some people like one forty sevens. I like one forty seven, 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 all night diner, Like they. Just ironically my CZ ninety seven B really liked lightweight bullets in forty five mm. Hm. I don't understand it, but all of my nine millimeters like really heavyweight bullets. Yeah. See, I am heavily invested in one hundred and twenty four grand nine mil and with the exception of that the few boxes of ninety grain holid points I have on the shelf, but there's just those. There's just something about like a nine milimeter that can drive like fourteen hundred and twenty five feet per second. It just puts a big ground on my face, you know. Raguel he brings up that he likes one forty seven greens as well. And part of the reason why I got into trying one forty seven greens was I was shooting knockdown steel targets for a couple of the matches I was I was shooting at fairly regularly. The one fifteens would occasionally if you got a slightly below the normal alpha zone. Hit wouldn't knock that steel over and you had to double tap or triple tap one forty seven's. That was never an issue, I mean or 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 one fifteens versus and then I tried one twenty fours. It was a little bit better one forty sevens. It was never a problem. So depending on your application is also going to drive your bullet wait a little bit. You know. The one thing I did not do to prepare for this, I should have told the tubas to grab our recipe books, not like the factory reloading manuals. But I'm assuming Nick, you key like a little book or a loge 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 twenty fahrenheit to one hundred and ten 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 or actually just written in a notebook over in my reloading bench. But it's like it's after I've done all the workhup 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 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 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 steers 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 alone. One of them. I got some I got some pretty neat tips and tricks that 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 stuff. The rest of this slide show is really like from me and Nick's own personal stock, like pictures 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 life 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 ten 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 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 case 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. Out I tend to load my pistol brass until the brass is shot, until it is cracked or damaged beyond repairs. 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 twenty five yards. It's really looking at like A and B zone hits on a torso target, not highly precise. No, that that's perfectly fair. I was gonna say that, like personally, I load brass until the next 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 form or something you have to if it's difficult to go out and buy it, you're not going to pick it up as range scratch exactly. Then it pays to like get into case and kneelings so you can maintain you can keep 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, And I load my brass until the next splits. The minute that happens, like you just it's time to junk it. So I will only case in the old rifle rounds. I won't even I will not bother with pissing. I don't kneel anything, because I mean, like the the hardest round, the hardest brass for me to replace my three a weight and it's not like three way brass, it's hard to get. No, But I've gotten eighty 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 check to make sure they are consistent volume, and that the webbing is this is, you know, like the same dimension throughout that that that whole stack of cases. Once those start to crack, I gotta junk the whole the whole batch, and I gotta go get eighty or one hundred brand new pieces of the same rash. I'm I was actually kind of thinking about it. Have you heard of Peterson? Uh? 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 got something else to roll to. But like I was fortunate enough to luck into a couple of buckets of lapooa brass and thirty odd six and three hundred wind mags, so I will not need either for a very long time. But man, there's nothing wrong with buying nice brass. But in any case, the only thing I do is is that because I still hand prime all my brass, just at a 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 ex on. It, it gets it gets ditched. That's fair, because if the primer goes in that easy, I'm concerned that soon or later I'm a blue a primer out the back of the pocket. And ar fifteens don't really like primers running around loose in the fire control the fire controlling group. Yeah, they get a little 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 went in, I'm gonna 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 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 that brass just because and actually more than that, we'll talk. About probably in the next slide. It's warm slide passed this. But anyway, so when 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 dies. 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, so I would agree with that one hundred percent. 