Reloading thread

IIA vests from the 70s were and are a fucking joke.

Yep. You need velocity / energy, material properties, and geometry on your side.

I'd take a 10mm auto, make a 135 grain spire point cast round, and try to drive it with a swampfox load at around 1700-1800 fps from a longslide.

The only elephants that are legally hunted are those that are old/trending towards being sickly/not breeding anymore. The sole reason that elephants (and other wild African game) are protected to the extent that they are today is that people pay thousands and thousands of dollars to hunt the older ones. This money allows nature sanctuaries/reserves to exist in perpetuity and keeps poachers from driving some species to extinction.

In addition, when viable (i.e., an edible animal), the meat from kills on these nature/game reserves goes to feed local villages. Literally everything about the cycle is positive.

Solid copper standard pressure ammo wrecks them. Solid copper loadings in magnum rounds like 10mm / .357 wreck kevlar 3a.

Ps, nobody should underestimate how common 3a and level 2 kevlar armor is.

Polyethylene armor is a scary threat. The old ways of loading solid copper rounds to smoking hot velocities dont seem to work on this stuff.

Theres a video of a 40 dollar polyethylene 3a panel stopping a 500 magnum solid copper HP (275 grain at 1660).

youtu.be/lWEn5ufEWZM

Enough polyethylene (rifle plate amounts, more then half an inch of the stuff) can stop even m193 and other high velocity threats. It seems like bullet hardness is the only way to beat this material. It still cant stop m2ap no matter what, and most of the shittier polyethylene rifle plates can be defeated by m855 meme-tip ammo.

Theres no good pistol projectiles out there for defeating this stuff. I challenge you to name a handload recipe that would smoke this armor.

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>Literally everything about the cycle is positive.
Except for the fact that elephants are extremely intelligent and complex creatures. I care about the elephants a hell of a lot more than I care about the rich dentists and lawyers who kill them for sport.

read Elephant Bill

shit's dope

Aliens kill your grandpa for sport.
>he was old though

Misanthropic fag.

This. Even if you struggle with the idea of saying that elephants experience human-equivalent emotions, elephants unequivocally display behaviors that appear to be mourning and have tightly knit family units. They even fucking return to a place where a friendly elephant died years later. How can you fucking justify hunting creatures like that for sport in any circumstance? It's completely fucking amoral by any reasonable standard. Even if you're a moral relativist fag, you have to admit that you are causing harm to a creature whose family will recognize that it is dead and fucking mourn it. That's actually evil when you do it purely for your own gratification.

Don't get me wrong, I'm fine with hunting animals of lower order intelligence like deer. An elephant is just too smart to make it justifiable as sport.

It's true that animals are a lot easier to like than most people, but also just fuck those people on a moral level. It's indefensible to be a rich dude paying money to hunt an intelligent creature for shits and giggles. Solve your mid life crisis in another way.

BOYS

THE ATF RULING ON ARMOR PIERCING AMMO ONLY FORBIDS DEPLETED URANIUM BULLETS, NOT UN-DEPLETED URANIUM BULLETS!

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What's your favorite handload?

What's your most unique handload?

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Is there anywhere where a Jow Forumsommando can get m80a1 / m855a1 pulls?

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What dollar amount of equipment do you realistically need to get into reloading 5.56? Excluding per round costs like powder, primers, bullets.

About 100. I started with a Lee hand press kit. It isn't super fast but it's good for a first foray into loading.
That's 53 on midway. 35 for a set of Lee dies. 25 for a pocket scale.

Are there any other extremely basic maybe tools that escaped notice from that list? Assume I have screwdrivers and wrenches and shit like that, but other than that nothing. Is that still everything?

A separate hand priming tool is nice. The kit comes with all the other tooling you need.

Thanks mate. How do you clean your brass? Seen some people using water/vinegar solutions with salt and soap. Good enough?

Double posting. 5.56 is kind of tedious to load if you aren't doing it for performance reasons. Steel case is so cheap these days that there isn't much savings in loading blasting ammo.

I use a dry media tumbler. A liquid solution works too though. Doesn't shine up cases, but it removes all the residue before you load.

