300 Win Mag - Getting started with reloading

alright folks welcome back it is finally time to jump in to the 300 Winchester Magnum today's video we're going to you know we're gonna be having a look at our new Thompson Center compass bolt-action rifle that's gonna be our test platform we're going to talk about all of the crap that we had to buy for reloading we're gonna go through the process of reloading and then we're gonna hit the range and see how it shoots now I can't really get started until I tell you guys how this all began I was doing a live stream a couple months ago I think it was in September one of my awesome viewers did a super chat donation and said that he wanted to see 300 Winchester Magnum and then somebody else jumped on and added some more money and before we knew it they're right there in that live stream enough donations rolled in to pay for the gun and the stuff I needed to reload for it so I kind of got forced into this I live in Kentucky I have absolutely no use for a 300 Winchester Magnum it's just way too much gun for the hunting and shoot and I need to do nevertheless I'm pretty excited about it this is my first experience with a belted Magnum and I think it's gonna be a lot of fun now we've had a lot of projects going on around here and I've had some other things you know going on so it has been three or four months since I bought the gun you know right after that live stream but I did at least warn them at the time that it was going to be a while it was always going to be a while so here's a really crappy look at the gun we'll get a much better look at it once we're outside on the range but it's a Thompson Center compass just like my 6.5 Creedmoor that we've been shooting here on the channel that's been such a great performer that's why we went with the Thompson Center it also gives me the opportunity to evaluate another cartridge on this platform because since the 6.5 Creedmoor has been so good some of my viewers have been buying the rifle in other calibers and not having a great time with it I remember one email in particular a guy had bought it in the little lab with a 204 Ruger and he was having all sorts of problems couldn't get it to shoot the throat was a mile long and things just weren't going well for him I think I heard a similar story from someone who had bought it in 308 and they were having problems getting it to shoot so I've never really known whether the success with the 6.5 Creedmoor they simply due to the inherent accuracy of that cartridge and they happen to be chambering it pretty good or whether the Thomson stare compass is just awesome can shoot anything right so this did this just gives us a second look at the platform I can tell you already I'm having some problems here in this video we are not going to shoot the first shots I shot the first I shot 20 rounds through this gun like I don't know six or eight weeks ago whenever I was filming the update video for the Creedmoor compass I thought during that video while I'm showing off a 1500 round update for that gun I would introduce this gun go ahead and shoot the first few rounds through it and see how it did well I ended up cutting that section out of the video for one reason the video was over an hour long but a bigger reason was the groups with this gun sucked oh god they were awful two to three-inch groups and I wanted the opportunity to investigate the matter put some more rounds through it maybe do some hand loading before I you know put that crappy performance out there so we might be getting into a mess this might be the start of an epic tire fire I don't know but the compass itself this is a 24 inch barrel which you can't see the end of but it's it's that way it does have a threaded muzzle like all of the compasses which is pretty awesome because I like shooting with a suppressor I shoot a lot I've got neighbors I try to keep the noise down as much as I can so that's a huge bonus for the compass in my book the twist rate is a one in ten twist so we should be able to shoot up to the heavy crap as far as I know my research into the cartridge thus far seemed to indicate that the one in ten twist is good good enough for the super heavy stuff I've got a set of Weaver Lowe skeleton rings these are pretty inexpensive rings and the scope I threw on it is a six to twenty-four vortex Viper PST gen one this just happened to be the scope that wasn't currently sitting on a rifle I've got three different 24 power scopes that just kind of get moved around here on the channel to whatever we happen to be shooting at the time this is the one that was available so it's on there now one thing I've done that I'm not going to cover in this video I went ahead and adjusted the trigger like I did in the Creedmoor update video so I've covered the trigger adjustment so much in that series it seems kind of redundant to do it all again so if the triggers are exactly the same if you see how its adjusted the original compass video and the update compass video covers that pretty thoroughly and I'll throw links up here like if you need to bail out and go watch those first there should be a little pop-up happening in the top right hand corner I'll also have links at the end of the video as well that cover I think that pretty much covers like what we need to talk about with the gun right now one more thing I should mention is I had to buy another magazine for this 300 Winchester Magnum the one that came with it is all screwed up there's this little let me show you on the good one here's what one's supposed to look like there's this little spring-loaded paddle that gets compressed as you load the rounds and for some reason this one it feels like it's hung up on something but I don't think it is it's no longer working I believe these are like glued together so I don't think I couldn't get it apart to really work on it but the good news is the magazines aren't crazy expensive I don't remember exactly what I paid I probably should have looked that up I think it was around twenty to twenty-five dollars so I probably could have gotten with thompson/center and had them send me a new one and maybe I'll still do that at some point but it just seemed like a hassle I didn't want to deal with so I just bought him another one so let's move on to the reloading components and talk those through a little bit first of all primers that's an easy one I picked up the CCI 250 s the Magnum large rifle primers and the choice was easy because this is the only one that was available locally and I didn't feel like paying a hazmat charge so hey this is what I could get but honestly I probably would have went with these anyway my normal viewers will know I'm a huge fan of CCI primers we shoot him in probably 80% of the videos on this channel so I've got pretty high confidence that we're gonna be okay there with primers oh I should have mentioned I did pick up some factory ammo and that's one I've already shot in the gun that shot super crappy here was the first one this is 165 grain PPU it's a soft point boattail these were pretty inexpensive so I figured this might kind of cover the inexpensive side of things next is the Hornady American whitetail that uses the 180 grain interlock bullet pretty solid deer hunting round you'd think so I figured we'd try those and I got a box of the Hornady precision hunter that uses the two granny l DX so a 165 a 180 and 200 in some Factory ammo I thought that would let us cover the meat of the bullet weight range and see how they did now on the bullet side of things I haven't bought any bullets at all that are specific for this project because I've got 30 caliber bullets running out of my ears these are actually the five these are the five options we're gonna load up and test with today the heaviest is the 220 grain sierra matchking i've got a bunch of these because this was my favorite most accurate bullet to shoot and 300 blackout subsonics so I bought a bunch I'm hoping we can get him to shoot well in the wind mag next is the 208 grain Hornady eld match same deal I had these laying around from 300 blackout subsonic testing next is the 185 grain Berger hybrid target I've got a couple boxes of these I bought them to shoot in 308 and we're still going to shoot him in 308 but we're also going to shoot a few here in the wind mag today next is the 175 grain sierra matchking a little bit lighter bullet by all accounts this is a spectacular bullet and the last is the 168 grain gold dot the spear gold dot this is the heaviest option that Spirit is offering in the gold dot line I've been shooting these bullets in six point five millimeter and 22 caliber and some