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. You sadistic, you self hating, masochistic bastard. Hey, hey, reloading is a good Reloading is a good hobby. It keeps me out from eight of 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, nah. The legs are four by fours that were actually salvaged from a. Oh what was it? What did I salvage those four by fours from? It was something here at the house, some home improven projective 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 girl all the time, so we like swing, so well, no, no, no, we cut the fence between our two yards from from like a really high privacy fence down to basically like a chest high fence. That way you could like we could past kids back and forth over and we could, you know, just kind of put the two neighbor haighborhoods 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 rngth to it at all, we all know. But what I did to make sure that the load from the reloading press and the bench fights that'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 god awful that god awful right far right side of that picture looks. I guess my far right. It's probably the audience's far perfectly functional assembly in the far right picture. Oh, I mean it's ugly, but it it gets the job done. Raggle. Yeah, that's I think that was quarter inch plywood. It looks like half inch from the pit might be half I don't know, dude, I built the same like ten years ago. Yeah, the plywood is not providing a lot of strength. It is. That that ladder frame is doing a lot of the work. It is, well, even with three quarter regular you're still plywood is. Not very good in torsion. It's not it's really not 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 may 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, there's solid as opposed to you have a structural framework and the cladding, the drywall and the drywall and the brick on the outside or the vinyl siding on the outside is really just there to enclose the house. The structure is the skeleton. That's kind of the way this is all. The structure of this bench is the two x 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 benchtop that pretty much anybody can get access to? Phil, I don't know about you, did you My local hardware store has a second pile of doors and windows. Does your just have that? Uh? Not my local hardware store. But there's a second hand store not far from my house, and all they do is building materials, all right, So go in there, solid core. Steal 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 chop 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 sized door they ordered for fifteen bucks. It's cheaper than a sheet apply wood. So Jim said he had his first stuck case in twenty years. Jim, Yeah, oh yes, coffee coffee cans are every reloader's best friend. That they but Jim dropping dropping the comment. Matter of fact, everybody else is welcome to as well. Like what do you use for case sloop? Personally? I am a I am a full on reading Imperial case sizing wax. Won't use anything else? Yeah, I I use Actually, it's it's mold lubricant. It's called super lube. It's a food save mold lubricant that's water soluble. So after I resize my rifle cases, I just run them back through the wet tumbler and then all of the lube comes off because water soluble works fantastic. I've never had an issue with it. Dickon with my powder and primers. I think it's a job done. That's also why a wet tumble is to get all the case ezing wax off. Mm hmm uh okay. So that's that is my reloading slash metalworking bench in my basement, right, the rude Goldberg machine, the rude Goldberg bench compared to my single stage right. So this is 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 umpster 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 mine, just because it was full of all sorts of solvents and oil and grease and you couldn't really get the bench shop clean anymore. So I just skinned it, called it a day, and then mounted on some two by four and two by six structure. So this Brnity press here is set up for nine milimeter. 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. 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 sets it into that shell plate. And then it will go through all of the stages of the press and make your bullet. So the first stage after it dropping the primer on there, the next time the turk comes up, it's gonna de prime and reform. The outside of the case comes down, prime is 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, Rufe 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 stackicking up and bent into like a little flag shape. I essentially took a piece of one sixteenth welding rod and just bent a little ninety 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 of 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 Shitah, there's shell play. There's powder all over the shell plate because it only takes you know, three or four poles are the lever, and then 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 loads, my training rounds, because they're dummies. There's no primer zom so you might as well use them for something that's true. So to back up one slide, I'm still using my fithful 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 polls 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 a swap dies to go from piece to piece. So what I usually do is I will load usually one hundred or one hundred and fifty at a time, because I've got three fifty round loading blocks, and i will take like fifty of my cases out of the dry tumbler. That way, they've gotten the worst of the carbon, the lead, the dirt, the crap off of them before I put them into my die. Start scratching it up, and I'll run them through and de prime them and resize them. Then I will from there. It kind of depends. Like for five, five six, I also have to. Also have to run it through my primer hocket 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 lube and everything back off of it. Come back to the press, and I will usually go ahead and bellmouth or depending if it's a rifle round, i will 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 prime and all my press, and then I'll load it. But I'm doing. 