I do think it'd be fun to eventually develop a precision hand load for my individual rifle, but yeah, for the most part it's about savings. That said, I think I'd still rather get any savings I can while also avoiding shooting dirty ass steel even if the savings are minimal. I also could use a new hobby.
A tumbler just doesn't seem to be a viable option for me living in an apartment unit unfortunately, but maybe I'm misunderstanding how they work. Isn't just cleaning them good enough anyway? Or is there a substantial gain from having actually polished brass?

Just remembered too. If you're loading military brass you need a crimp removal tool. There's a couple of different types.

There's no gains to a polished case other than aesthetics. As long as there isn't residue on the outside to interfere with the sizing die then it's good.

Awesome, thanks again.

Doesn’t matter. We are top dog in the universe. All life is below us and belongs to us. Cry more faggot

>We are top dog in the universe
This is one of the most laughably stupid things I've ever seen in Jow Forums. I get that you're just trying to be the epic trolling man, but if you had the slightest actual conception of the implications of what you've said, even you would have realized that it was so stupid that it would be unbecoming.

Bumping for personal interest

hey guys. recently got into reloading and messed up some of my 9mm reloads. they are all seated to the same depth, and even after 10 mins of hard blows with my impact bullet puller, 3 of them have only slightly budged (the other 4 were fine tho). wat do?

Holy fuck how much of a beta are you? Maybe we should start hunting faggots like you instead of elephants.

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>Maybe we should start hunting faggots like you instead of elephants.
God I fucking wish you would. Better men than you have tried.

300 dollars for a usable set up

Hit them harder

Stopping a 500 magum is easy. It's a large and relatively slow bullet, exactly the opposite of what you want for armor penetration.

>bullet hardness
Hardness is good and all, but sectional density and velocity are far more important.

>How can you fucking justify hunting creatures like that for sport in any circumstance?

Because those being hunted (legally, anyway) are old animals about to die anyway; they have already passed on their genes to their offspring. Better to die from a hunter's bullet than starvation when their teeth don't work anymore.

Furthermore, the massive cost of the trophy fee (which can be tens or even hundreds of 1000's) does a massive amount of good in the poor regions where the hunting occurs.

Now if you're talking about improperly managed hunting, aka illegal poaching, then I totally agree with you.

>favorite handload
577 snider: 2 grains 4F to ensure ignition, topped with 80 grains 1.5F, two nitro cards, and a 700 grain flat-nose slug.

>most unique handload
for a .357 magnum smoothbore pistol (yes, it's form 1ed)
.357 Supermag brass, 1/2 oz #11 shot with a round ball on top.

I've seen 'em on gunbroker.
I'd also check the usual spots for oddball surplus like CVDS/ Big Sky Surplus.

You will almost never save money by handloading for a common caliber like 556 or 9mm.
Cost savings are for obscure or expensive calibers. Otherwise, get into handloading because you enjoy the hobby, or because you're making precision ammo tuned for your gun (which is certainly doable, but never cheap)

Cheaper than factory precision loads though, right?

Yeah, once you have your gear your ongoing cost is only powder, bullets, and primers and thats far cheaper than factory match ammo.

Are you incapable of observation? Did you not catch OP was talking about a specific caliber?

OP specified a given bullet. OP said nothing about the caliber; there are many rifle calibers which could take those projos. OP also didn't specify a barrel length.

>IIA
Hot 9mm NATO will defeat those.
>both sides
Which makes it more-or-less equal to a IIIA vest, still not particularly impressive. There's plenty of legally not-AP bullets readily available (both as components and in loaded ammo) that will defeat IIIA soft armor. e.g. Lehigh's 65 grain Xtreme Defense.

The interesting thing would be defeating level III plates without one of the AP-banned substances, to wit
>one or a combination of tungsten alloys, steel, iron, brass, bronze, beryllium copper, or depleted uranium
(Aside from the rules-lawyer "tungsten carbide is a ceramic, not an alloy" approach...)
I've heard claims about pewter's AP properties, but nothing specific to hard armor, and in fact I suspect it has nothing to offer here, because a cursory search turns up tensile strengths well below drawn copper rod. I expect that bullet defeated IIIA-ish due to a combination of low weight (230gr of lead = 155gr-180gr depending what pewter) resulting in higher velocity, and probably being loaded pissing hot. A 160gr-ish linotype bullet loaded to the same velocity would probably have done much the same, while running lower pressure because taking up less volume in the case.
May be possible to get higher strengths out of pewter by cold-working (e.g. drawing them into rod, and machining bullets, as is done with copper) or other means, but as-cast they seem to fall in the same range as hard lead alloys, pic related (note "412 metal" is linotype), but without the density.