other cartridges they seem to be really really excellent shooting bullets so I thought this might be a good light option for the 300 Win Mag alright so on the powder side of things let's start with Hodgdon a couple of these I already owned mainly for 6.5 Creedmoor age 43 50 and age 48 31 SC we're actually going to be shooting age 43 50 with 175 greenseer match King today it shows up in a whole lot of load data sources with the lighter bullets for this cartridge but the one I bought specifically for this project is Hodgdon H 1000 this seems to be an incredibly popular powder so I've actually got a couple pounds of it it's one thing about these huge charge weights well compared to what I normally shoot they're huge but you know charge weights up near 80 grains at times pound of powder is gonna go pretty quick we're gonna shoot h1000 with the 185 greenberger hybrid target today but I think H 1000 would be a decent choice all the way up to the what 220 grain match King the heaviest bullet we're going to shoot today so seems like a pretty flexible option here in the wind man now on the Alliance side of things we've got reloader 22 23 26 and power Pro 4000m our rear loader 26 gets incredible velocities in 6.5 Creedmoor and it shows up here in the wind mag load data with some pretty awesome velocities as well we're going to shoot this with two different bullets today the lightest bullet 168 green gold dot we're gonna use this and the heaviest bullet the 220 grain sierra matchking we're going to shoot them both with three loader 26 reloaded 23 a little bit faster burning than 26 I believe but still right in the good spot here for the for the wind mag we're going to shoot reloader 23 with the 208 grain eld match reloader 23 is kind of like reloader 16 if you're familiar with reloader 16 like it's supposed to be a very temperature stable powder so I'll be pleased if we get good performance with reloader 23 just for that reason and I think reload of 22 is kind of close but it's gonna be a little bit more temperature sensitive kind of like you hear people complaining about reload or 15 reloader 17 I think when you load a 19:22 is kind of in the same boat from what I read so we're not shooting it today but it's it'll be a great powder for this cartridge and you'll see it pretty soon yeah and last up 4,000 mr I've had good luck with the entire Alliant Power Pro Series from 300 MP to 2,000 a more to power probe varmint so I'm hoping 4000 mr will be a good choice in the 300 Win Mag the only other one I've got to show you here is some video very in 160 there are some slower burning video vory options that I want to get a hold of for the wind mag but in 160 should work fine especially with lighter bullets we're not shooting it today but it'll show up here pretty soon in a future video the most difficult choice when I was buying components for this cartridge was brass I ended up going with Hornady about a hundred piece of Hornady brass but no matter what brass you talk about it seems there is all sorts of reports of it being terrible it's like there's no really good 300 Winchester Magnum brass there is an extremely expensive option I think it was Norma but I just didn't want to shell out the cash so we went with the Hornady and I'm hoping for the best here we'll see how it goes another good thing about Hornady is that I just bought 40 rounds of Hornady factory ammo so we can recover that brass so we've really got 140 pieces to work with and like I mentioned I've already fired 20 pieces through the gun so the brass from those shots I've gone ahead and cleaned them up and they're gonna be ready to load here in this video so we've got some once fired brass to look at and make comparisons with and all of that stuff so Hornady is gonna be what we're primarily shooting for the time being so I guess next I need to go through the dies and stuff that I got so let me switch camera angles for that I think that's the first thing I should mention is I did pick up a loading tray now what I've been using in other cartridges are the are the Frankfurt Arsenal perfect fit reloading trays like here's a number for that I use for 6.5 Grindle I really like these loading trays that have a nice fit so I definitely wanted one for the 300 Winchester Magnum but I was ordering from Midway and they don't sell that much Frankfurt Arsenal stuff what they've got is this national metallic brand and if you look it's like all of the exact same stuff as Frankfurt Arsenal so I don't know if they I don't know what the deal is between Midway and Frankfurt Arsenal but they've got knock offs or rebranded or differently branded stuff that looks exactly the same it's the same with like ammo boxes ooh speaking of that I need to go I bought some ammo boxes as well but I went with this national metallic brand you can see right there 300 Win Mag the fit yeah it's not bad I guess I guess you got to make room for the belt so it can't quite be as tight as some other cartridges are and just look at that I can't wait to start playing around with this beast yeah lost my train of thought yeah so we've got a nice loading tray let me go grab those ammo boxes before I forget alright here we go I went with the MTM cases dude all that crap out of there see how a piece of brass fits yep pretty straightforward stuff this is the MTM or 50 our 50 series magnum rifle so that should do a fine job and I did get two of them what is wrong with the color on my camera it's all freaky looking all right there we go my the white balance setting on my camera got all jacked up alright so as far as a bullet seating guy goes I'm actually going to use the die from my yeah from this kit from my 308 Winchester Hornady custom grade set their custom grade seeding dies are universal buy caliber this neck portion right here which this case hasn't been resized so a little bit tight in there right now but once it's resized it won't be that's the only part that makes contact so there's no difference in the dies i've got the micro just adjustment thingy here this is a great upgrade to this die and i've also got so it's got the seating stem that came with it and I've also got a seating stem that's specifically for the eld X bullets and this should give a better fit for most of our high ballistic coefficient bullets vld bullets that sort of junk that should help so that's bull of seating pretty straightforward there now on the resizing side of things things get a little bit more complicated I ended up buying this this is the thriller win mag match grade full-size die this is a fooling sizing die that uses they call it at the neck so let me pop this guy out real quick there's our decapping rod and you can see this thing's got this like c-clip sort of retention going on here and it's a loose and wobbly fit which is a good thing right we want this to be able to self Center and find that flash hole to pop out the primers you'll notice right now that it does not have an expander ball but this screws off and the die actually does come with a normal expander ball this is going to take a little bit of thought and some experimentation I think I think we we need to not use an expander ball here since this is a collet died and actually so here's the main so here's the main die bar down and there is the collet if we turn it and smack it nothing comes out because there's no call it in there I'm an idiot when you buy this die it does not come with any call it so I picked up two different Collins there you get match-grade bushing so that is a point three three two inch and a point three three three inch so let me grab the the point three three two guy and we'll have a look at it there you go you see it says 0.332 on it so this is what you know you know at the top of the press stroke that's this guy right here is what's going to resize that neck the neck goes up up in there and it sets the outer diameter of the neck now what I'm thinking is okay so we got just the right call it that gives us the neck tension we want and we're gonna talk more about that here in just a minute but okay so we've got the right collet that gives us the neck tension we want why would we want to drag an expander ball through it to open it back up you know we've already kind of said it the way we want it so it's nice they include one but I don't think at first you know if we choose our collet properly I don't think we need it now this is my first experience with a collet die of any sort and what I'm wondering is okay let's say that crush the mouth of one of my cases I step on it or something before I get it picked up and it gets pinched a little bit no big deal that should I learn right