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 five hundred rounds an. Hour, it's taking me. It's taking me potentially an hour maybe more to make one hundred and fifty rounds. Yeah, that's reasonable. I think I was usually at about one hundred rounds an hour loading on a single stage. Yeah. Now the trick is I can make that same. Like, the only thing that really slows me down is I loading five five, six, 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 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 split in. The neck anyway. But I'm more than likely. Yeah, but I do. And this is this is something I've argued people to death about. I do trim my revolver brass just because trim the revolver brass directly influences how exuberant that factory crimpede is going to 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 into that carbon ring. Two things though, I almost exclusively shoot three to sevens. Out of my revolvers m h 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 second hand, and I thought it was missing most of the components for the for the case feeder. It didn't come with the rod for the primer tube, so I had to ghetto fab one. I didn't know they came with one. I mean, all of my reloading stuff has been bought secondhand, typically except for dives. Yeah. Now, the one thing I did want to point out, although I'll probably hold on too 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 and well. I also have a rock trucker single stage I do all of my long range rounds with. Yeah, all my rifle rounds get done on a single stage, so far do the amount of progressive. I'm telling you it is freaking hard to beat an old school single stage for repeatability. For precision repeatability, I'll tell you right now, the hornity that I have here is really only good to five to seven thousands per case. Overall length with seated bullet five to seven thousands is about where it's at. 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 Holow points the other day, and bruh, you would not believe how much variance in the bullet itself, because like you got to bear. In mind when we talk about about doing rifle loads, we'll get in we'll get into how anal I get about my bullet choice and out of a case. Hopefully I will remember to tell y'all how nonchalant I have gotten about low loading those precision rifle rounds, because I used to get super duper an ortent of about like seating death must be exactly the same. And then I realized the variance I was chasing was not from the candle or to the to the to the bottom of the case. It was from the tip of the bullet. And when you like and when you line up ten 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. I have to I went through, don't use the word problem and don't beat me to the punchline getting off topic. Lord, 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 with a jacket bullet, the jacket does this, the lead goes in this side and the top there is and it wraps. It's the exact opposite for a hollow point. So if what you're measuring from is the candle or which is the is a is you understand this and I understand this like the candlel or is a data is a datum line on the round? Yes, the candle or 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 candlere correct but the very tip of the bullet could be slightly jagged or slightly misaligned because the where the jacket got formed in form could be a couple of thousands off, But it doesn't impact the fact that the candleler is in. The right spot. Yes, so that's why I stopped chasing absolutely to one thousands of a thousand and in picture perfect seating depth. And what I do is that I have a dummy round that I screw my die down until it contacts it die, and I know the candler is going to be in the right spot from that moment for it. And I love all my rounds, and I stop measuring the overall length. Interesting, and you know what that was enough to like cloverly four rounds together one hundred yards. Interesting. Candle ers are all the right height, even though the tips of the bullets. Are a little different. Oh damn it, Stewart's right, I'm thinking about that. The candlelor is where the bullet crimps too. What am I thinking? Then? It's not candlelor? Oh yeah, with the with the tangent point where the it's a bullet, it's a sea word? Is it a sea word? Oh, there's so many words I could think of. A sea word describes. We'll find We'll find it for when we go to the oh Drive. You know what, Steward's gonna have to come on the show, and you are 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 or anyway. Oh, the point stand, The point stands. I understand where you're coming from. So I took middally. We are talking thousands of an inch, Oh we are. We're talking thousands of an inch, and we are talking about percentages of bullet diameter difference and impact at three hundred yards, which is well over the top for most cases purposes. But you know, I took actually a box. I took a thousand bullets of cr matchkings and I selected a random fifty out of there, and I took them to the comparitor at work. Which is essentially what it is is. It's 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 two. Thous Now, let me flip your lid. What I just get to this is so far off topic. We're gonna I'm gonna drop this and then we're gonna stop talking about. We're gonna 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 fifty Serra matchkins. I weighed every last one of them, and from the heaviest to the light is 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 the flight path. But the other thing I did was remember how I said I was measuring off the odive 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 seater or 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 died down and ate the turn at a time until I get the perple. Oh yeah, no, that's no, that's way too that's way too picky. So what I did was, once I discovered this hole, the very tip of the bullet is slightly different in this lot is, I took my die out of the press, I put it upside down in a pad advice. 