Honestly, if I had to use readily-available metals to make a hard-armor-penetrating bullet, I'd be more inclined to play with titanium or high-strength aluminum alloys (7075 or maybe 7086), and go with long penetrators (whether drag-stabilized or CETME-style) to make up for their lightness, rather than yet another middling-density, low-strength material. But I'm open to hear any results that suggest pewter does have something unique to offer.

>I've heard claims about pewter's AP properties
The only "AP" property that pewter has is that it's harder than pure lead, but that's not saying much.

>A 160gr-ish linotype bullet loaded to the same velocity would probably have done much the same
exactly.

I'm not sure where you read about pewter's AP properties from, but I'm guessing it must have been an old source, or perhaps from a source that wasn't well informed on bullet casting.

Name a time and a place. Plenty of anons here would engage in a consensual hunt of the most dangerous game.

>relatively slow

That load maybe. A normal load is about 1900 fps.

Big sky surplus is down

Fast for a pistol round, but still slow in the general scheme of things when it comes to piercing armor.

They changed their name to CVDS or something similar. Combat Veterans Disabled Surplus or something like that? Maybe it was CDVS?

American reloading gets some every now and then.

My CCW ammo is .454 Casull loaded with 185gr Z-max at 2300 fps and is my absolute favorite.

I also took a 225gr Xtreme Penetrator meant for .450 Bushmaster and loaded it into a .45 Colt case for the same gun, but it's so long that I can only fit 10gr of powder into it and get it moving a solid 1000 fps. Should go through literally any living thing either way.

M855A1 could easily beat that, and that's the current army issue ammo.

We keep one of practically every other animal on this planet in a cage for our own entertainment.
If that's not being on top of this world than I don't know what is.

Here's my method if you're not extremely concerned with accuracy.
>remove die from press
>insert round and push the lever down
>top half of the bullet should be peeking over the die slot
>grip the bullet with a pair of wire cutters making sure not to grip so hard that you deform the bullet
>use the lever to bring the round back down
The cutters should brace against the die slot and let you pull it fairly easily. I've done about 50 like this and at lest 40 of the bullets were still usable with hollow point ammo. It's 100 times easier with fmj because there's no cavity to allow for give.

So I'm thinking about outgrowing my Lee Loader and upgrading to a hand press... but idk what dies to get. having never bought them.

Really what's the difference between Lee dies and a brand like RCBS at 2-3x the cost? Can I use different brands dies in a different brands press? What should I be looking for in dies?

Follow-up for you fags loading 45-70, what dies are you using?

Rcbs dies wear fast

What about molybdenum carbide?

Take the grubpill

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"Why not home brew some nice and hot .22tcm9r? You get preformed brass, you can buy tons of different molds for .224 bullets, cast them in hard lead, chuck em in a lathe, run a drill bit most of the way through them and screw a 3 or 4mm 316ss grub screw into the base. Then you get normal looking .22tcm9r you can keep on hand, and noones the wiser till you gotta slot some floppies. None of these pistol rounds sre going to punch through anything at distance, so it doesnt matter if your rounds dump energy after 50yds, if theyre smoking hot out of the barrel.

.22tcm brass save you have the trouble trying to homebrew a 3dp sabot, or fuck around with shortening/sectioning fmj's."

"You're loading sabots, just do what that one meme user says in all these threads and load a 6mm hardened tool steel, cone point grub screw. No need to worry about the bore"

"You could potentially use 304SS allen key grub screws (can find them in a cone point, although its usually a 90*), and literally thread then in to a shortened 9x19 fmj. The 304SS grub screws have a rockwell b hardness of around 70, whereas nickel is about 64, and are only slightly less dense than nickel.

The grub screw can be longer and seat deeper into the case, like belgian paralight rounds, increasing sd of the penetrator. That would cost some case capacity, which could be made up for by having a projectile with a shorter oal under the crimp. Or use 9x21 or 9x23 brass and keep 9x19's oal, ala 960rowland."

Here's a few interesting posts from the last few threads.

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>Plenty of us gentleman will naruto run across the area 51 border line.

No you fucking won't