out during resizing normally right expander through there spreads it right out but I don't think pushing it up into a collet would necessarily iron out all of those issues so maybe that's what that's for maybe if you got one that's out of round or needs a little bit more attention to get back to being round you put on your expander ball run it through to iron out the problems then take off the expander ball and then run it one more time to let the call it do its job I don't know I didn't really research this or read the instructions or anything I probably should have well I've read the instructions briefly it didn't seem to cover it now the problem is these stupid Kaulitz are twenty bucks a pop freaking crazy so I did a little bit of math and decided to go with the three thirty-two and the three thirty three I'll go ahead and tell you I chose poorly we'll cover it here in just a min but I'm gonna be buying some more Kaulitz at least one more but the guidelines on how to choose a collet are that you take a round like here is a piece of the Hornady precision hunter now luckily we're using Hornady brass so the odds are good that the the neck thickness here is gonna be the same as the big old bag of brass I bought now if I switched brands and let's say that the neck thickness is 1 or mm thinner that's going to need a completely different Colin so here's how they tell you to choose your call it we take some measurements around the neck let's see there's a 335 335 334 5 334 5 all right let's call it 335 now the instructions right here bushing size it says measure the outside dam but diameter of your loaded cartridge subtract 2 to 3 thousandths from the neck diameter to determine bushing size so we started with 335 so if we subtract - that's a 333 and if we subtract 3 it's a 332 so it looks like I made the right choice we'll come back to this because I think I might need a 331 in the end but we'll talk more about it here in just a little bit so here's our 332 to install it you just drop it down with the writing pointing towards you there it went down in there we I should take off the expander put this guy back on there's that now this guy just screws down in there and here this is how you adjust the depth of the depth of your decapping pin actually that guy might need to go just a smidgen lower but I think it's okay but yeah screw it we're here we got the camera rolling might as well loosen that one and then screw that one down and then tighten that one back up and it's out a little bit farther now so it seems like a really nicely made I like the knurling it's just beautiful I really liked the decapping pin that's got some wiggle to it and I'm hoping this is going to do a nice job for us so there's the part number 0 4 6 2 4 0 and don't forget it does not come with any Kaulitz now the same fine gentlemen that recommended that I go with that die actually bought this for me he's one of my supporters over on patreon he just got in touch and said hey I want to send you this this is an additional sizing die I'm trying to remember exactly what he calls it what the guy calls it this is the company innovative technologies the website is Larry Willis com what this dye does is provide additional sizing right here above the belt because apparently a standard sizing die just doesn't do a good job right there in that section above the belt and that will grow over a couple firings and eventually you won't be able to get your boat closed and your standard fulling sizing die isn't enough to get it isn't enough to get additional firings out of it so this is a curious little die so it's got this guy that just goes up inside of there this actually goes in your reloading press upside down this is on the bottom what you do is you take your case that you're fooling three sighs at first with a standard fulling sizing die and then actually what you do one side of this the top side acts as a case gage so if we drop this down in here this case has not been resized but you can see how it's not going all the way down in that means this portion is too big now the fully sizing die is going to take out some of that so after we do that we'll need to use this gage to find out whether we need to use this die to size that area further let me grab a new piece of brass all right here's a new piece and you can see it drops right down in even has a little bit of wiggle room which is what you'd expect right from a new piece of brass now I'm going to use the new piece here to demonstrate this because it might be hard to get this off of the pre piece that hasn't been resized but let's say this is a piece we just resized and we want to reduce the diameter right there above the belt a little bit you take the collet you slide it over the case and you push this down until it's touching the belt then you put this in the shell holder in the press just like normal and the die is installed above it and it goes up in there it squeezes this this collet and it just kind of squeezes right there around that belt so this is going to be extremely useful and I really appreciate Eric picking this up for me I think this is going to save us a lot of money on brass because apparently this is such a problem I mean a lot of people only get a couple firings out of their 300 Win Mag brass before because that you know because of this issue so over on the Larry Willis website they claim you can get 8 million firings out of a piece of brass when using this not really but you know you can get a whole lot more firings so this should be a good thing it's not cheap I think it was a hundred bucks let me look that up real quick that seems high yep it damn sure is is 96 dollars and 95 cents so yeah not cheap we're gonna need to get a whole lot more firings out of some brass before this pays for itself but it's certainly a very neat idea and thanks again to Eric for picking this up for me tell you what you guys that already shoot 300 Winchester Magnum now let me know how big of a problem this is do you only get two or three firings out of your brass due to the size above the belt thinking maybe we'll do a bit of a test here maybe some brass will use it and other brass we won't and we'll see how many firings we get in the compass before we absolutely need it I don't know we'll see how it goes and the other thing I picked up was a shell holder this is the RCBS shell holder number four I completely forgot to buy a frickin shell holder I actually sat down to start filming this video the day before yesterday got everything like the whole spread set out fresh battery in the camera and then I realized I don't have a shell holder for some reason I just I'm the worst about forgetting a shell holder on the equipment list this is an RCBS number four this was the only one I could find locally should be just fine but I kind of like it annoys me that they don't put the number like where everybody else puts the number like this is a Redding and has the number right there but then again at least they're nice enough to put RCBS on it so I could remember what brand it is so yeah don't don't forget to order a shoulder I need to get like a Forster coax press that doesn't use shell holders right then I never have to worry about it alright anything else I don't think so I think everything else is pretty pretty much standard stuff we will be using the Hornady headspace comparator kit the 300 Winchester Magnum uses the e 420 there's a pot joke in here somewhere but we're gonna pass it by but yeah this is you know goes down sits on the shoulder helps you measure your your headspace so we're gonna be making use of that quite a bit and also the Hornady bullet comparator which is over here actually on these calipers this is of course the 30 the 30 caliber one and that allows you to measure like this from cartridge base to the ogive of the bullet which gives you a more accurate and repeatable result than measuring to the tip tips bullets like this Hornady LDX are generally pretty uniform but things like our CR match King or the Berger hybrid target that have a little hollow point sometimes those are irregular and you'll get overall length readings that vary a bit so the bullet comparator gives a more consistent reading overall alright let's see anything else I don't think so I think we're ready to get reloading so let's start out by looking at the brass I have fired most of what I've got is the Hornady and let's take a couple measurements to compare you know this is fire form to our chamber so let's take a couple measurements to compare our chamber to a new piece of brass okay this is the headspace comparator so we put this guy right in there and it