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 to the face of the dye using my doll calibers. I did that on ten different rounds, and they were within I think one or two thousands 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 base of the bullet to the tip, I was getting five, six, seven thousands different 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 die 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 turn Yeah. That's the one thing I never got into was concentricity and neck turning. I understand it makes a difference. But well, okay, I. We can. You know, we'll get into that when we get into the point were that I was. That's a twenty minute talk on its own. My point is is that I I was chasing ghosts trying. Yes, you were, but I didn't. You were chasing birds on the tip of the bullet. It's really what you were chasing, but I did. I didn't know until I tried. That's no, you don't. And that's that's part of it. Yeah. Anyway, okay, trimming. So two things I wanted a couple of things I wanted to point out here. On the left, that is the perfect amount of ghetto rigg. On the right, yeah, that's perfect. Let me get there. So on one side is my Lineman hand powered case trimmer. That's what I use for my three away Winchester, and that's also what I use for for my revolver rounds, and for the revolver rounds, I trim them one time and once it's once brass is into my into my workflow, I don't go trim it a bunch of times and 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 of foul too short, I'll just put in circulation. It'll be fine, it'll stretch, yeah, But the three oh eight, 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. There's still still selling they do. It's a little one man garage outfit and he makes like three D 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 interesting because it's kind of like a side gig for him, and he 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 three D 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 too. Well. Now this has got to be all weekend, every weekend. Yeah, But what we have here is his tray, and it's kind of the easy thing to say, but there's actually a little plastic collar around the call it, 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 but I think their quarter inch by twenty 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 the air with another hand or fight it or have it ski 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, phill thinking ahead indexible fixturing. Well, that's a high the fixture. 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. If I'm bloading up a bunch of AR fifteen mags, I just bolt the bolt the loader down to the bench and then just you know, freeing it. 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, T tracks are nice. Oh well there's Stuart with TA tracks. Yeah. T tracks are great, and all you have to inset them into the bench. That's fine if you're willing to build a dedicated work bench 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 indexible fixturing 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 cord a drill. It's probably about as old as I am. Oh. Yeah, that came attached to the world the world's finest trimmer. That my dad gave me. Attached to the trimmer. Yeah, that's my dad's old drill and the world's finest tremor that he gave to me because he upgraded to the case. Tremor on his Dylan six fifty. Okay, that's fair that Yeah, So this is one of those moments in time. I mean, now, I'm gonna piss some people off really badly. But I was this close to getting a whole hand me down Diyllan six fifty when he upgraded to a seven to fifty. I turned him down. Why I have no fricking place to put the stupid 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 forty pound? Weise, I don't it's not that big. I have no want to fool around with a progressive your daughter out, I have no it's gonna hit me when she sees me. I have no interest in getting a progressive press, not now and not ever. I could be I could be talked into a turred press at some point, but the truth of matter is that I just I've I have helped my dad set up that progressive press at six fifty, and I understand the seven fifties are supposed to be easier set up. They are. I have him full with his seven fifty he has, but like I've helped him set up that six fifty 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 Dylan five point fifty, okay, manual indexing, Yeah, I kind of like that better than I do a six fifty. But even then, I'd rather I think i'd really rather just get like a Reading T seven. If I if I was gonna upgrade to anything from a rock Chucker, it'd probably be a Reading T seven. I just can't see my rifle rounds. I agree with you for rifle rounds. I agree with you, Brenning T seven, but. For pistol rounds. I just don't like progressive presses 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 one hundred and fifty rounds an hour while you smash five hundred, six hundred and seve hundredrounds an hour out of your progressive presses. I am happy for you. My heart is over is overflowing. But I do not like progressive presses. I don't like setting them up. Hobby, Do you have two freaking many already? No? I I'm asking seriously, how many discreete hobbies would you say you have, of which reloading 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 obligable. Well, it's an obligation. It 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, radios as well, thing all by itself. Yeah, radios do take an awful lot. All right, Let me 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 room. As you people have heard me bitch incessantly about the county that still won't give me the goddamn bermit to build a garage. We're gonna leave that alone for now. You promised me we would stay on topic. I'm trying. I'm trying. It hurts, but I'm trying. I'll let we can let the dog out of it benefit. We can let the dog out the 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 chucker. Is it as consistent as my rock chucker? No, it is not. And I will never try to claim it is. Is it as reliable as a rock chucker? No, it is not. 