What did you do at your reloading bench today?

[rickhem]

I cranked out 100 rounds of .38 Special ammo. I loaded the Zero 148 HBWC over 2.6 grains of Bullseye. Cases are some WW brass with the Federal #100 small pistol primers.
These are intended to be my target loads, but they may see some use for getting my GF shooting some of my revolvers a bit. Low recoil, very accurate, and no trying to find all the brass, it stays in the gun. Nice!

[DsGrouse]

Unpacked all my ebay, facebook market place and cast boolits orfers.

I've got quite a few new swaging die set ups, along with 4 new presses.

200lbs of pure leas for swaging.

Now i need to get the used swaging dies cleaned and boxed,the new ones, wrapped and boxed

[DsGrouse]

Got some help fixing up an old CH tool and die press. I wanted a universal shell holder so I can use this little press for crimping.

Dropped off my new Sea Grit press and a new style of point form die at a machinist shop. He's going to machine me a couple of adapters so I can use these dies on RCE presses.

[Vaquero]

I did a small test batch of 30-30 using a 150gr Speer and some H335. When I got the big batch of 265's the other day I saw on the bottle some data for those. So I looked it up and it was under max so I rolled 5 and got some excellent results. Noticed the 30-30 load, also and it's around 2300 fps so not a max. I found 7 pieces of brass already primed, so I rolled those to see. The one rifle that is scoped will be our tester. It generally shoots 170's better so we'll see.

20250718_163811.jpg (2.01 MiB) Viewed 915 times

RP

[JVogler]

Loaded 50 large rifle primers into 7.62x 39 brass shells with my Lee breech lock press and the Lee ram prime. It's a slow process priming but it is smooth and precise.

[DsGrouse]

Primed 300 30-30, 100 38-55, and 100 375 win.

[Vaquero]

Primed 300 30-30, 100 38-55, and 100 375 win.

Ooooh, 38-55 long or short brass?
Whatcha shooting through, if ya don't mind me asking??
I have a Marlin Cowboy.

RP

[DsGrouse]

Primed 300 30-30, 100 38-55, and 100 375 win.

Ooooh, 38-55 long or short brass?
Whatcha shooting through, if ya don't mind me asking??
I have a Marlin Cowboy.

RP

38-55 Short. I sent a new Ruger Marlin 336 to Jes Reboring. He recommended doing a three groove in 375 Win. I'll use the 375 Win brass for supers and 38-55 shorts for the heavy subsonics. I plan on trying to run 300-grain bullets at subsonic levels. To stabilize that heavy, long bullet, we went with a 1-12 twist from the 375 H&H. He normally puts a 1-15 twist.

I'm waiting for it to come back.

This is the thread on that marlin 336
https://henryrifleforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=16996

[The Happy Kaboomer]

Nothing............

[rickhem]

I loaded up 25 rounds of 6.8 SPC-II for my final confirmation test, after going through a couple ladder tests. These are loaded with the Speer 90 TNT bullet over a charge of Reloader 7 powder. This should give me just short of 2900 fps in my 18" barrel.
The big deal is that my rifle has the 6.8 SPC-II chamber, and only the original 6.8 SPC chamber is SAAMI certified. The SPC-II is a bit different, in that it has what I'll simplify as an extended chamber. There's more to it, but in short, it allows a round to be loaded longer, and that gives a bit more room for powder, and the charges for the SPC-II chamber frequently go past the published data for the shorter SPC chamber.
So what I'm finding in my rifle, is that I'm not quite at the charge weights that others find optimal, but I'm getting well under MOA at 100 yards with a few loads surrounding this confirmation load. If this works out, I'll have a load that can deliver that kind of performance, even when the charge weight varies by a couple tenths of a grain over or under my targeted charge weight. That means just throwing charges is fine, and it'll make loading much quicker.
The target will be my decider though, and I'll see how that looks in the next couple weeks.