looks like two point two seven seven is our number and we should be able to pick out any piece of brass that we fired in the gun like there's a random guy from the middle they should all be the same two point two seven seven now we can even grab a piece of the PPU brass there it is it should be the same or very very close to point two seven seven so that's what our chamber is two point two seven seven and these two pieces here I got mixed up of which one's fired and which ones in there yeah it looks like them this is the new one alright let's look at a new piece it's looking like 2.26 3 so that is 14000 shorter than our fired case that's a lot so whenever we load up and take this new piece of brass and fire it that shoulder is gonna blow forward 14 thousandths let's grab another new piece out of the bag and see if it's the same two point two six three that's the same number we saw before right yeah I think it is now what we can do we don't whenever we resize our case we don't want to go back this far we don't want to continuously set that shoulder back and then blow it forward that much it's gonna be way too much work on our on our brass what we can do is take our fired piece that's sitting at two point two seven seven and when we're setting up our fooling sizing die we'll only screw it down enough so that maybe this goes down to two point two seven five or two point two seven four perhaps just a couple a couple extra thousandths of head space so that our guns gonna chamber the round easily but not so much that we're constantly blowing the shoulder 15 thousands forward like a new piece of brass now the next thing I want to look at is the the thickness of the neck and earlier kind of like you don't necessarily need a micrometer like this to get an idea of your neck thickness what you can do is like earlier whenever we were measuring yeah remember measuring like this and my calipers were still zeroed for the headspace comparator so what was our number yeah 335 remember that so we know our bullet is 308 which means we have 27 extra thousandths to account for here right check my math yeah 308 335 minus 308 27 so if we assume that half of that is on one side half of it is on the other that tells us that this is about 13 and a half thousands thick right thirteen and a half thirteen and a half makes 27 and then 308 of bullet and we're back at 335 so let's see if the calipers agree with that being about 13 and a half these guys if I can get it to focus properly yeah there's zero put our case neck down in there and we have just over 13 at that spot let's go to another spot that spots actually a little bit under 13 there's another spot that's right at 14 so it seems like thirteen and a half thousand s is about right but at the same time it looks like this stuff might not have the most consistent neck wall thickness now I do have the tools to turn the necks for 30 caliber I have a 30 caliber kam neck turning tool so maybe down the road we'll do a little bit of that with these and get these necks more consistent but for the time being we're going to roll with what we've got now 335 is going to be our final ammeter and we know that our bushing is 332 so you'd expect about three thousands of neck tension there right but I don't think it's quite that much because when it goes up in the die I think you maybe get a little bit of spring back I don't know after we do some resizing we'll measure some necks and see if they're coming out 332 or maybe they're just a little bit bigger but at least here with the Hornady brass it seems like we do have some neck tension right we've got a little something to grab ahold of the bullet so that brings me to the PPU brass here's one of the loaded rounds from that box have a look at that 331 331 5 332 so let's call it 331 for a second and remember back to the rules about picking your bushings you go two or three less than the number you measured so if we wanted to use ppyou brass we wouldn't need a 328 bushing like our small the smallest bushing I bought is four thousandths too big so here is a piece of the PPU brass that I resized with that 332 collet in the die so this has been resized and let me grab a bullet here's a 220 grain sierra matchking it goes straight through so that's what you're getting yourself into when you choose to get a collet die you need to know what that neck wall thickness is before you get your Kaulitz now I don't mind we've got plenty of horn D brass we're not going to shoot this PPU brass anyway I was planning to you know I wanted to test with it and play around with it and give it a try but it's not worth paying another $20 for a collet just so I can use up twenty pieces of once fired brass that's throwing good money after bad so the question is is the 3:32 tight enough for the Hornady brass the measurements we've taken so far looks like it's going to be so we'll see how that actually works out when we get to resizing and speaking of that I mean I think it's time to start some resizing yeah let's do that alright so let's pull our match-grade full-size die out again and remember we are not using the expander yeah that little guy in there we also need our shell holder so let's go ahead and snap that guy in place make sure I got enough room to work the press without bumping the camera tripod alright so this sets up pretty much like any other fooling sizing die we raise our RAM we screw the die down until we feel it touch the shell holder okay there it is so it's touching but just very lightly I want to go a little bit further there we go so it's still pretty lightly touching but it's enough to take up the slack in the press once we have a cartridge in there and we're resizing the show hole or probably won't even touch the die anymore alright first thing we need some Lube and today I'm going to use imperial sizing die wax this stuff is really awesome can of it lasts forever like absolutely forever okay you just need a little bit of that on your fingers kind of get them greased up a little bit and you generally only have to go back for more every couple cases so we're just going to slather that on this dude and the good thing is we don't have to worry about lubricating the inside of the neck because we're not pulling an expander ball through it right we're all of our sizing is going to be done from the outside by the collet so no need to lube inside the neck which is good because a lot of times it's a pain in the butt if you're not going to tumble the brass after you've resized it you need to get in there with a q-tip or something and get the Lube out it's pain the butt so this is nice we know that our headspace number was it 77 it ended in 77 yeah two point two seven seven and I'll tell you what we can do let's go ahead and zero the caliper so there we go so let's set our die until we read maybe a minus three here all right up and in that didn't really take a whole lot of force and let's see if we touch the shoulder at all I'm assuming we probably didn't know it's still read zero so let's screw this guy down a little bit more just a smidgen yeah just a little bit there and let's run it back through again we can have a look between our shell holder and the die looks like we're pretty darn close if it's not touching it's almost touching yeah we may I think we're just getting contact so we've moved it about half a thousandths so let's go another little tweak and try it again okay so it looks like we've bumped it about one-and-a-half thousandths and honestly that would probably be just fine like with a bolt-action rifle you can just next size and not even bump the shoulder and you're usually fine for a couple firings so just a tiny little bit of bump would be just fine but let's go ahead and tweak it on down and try and hit that three number yeah there's just a little bit more all right looks like negative two and a half here's what we're just gonna breathe on it yeah I just I just breathed on it and then we'll make sure that lock ring is pretty tight now let's move on to the next case we'll come back and hit that one one more time here in just a second but let's see what this guy gives us up and in back down I know this one's reading right at three thousandths good so it looks like we've got our die set right let me go back to the other one and run it through one more time yep there's that one at three thousandths so let me go get a rag to wipe these off and then let's take a few measurements of a resized case and compare it to the fired case so the first and most important thing is are we going to be able to have some neck tension here to hold on to our bullet it looks like we are so I've got PPU case