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 finding a second crotch. Also, she Rachel, the one commenting, wants me to get the fucking lath out of the basement, and that requires a second garage and some large angry friends. Well, it's not that heavy when you take it apart. The heaviest piece is only four hundred pounds, So it's not that nick. Shut up, louck. My hobbies are heavy, many and varied, all right, Not a single one of my hobbies doesn't involve cast iron or lead. Sell deal. But the point being, I can either spend one hundred or ten hours loading a thousand rounds, or I can spend two hours loading a thousand rounds and get to enjoy my other hobbies as well. No, that's fair. I just it, and really pit 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 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 duck, she's gonna shoot my ammo. My dad because I'm not gonna make my dad buy his own AMMO when he only shoots with me, He's just gonna shoot my ammo. He's I want to spend time with my dad, I'm bringing the bullets. I mean, my dad has a seven to fifty, he has plenty of zon Well exactly, that's different. My dad doesn't handload. 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 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 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 and 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. It is on topic because it's reloading. I mean, the press. Look, it gives me a fivefold 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 outstripped my ability to make or purchase AMMO. I can absolutely, even with that progressive press, I can outshoot my ability to produce am oh. I sure could have. I tried, but bear in mind that I do a lot more dry fire than live fire practice. Yeah, I need a mantis h we can make that topic. I know we can, and I know I should have bought one already, but anyway, I bought a breada instead. So yeah, on the air side is a World's Finest trimmer. It's set up for five five six. It's it's awesome. It's actually it's host clamp down to that little one. Buy because I hold clant that down to my bench with a with a. Oh the quick clan, yeah, quickly, a 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 tremmer, 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 candle, like catch the brass shavings. It gets job done. So I also have a World's Finest for my five to five six brass. The only difference between what Phil's doing and what I'm doing is you're using a drug. 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 the cordless Mikita. I will say this much, and Nick might giggle at me, because I'm sure he has man hands and my mechanic hands have kind of worn away from office work. But I personally recommend you keep a keep a glove on hand because usually when I'm trimming five five six brass, it's like five six, seven hundred cases at a whack. I'll just sit there for an afternoon, smokes cigar and just run brass over and over. No, 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, I look, with the corded drill that you've got there, it's probably not gonna be a problem if a glove gets grabbed by that. That drill press I've got is a half horse power 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 things nitro gloves that will tear when you touch them to anything. Anything else. You could lose fingers or lose an arm. Fas 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, just have to live with that, But anyway you might. Hey, you know, everybody has to choose their risk. And for me, ever since I was thirteen, 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 seventeen minutes and forty 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, And 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, was I was gonna say? On? Behind that big old stack of 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 so, but if you're like splitting like tents of a grain, it can be. It might see the electronics, the electronic scales, if you put something above them, it changes their reading because the area 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 fluorescent light on and off affected the scale they're reading on their electronic scale. 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, saying they don't have enough current to mess with that scale. But I did notice that my old house of fluorescent lights would mess with it. Yeah, but once you set the zero with a light on or off, it did not make a difference. But change that light on to off you had to rezero 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 an a window unit and a box van in there. Just like circular the air and keep things moving. 