where it fell through these are not falling through so we've got enough to grip the bullet maybe but exactly how much do we have remember we were using a 3/32 collet in our die so it's kind of hard to show you on measurements like this 333 there's a long 333 333 okay let's look at the other piece 333 so it looks like our number is 333 so that's a 3/32 collet so some of that might be the brass springing back once it's you know goes through the collet and shrinks down maybe there's a little bit of spring back or maybe Hornady made they call it a touch large I don't know I don't really care but remember once we see the bullet our final number is going to be 335 so we've got two thousandths of neck tension now people run one two three thousandths of neck tension so I think we're in a good spot here with the Hornady brass with the 332 collet but I bet if we threw the 333 collet in there we would just barely have enough so I think I'm gonna buy a 331 to kind of cover the full range 331 to 333 seems like it'll be the right you know range so that we can play around with neck tension and find out what gives us the best accuracy in this gun all right some other measurements here right below the shoulder right about there I'm getting 488 let's see what it is on a case that hasn't been resized so it's looking like a 489 or 490 MC and sometimes that's good so we're really not moving the body of the case there that much seems like our chamber is reasonably tight there in the body now if I'd but the calipers right up against the belt this one has not been resized I'm getting 512 there's a 513 let me look at another piece yeah this guy's reading about 512 so let's look at one of the pieces we resized it is also reading 512 so it looks like right up against that belt our die really didn't do much let's look at a new piece ah now this new piece is 506 yup here's another one 505 506 is what I'm reading so let's grab our Larry Willis die and use it as a case gage yep if you remember this into the die nice not so much slop if you remember earlier when we put a brand new piece into it quite a bit of horizontal slop there but our resized piece fits pretty tight but it freely goes all the way down there so it looks like here at least first firing with this gun up I just had to open my mouth the second one I put in and kind of hung up there now it's going freely that first time in there kind of stuck just a touch yeah so it's very close now if I remember the instructions correctly I think 510 is the goal whenever you're using you know this die I think that's what he has you do is take it down to 510 yeah resize the expansion ring on your case just above the belt as needed or down to 510 so what was our what was our number on these yep our number let's see there that one's 511 I seem to remember maybe getting some 512 s here somewhere yeah 510 and 511 are the numbers I'm getting so I guess we can play around with it here and go through the setup but it just doesn't look like my brass is needing this at this so what you do is get the collet out of this guy there went okay there's the collet do you remove the lock ring completely and you feed it up underneath and thread it in from the bottom and the instructions say to go all the way so there it is all the way in doesn't seem like we would need this lock ring so I'm not even gonna worry about putting it on there now the collet has got one end with a 45-degree angle cut and the other end does not the one that does not have the angle is what goes down toward your belt so it says push it all the way down until it contacts the belt make sure the 45-degree angle is then we slide it into the shell holder and raise the RAM now this is done by field right we're not going all the way up Oh almost forgot he does mention in the instructions that you really need to use Lube on this guy and I didn't luckily I don't think I pushed it all that hard so hopefully this guy will come off yeah it slid right off I haven't pushed it hard enough yet but he says the lube it and he specifically recommends the ramp reading imperial sizing guy wax that we're already using love that stuff it's good stuff okay we're back on and this time we're lubed and I guess you just raise it up and kind of it's a feel thing I don't think you necessarily go all the way so let's see how far that got us yeah that was able to slip off he does mention in the instructions that if you get it stuck what you can do is flip the case over put the case mouth on your shell holder and then raise it very lightly and let the press help you pop it off of there so that that didn't take hardly any force it wasn't enough to booger up our newly resized case mouth so there's that let me wipe this guy off we'll see if that collet left any markings on the brass so we did get a couple very very light marks on the brass nothing bad at all I was afraid the little the little fingers of the collet might pinch the brass or leave it looking like a case that was shot in a fluid chamber so that guy's done now we can yeah pop it in the top and let's take another actual measurement yep it's now at five five ten so we didn't do much but we did enough sweet I like that that's pretty cool what we'll do once I finish resizing the ones that have been fired we'll run them all through there you know as a case gauge and if we run into any that the need this guy will use it so I'll just leave this guy in the press and we'll sit the call it right over there get my fingers lubed back up and go ahead and finish the rest of these oh that sucks I can't leave it in the press here on the breading t7 turret press because when you try and turn the turret it bumps into that it's going to have to remove it that kind of sucks but it's not a huge deal not a huge deal tell you what I'll do so I don't forget each case I'll go ahead and resize it and then as I'm putting it back on the loading tray I'll go ahead and check them here yep that guy that guy is not going all the way in there interesting I'll tell you what let me finish up resizing these cases and then we'll we'll come back and revisit that this die real quick I don't know if I mentioned but we are going to use we're going to use fired brass the once fired brass 15 pieces of it so we're going to use 15 pieces of it and then 10 pieces of new brass because I want to load up 25 rounds today so I got done with my once fired brass and was about to start on our new brass and then I realized that my camera sucks and never wants to focus alright let's try this again so I switched over to the new brass and I was about to run him through and I started thinking like we'll we've got our 3:32 collet in our sizing dive what's the next size on this new brass and coming to find out some of it in some places is like 331 now remember our brass is coming out of this die at 333 so this new brass the necks on it are not going to get touched now I'm lucky it looks like this batch of Hornady brass is in pretty good shape but if you've ordered any brass at all you know that sometimes you get some with goofy case mouths that are out of round so this guy is about to get less round than it used to be okay look at that one you've pulled a new piece of brass out of a box that looked like that haven't ya sure you have so what would we do with that and I want to go ahead and run it through this die set up and see what it does I don't think it's going to get us where we need to be like it's not going to straighten that out I don't think okay up in there no resistance whatsoever this you know new new piece of brass isn't even touching most of the sizing die yep and out it comes and we still have a wonky neck so I think our only option here is to go ahead and pull out our decapping pin and replace this guy with the expander okay so now we've got an expander that's going to go through and iron out the problems in the neck let me go ahead and put a touch of Lube on this guy and screw it back in so the question is what's the next size gonna be after it has that expander pulled through it now on the way up of course the expander we might we're gonna run into some resistance as it overcomes that dent so up in little ways and there it is yep I can feel it going over the expander there it went all the way up all the way down and honestly that's still like it's back to being round but I can still tell where the dent was and I'm thinking we might still be slightly out of round can you see that when I turn it let me wipe the crap off of it make sure I'm not seeing things yeah maybe I'm seeing things a little bit but let's see what diameter we were left with 331 331 332 so this is actually this is good news it tells me that a fired case that goes up gets sized with our 332 expander ball and comes out 333 remember it's probably not even going to touch that expander on the way out because this case had to expand to run through it and 333 is the absolute biggest spot I can find on this guy so the expander ball may not be too bad to use even with a collet it's small enough to where it'll help iron out any problems going up but it doesn't stretch it out past what the collet now if we went to a smaller collet let's say we went to a 3 a 330 collet mm smaller then I assume the expander would probably be you know undoing the work we did in the collet go getsize to 3:30 and then get dragged over the expander and be back out at 3:31 or 3:30 to hopefully that makes sense I'm gonna run this one back through one more time yeah just kind of feeling feeling that expander ball there yeah I think we're just fine so I'm gonna run the rest of these new pieces with the expander in place yep I think it's just barely touching and this new brass we're gonna have a little bit more neck tension than we do with our resized brass which is no big deal no big deal at all now of course these new cases you remember how far that shoulder was set back like 15 thousands less than our fired cases so this die is not touching the shoulder whatsoever we're just kind of ironing out those necks a touch all right so now we can get back to that other task we were talking about we're gonna use this as a case gauge like that guy needs a little bit of love see not quite touching same thing with this guy same thing with that guy so I think earlier I just happened to pick an odd ball that actually fit so pretty much all of these need a little bit of work here with this die so let me get it reinstalled in the press all right installs from the bottom we're all the way up a little bit of lube on the case slide to call it all the way down to the belt and up it goes well like I was messing with earlier I'm wondering like if we just go ahead go all the way in there there you go that's the press all the way up there were definitely some work going on there and I think the Kaulitz gonna be no it actually slipped off by hand that's good so back in the top as a case gauge it goes in no problem whatsoever so the the die definitely did its job and let's take a quick measurement yeah so I'm getting 511 all the way around the case good I was afraid of you know we raised the ramp all the way it might overdo things but it doesn't look like it does remember his instruction said you either go as far as you need to go or down to point five one zero I think if we needed more than this we could drop the die a little bit right like maybe we screw the died down half turn and then put the lock ring on top that would let us get the the collet a little bit farther up into the die but this seems to be perfect so I'll just go ahead and do that with all of them put a man all the way up you have to call it it's sliding off of them pretty well then back in the top as a case gage no problem and on to the next one goodness gracious I've almost filled up a whole memory card and we're still resizing this is going to be a very long video but that's okay like first time with a cartridge first time messing with belted magnums a lot of firsts going on here so I want to talk out everything I'm doing not only to help those of you who may be in the same spot but also to invite you all to let me know you know in the comments if I'm doing something stupid or I missed something or I overlooked something I am always happy to hear that it's all about learning man right alright I think that covers resizing enough so I'll get these guys finished get the Lube wiped off of them and then we'll move on we got a little bit more brass work to do before we get to the good stuff okay so now that our brass has been resized now we need to double check its length so I pulled out the Hornady manual here you'll see that the max case length is 2.6 to 0 and while we're in here might as well make note that the maximum cartridge overall length is three point three four zero we'll just make note of that for later but two point six two zero is the number that's important to us right now so I'm going to go through each case this is a fired one two point six zero seven two point six zero four you can see these are all these are shorter than the trim length which was two point six one zero so these are all quite short I'll go through and measure the rest of them this is a new piece of brass and these guys are a little bit longer two point six one four two point six one three so it looks like in their factory ammo they trim them a little bit shorter so there's two point six one three good alright so I measured the rest and they all came out good the next thing I want to do is deburr the flash holes down in there a lot of times brass will have a little booger on the inside of the case my dear down there by the flash hole I guess a new case would probably be easier to to show you on but at the inside of that hole inside the case sometimes has a burr so for the longest time I used the Lyman flash hold deburring tool you just put this guy down in the case find the flash hole and actually this this stop isn't far enough up but you just put it in there twist around a little bit and call it good but recently a viewer named Thomas sent me a little bit of an upgrade this is the reading yeah the reading flash hold deburring tool now with the Lyman unless you set up the stop there's nothing to kind of keep you cutting to a consistent depth and if you want to use the stop then you really need to have all of your cases trimmed to the exact same length and this is a good situation like if you remember the the new brass is about ten thousandths longer than our once fired brass that we're using so we would have to account for that with this whatever so the reading now the reading unit up here at the the cutting end has gotten a little bit of a built-in stop there we do have a pilot which I need to adjust this and tighten it down that will keep our case aligned properly but this guy right here keeps us from going too deep so let me put this guy down in here and see if I can find the stinkin flash hole there we go finally found it and we'll bring the pilot down a little bit but this pilot doesn't quite want to fit in there see if they're all being that way yeah that one went in but it is an extremely tight fit tell you what I might need to do first we need to chamfer and deburr the mouth of the case let me grab our little deburring and chamfering tool here and let's kind of go at the inside of this dude real quick all right it's that cut a little chamfer on the inside this is the one that we couldn't get it to go through so let's see if now at all yeah now it went through so that's what was keeping it so we're going to need to do that first so let me get the outside as well there we go that guy's ready to rock so let me run through them and get this done and then we can deal with the flash holes alright deburring and chamfering of the case mouth is done now so let's have another go at setting up the pilot there we go we'll tighten it about let's back it out just to touch make sure we got plenty of room to maneuver yeah there we are and where'd my allen wrench go there it is from this point you just stick it in give it a couple cranks feel a good bit of resistance and then you feel the resistance stop and then you dump out some brass shavings see if it's a little bit easier to align now that we've got the pilot in there kind of got a hunt for the flash hold just a touch yeah there it is man that thing is wicked sharp I guess I've just I've used this one so much this is probably pretty dull by this point perhaps but this thing cuts through there like butter now most Hornady brass is usually pretty okay like I don't seem to find the really terrible burrs on the flash holes in Hornady brass that I find in some other manufacturers but it still seems worthwhile it only takes a minute and you only have to do it once in the lifetime of the brass right so why not so this is as far as we're gonna go today with brass prep like I mentioned earlier in the future maybe we'll turn the necks but we're not going to do that today some folks will use a primer pocket uniform err to uniform the depth of the primer pockets we're not gonna worry about that either today unless we get to the priming step like if we get to the priming step and some of the primers aren't going down to flush and I don't know if something weird like that maybe we could revisit it but I don't expect to run into that