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. It's different air pressure. It is worth pointing out again if the thing of it is is like, if you're shooting minimum loads or even mid loads, the odds of you being a tent of grain higher low affecting your ammunition that big is not that not a huge concern unless you're dealing with something really, really really super fast powder, where two tents of grain might be the difference between minimum and maximum. But if you're so, you're using the wrong powder. But if you're twelve ear that or you're using like tight group. I don't like type group for that reason. I don't like tye 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 that's all. That's it is that kind of like all machines or smoke 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 on the right side of that is a I think that's a Redding powdered trickler, which is literally just something that like if you're if you're loading, if you're loading precision rounds, and you want to make sure that every powder charge is exactly the skame the same, then what I do is I will take and throw 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 thing I have in this picture is a couple of the f w arms dies, which are now owned by Dylan. Like Dylan doesn't own f w FW sold the patent to Dylan. But I've got the the auto centering swage die and the auto centering yeah de priming die. I actually don't use the d priming dye. I haven't since I got it. Stewart's dreamed me out about recently, because I should should be using it, especially after I forcibly resize the flash hoole on a couple pieces of brass. Look, you only do that like four times before you buy twenty spared decapping pins, then never have it happened again. As a matter of fact, I now have twenty spared capping pins sitting in my word in my bench. Like you're gonna 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 dies. But decapping pins are one of the things you're going to break most often. Yes, I mean, well that an 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 a couple, They're usually a couple of bucks. So I usually buy a ten pack for whatever whatever case size I happened to be buying. Since you mentioned crunching casings, I have pictures still floating around somewhere with my daughter when she was like five or six. Maybe she wanted helping. She went, yes, she wanted to help, So she was. She was running the press, and she wasn't paying super close attention to making sure that the case mouth got up into the die 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. 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 this is the last. Yeah, this les slide. So so go ahead and go ahead. You and I have the exact You and I have the exact same wet tumb We do it, we do. But I actually use it a little differently than yours. I don't pre tumble before I before I do anything. I I just dumped them right into the wet Tumblr with a you know, a scoosh of dawn. It's it's don dish slp, squirre to wee b it in. Fill it up full of casings, fill the rest of the world full of water, set it for two hours, walk away, go play some counter strike or whatever the hell you happen to feel like doing, and then run them through the Tumblr 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 deprime them before I run them through my wet tumbler. So a couple of days sitting in front of a fan, at least twenty four hours sitting in front of a fan, and then a couple of 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 I think about where I live, humidity is kind of just a way of life down here, all the humidity. But 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 deep dedicated depriming die 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. 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 dies. And that's two things. First of all, 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 sure to me, I use that first step as an opportunity to like get the case is a little bit cleaner. So I'm exposing myself to a little bit less crap. But I'm also making in fact, you're getting more of that lead in the air with your dry tumbel asshole. Well, it's 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 me not get in there, let me enjoy my fantasy for five minutes without. Tearing it all a hard. I'm trying to help you out, brother. You want less lead in your body, wet. Tumble first, screw it. I'm gonna start a new I'm gonna start a new trend. Let 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 we'll have this whole world back on track shortly. But anyway, Also, it's worth saying that it like your dies, especially your car by dies, do not like dirt and crap getting shoved up into them. So like correar that mine. 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 deep prime brass in dry tumblers because anyone who done at enough times, sooner or later, is going to get a piece of media shoved into that flash hole nice and tight, And if you're not paying really close attention, you're gonna be really pissed off when your flat when when the ignition from that primer cannot get through the piece of corn cop I have. Had steel pins get stuck in de primed five to five six cases. I've had three of those pins get stuck in the primer flashole. I've in a deprimed case. I will admit I've had that happen to be one time, but I have had it happened to be many many more times where I've got corn cob media cops stuck in bin flash holes. Absolutely well, it's it's a semi soft media it's eventually some is going to get jammed in there. So like I said that, that's me. And as far as like wet tumbling, it's a good old LSD. It's fill it up to it's five pounds of brass, my my steel pins. I fill the whole contraption up with scalding hot water up to the brim, put in a one second squirt finally calibrated one second squirt of dawn. And then that bottom right hand picture is a dipper I made to measure out the let Me Shine and that is a nine meal case in safety wire to a spare out rich. You know, I've never used let Me Shine on any of my brass. Let Me Shine is not strictly necessary. If you