problem I already did this one right so that's it folks I'll see you guys here in a minute when we're ready to install the primers so I just finished up the flash will be burning and I thought I would show you guys the big old pile of brass on the bench this is totally normal like when you're deburring flash holes there's a decent amount of material that gets taken off I remember back the first time I did this I thought holy crap where is all this brass coming from and is this really necessary but it's normal but this step totally optional you know if you're just getting into reloading or whatever and you're trying to accumulate all of your various tools and stuff flash holdy burning that's down the list this is pretty optional one I found interesting the new brass was fine I didn't feel any burrs but once I went over to the fired brass from the factory ammunition some of them had some pretty gnarly burrs in them so it's interesting to see the flash holes feel a little bit different and the case lengths are different right all that factory ammo brass was much shorter but I did weigh some examples of both and they're both they both weigh about 234 grains sometimes you have to be careful about that like one manufacturer pretty much the same head stamp but they're a little bit different these seem to be pretty close but these fired pieces from the factory ammo I wanted to shoot some today to you know show the process of reloading once fired cases but after this they'll be going into like just duty as like cider ammunition that we load up to adjust our scope and all of that sort of junk or warm up the gun or whatever and we'll mainly be using the you know the new batch of brass that I bought alright let me get this cleaned up alright so our brass prep is done that's the tedious part of reloading is getting your brass to the point where it's ready for primer powder and bullets so this seems like the appropriate time to talk through our load data first of all let's talk about our bullet lineup on the Left we've got the hundred and sixty-eight grain spear gold dot next to it is the hundred and seventy-five grain sierra matchking then the 85 grain Berger hybrid target the 208 grain eld match from Hornady and the 220 grain sierra matchking so I was able to find exact load data for these specific bullets for the 168 grain gold dot spear has data for it we're going to be using Alliant reloader 26 and we're going to shoot 70 6.0 grains the spear max charge was 78 point 1 grains so I'm 2.1 grains below max what I tried to do was take the max I went down to grains and then rounded it off to the closest 1/2 grain that's pretty much what I did for all of these and I also looked at other sources sometimes it wasn't the exact same bullet but I at least had one alternate data source that more or less agreed with these charge weights right in the case of this first one the spear gold dot Alliant had data were three different spirits from 165 up to 168 grains and they had max charges in the 82 to 83 grain range so a full four or five grains of powder more than the gold data so this seems like a reasonable charge wait for a reload or 26 hopefully that makes sense I try not to rely on one single load data source I always kind of like a sanity check you know an additional point of reference to make me feel a little bit better about the charges so next with 175 grain sierra matchking we're gonna shoot h-43 50 Hodgdon h-43 50 and we're gonna shoot 60 9.0 grains the Hodgdon site had this exact combination and they showed a max charge of 70 1.0 grains next is the 185 grain Berger hybrid target we're going to shoot h1000 and we're going to shoot seventy seven point five grains the Berger manual shows a max charge of seventy nine point five with the 208 grain Hornady eld match we're going to shoot reloader 23 and we're going to shoot 70 point zero grains the Hornady manual maximum is 72 grains and the 220 grain sierra matchking we're gonna shoot reloader 26 we're going to shoot 70 2.0 grains and this came from Alliant they're Max charge was 74 point 2 grains so we're two point two grains below on that guy so those are our bullet and powder combinations and our charge weights but the biggest thing that's missing here are the overall lengths if you remember back when we look in the Hornady manual it showed a Sammy maximum overall length for this cartridge as three point three four zero inches most of these load load data sources used three point three four zero inches there was only one exception Hodgdon with 175 grain match King used 3.30 now one good thing about these Thompson Center Compass rifles is they have an extremely generous magazine if we grab one of these rounds of PPU I'll be able to show you there you go you can see how much extra space we've got with this with this round of the PPU ammo I was playing around a little bit earlier it looks like the max overall length for this magazine is three point four seven five so that's a hundred and thirty five thousands longer they in Sammy maximum overall length that we can fit into this magazine I can tell you right now we are going to need to take advantage of it because my my tests with these bullets of maximum overall length shows that this gun has got a super long throat it's got a freaking giraffe throat and I want to show you guys the way I used to determine that so what I've done here is I've sacrificed one of our pieces of Hornady brass this piece has been resized and then I took a dremel tool and cut a big slit down the neck I'll keep a case like this for everything I load I find it really useful I mean you can use it like this is a 208 grain eld they work nice for eyeballing your seating depth as far as how much of your bullet and the case neck are making contact and also find it a pretty repeatable way of figuring out my maximum overall length so as you can tell this kind of goes in a little bit stiff like you can pull it in and out but it's reasonably tight and when it gets loose you just pinch it a little bit to keep a little bit of tension there but what you can do is just barely start it so there there she is just barely started so you take the rim and put it up under the extractor and then just bend it in and well you can't see because the Scopes in the way but yeah it's too long to fit through the window right now so I'll tell you what let's go in a little bit farther alright I think I finally figured out a length that will fit through the ejection port okay so our starting number is three point six four two so we put it in under the extractor tilt it until it's straight and then slowly push the bolt forward there we go and then we go ahead and push the bolt all the way in close the bolt handle and then open it back up now you want to put your finger in there to keep it straight so you know the rounds gonna want to tilt upward as it comes out and we want to keep it straight so the bullet doesn't get disturbed because the rifling has now pushed the bullet in to the case so let's see what the overall length is it's like three point six one nine now the number I had written down earlier whenever I tested this before I started the video was three point six one eight I generally find this is repeatable to just within a thousandth or two so let's back it out and do it again yeah three point six seven seven I don't think that'll fit there we go starting at three point six five zero and it goes close the bolt and then open it up next reading is three point six one nine the exact same number we got last time so it gives me some idea about where the rifling starts now the bad news is with this freaking 208 ldm it's three point six one nine for crying out loud the recommended overall length is three point three four zero that is two hundred and seventy eight thousandths of jump before we engage the rifling from the recommended overall length that's a quarter of an inch so now that you've seen how I do this let's jump back out and look at the numbers for the rest of the bullets so here are the max overall links that I came up came up with for each of these bullets if we loaded all of these two three point three four zero inches these would be our jump numbers right 158 thousandths for the hundred sixty-eight greengold dot one hundred and twenty thousands for the 175 grain match King and so on right like the worst is the 185 grain Berger it would be a point two nine four inch jump I think this is why the last time I shot this gun with these three types of factory ammo they all shot terrible throat is just terribly long so we need to try and stretch out our rounds a little bit or at least that's what I want to try