have really hard water, it can help because I believe that 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 finally calibrated amount of don 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 down. Did you miss the part where Stuart said when I had full autos. No, no, I didn't miss that. I just kind of cry on the inside because I will probably never be able to to have flaws without getting an FFL. Stewart is who I want to be when I grow up, which is which is laughable Texan. Well I'm from Texas. Oh well you're halfway born and you just need to get old. I was born in Texas City, Texas actually the most Texan place on earth. The Texas Eist, texasist. We should put that on the shirt. We should, the Texas theist guy. But yeah, so like that, that's I use LSD and then after I'm done personally, I take a ticke a towel, lay down of the bench, spread out the pins so they could dry, spread out the brass. I let it sit for twenty four hours, and usually I'll make a point of going out there several. Times and like, yeah, mix it up a little. 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 they're primer pocket down, because then it's primer pocket it 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 lin 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 noticed that towel is completely dry, and I mean completely dry, no spots of witness at all, then I'm usually pretty safe to load the cases. Yeah, you know, it's even in Southeast Louisiana humidity. I find twenty four 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, 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 too well, and I want expand next week slightly not just precision rifle, but like let's talk about like load development and load tuning, because like I, I go through this slipping their danger signs for over pressure 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 gonna tell me when it's grumpy, way before the primers do. Like you can feel if you if you're experienced with firearms, and you should not be fooling around with reloading unless you have some farms experience, but like you can feel the bolt and the slide beating on things they're not. Supposed to over. I can tell you this. I have found if you are training for competition shooting, and you're doing say triple tabs, long strings of fire at multiple targets, you can get so focused into what you're doing, into your transitions, into your reloads and 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 you should 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 un extraordinarily think it should we're gonna. I definitely got away from myself with the nine mili loads A couple of times when I was all right, I just mixed in the load development loads with my regular loads and didn't pay attention to it. Agreed, 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 let Me Shine? Have you made rose gold cases yet? I will warn you that if you use let Me Shine, 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 renting it off, your brass. Will turn orange. I've heard benefits never using lemon show. 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 to you've repidly 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 screwed. 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. You the amount of time it would take to leach. Okay, it's leeching 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 colored, that's a good idea. I guarantee you it will. What's going on is you're getting surfa 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 gonna happen in a day. It's not gonna happen in a couple of days. It's probably gonna take a couple of weeks. Citric acid is a weak acid. It's not gonna 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 where 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 us stripper. That's also well, some of them are acid, 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 lemaschine ever would be in any concentrated amount they're going to sell you. That makes sense to me. Yeah, look, you can. We use products in my industry like lemaschine and other different stripping chemicals and different acids. 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. I'll have to look up the difference between citric acid and muratic acid as far as the acidity level of it, but I think one point five muratic acid is strong enough to give you a chemical burner skill. You can drink lemaschine, 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 and miradic 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 hour and a half, we're two and a half minutes over. Close enough, close enough? Okay, Well we're gonna go 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 book and probably wouldn't hurt to also bring a reloading manual. I have a couple. Yeah, well, we'll try to be I mean, I thought we did a pretty good job of me We're gonna need sharpies. 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. But next next time we need bring notes. We did not address the potassium nitrate shortage. For those of you that don't know, fassium nitrate is not manufactured much in the US. And this is what happens when you import a lot of your explosives from overseas, and your 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'll do that called. Also, copper is up thirty 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 pan exel you. If you need some, buy some before the price goes up, because it's probably not gonna 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 in order tomorrow. But let's go ahead and pump 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 dot com and hit the contact form and leave us 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 cast 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,