here first is to stretch out these rounds as much as we can to minimize that jump we've got a lot of testing you know in our future with different seating depths and we'll circle back around and load some at three point three four inches and see how they shoot but today I want to shoot them long I want to try and get them a little bit closer to the lands as I mentioned our magazine length is three point four seven five that can fit in the magazine so I chose that as my starting point and what I did was I took my split case and I'll tell you what this is the 208 eld that's not a good that's not a good one to illustrate what I'm talking about let me grab the hundred and seventy-five grain sierra matchking and what I want to do I want to put a little sharpie mark on the bullet right at the boat tail so it's a little bit easier for us to see there we go see I just drew a little line on there so I put it in my split case let me put it at three point four seven five and we'll have a look all right pretty close it's three point four seven three and you see where our Sharpie mark is in there and we have almost total contact between the neck of the case and the bearing surface of the bullet but not quite like it just didn't quite get all the way down now there's 300 Chester Magnum has a very short neck anyway so I really want to see that bullet far enough down in there so that the bearing surface makes total contact now here it is at three point four to five there we go see our blue mark now it's clearly down a little bit below that next shoulder Junction we've got complete contact between the bearing surface of the bullet and then and the neck now this is 85 thousands longer than the sámi maximum overall length and the Hodgdon load data had this bullet seated to 3.30 inches so it's a hundred and twenty-five thousand longer than that but this depth results in a jump to the lands of only 35 thousandths that's much more reasonable we've got great contact there where we need contact the round fits in the magazine yep fits in the magazine no problem and we've only got 35 thousandths of jump to the lands so that's what we're going to shoot with the Skai usually going longer isn't a big deal until you start jamming into the lands and I've always heard that can do weird things with pressure although I haven't really observed it myself usually when you see things a little bit longer you know it increases your effective case capacity which seems to lower pressures we lose a little bit of velocity but we've got more case capacity and it can usually be made up you know we can pick up that velocity without with a higher powder charge but there shouldn't be any safety risk I guess is what I'm getting at going a little bit longer hasn't ever gotten me in trouble you know this may be the time maybe I'll blow my face off today but I think we'll be just fine now I did this same thing this same sort of exercise looking at the seating depth and considering magazine links and all that crap these are the numbers I came up with the first two the 168 green gold dot is going to be at three point four four zero this one seventy five is at three point four to five and then the last three the 185 the 208 and the 220 those are all going to be a three point four seven five which is our maximum magazine length now you'll notice the the burger and the Hornady they still have a significant amount of jump one hundred and fifty nine thousand for the burger one hundred and forty three thousands for the for the Hornady like that's still a bunch so I don't know why in the world they feel the need to chamber these guns with these throats that are so god-forsaken long it's aggravating it is really aggravating now on the other side of this the 6.5 Creedmoor thompson/center compass we have never shot any bullet that we could not get to the lands and fit in a magazine and then our first test here with the 300 Win Mag there's only one bullet the 175 we could get it to the lands and still fit in the magazine I didn't like that seating depth though you know I felt like we needed to go a little bit a little bit shorter but that guy was the only one we could get to the lands hopefully all that made sense it can be a little bit confusing and it sucks having to go this far away from the published load data on length but it is what it is and I think that's probably the only way we're gonna find accuracy in this gun so hopefully some of these loads will shoot let's see sorry I showed you the final load data right including the old roll links and everything good I think at this point we're ready to move on and the first step of moving on is going to be to install our primers so I'm using an RCBS hand primary tool and I've got our primers in the tray so now it's as easy as sticking them in there and squeezing and there you have it I always like to drag my finger over them make sure that the primer is flushed or just below flush and that is perfect so these guys will go in very quickly and we'll be ready to start laying out powder all right so our first five charges for the spear gold dots is reloader 26 now the quickest way to blow your face off is to have a powder mix up so one rule I try my best to live by is to only have one powder on the bench at any given time so all of our other powders for today are off the bench sitting in the floor here next to me so no mix ups I like to use a little a little bowl dump pass-outs powder there now what I want to use is the lead powder measure kit this is just a kit full of little yellow scoops which a bunch of them are over on my bench this is probably gonna be one of these big guys but you can tell there's no powder residue on them I've never even used them so let's start with this 4cc guy and see what charge weight that gives us try and scoot this up so you can see the readout on the scale so here's a full scoop nope that's still not big enough all right here's the biggest one this is a 4.3 CC scoop 62 so that's all we're going to get then from there I'll just trickle it in by hand I do have a trickler which makes this a whole lot easier show you what that looks like there you go this is a Frankfort Arsenal trickler you put powder in the top and it trickles out the little spout nice and if you're loading a bunch of charges with one powder then it's definitely worth the time to fill this up and use it but since I'm only doing five charges with each with each powder it's yeah it's easier to just go ahead and do it by hand and I'll tell you another thing I should do before I even start here one thing I always like to do this this scale is a fifteen to twenty dollar scale off of Amazon unfortunately they don't sell this exact model anymore this is such an amazing little scale it's been great I've been using it I think almost two years now what I've got I just dumped them out off-camera of course is a little check light kit this is a little little thingy full of these little check weights and these so like this big one right here is a twenty grain weight so if we drop that in there our scale should read twenty point zero and it does there's forty point zero fifty point zero here's a five Greiner fifty five point zero here's two more should be fifty seven two more still fifty nine and then here's a little half grain fifty nine point five so this scale is reading my check weights perfectly really helps to build confidence in the accuracy of your charges these Chuck Wade kits are pretty pricey like thirty thirty bucks or so but it could even be something as simple as a bullet like maybe you keep one golden bullet on your bench that you know that okay every time I measure this bullet it weighs one hundred and eighty four point three grains or whatever and every time you get ready to use your scale you throw it on there just just to build some confidence okay seventy six point zero grains is what we were after so there's a big old scoop trickle trickle trickle trickle some more seventy six point zero yep right on the money I've got a funnel from the Lyman precision funnel kit with the 30 caliber insert in there it's a pretty nice little funnel kit but a basic four dollar funnel works as well all right and it went so let's have a look and see if we can tell what the case fill looks like I need a flashlight yep as always this is a tough thing to get on camera but it's well down below the shoulder about in I don't know this area right here is where it comes up to and I think our case Phil is going to be pretty reasonable with all of these charges today nothing's gonna be way up here and get compressed really hard or leave a ton of case capacity left over the next charge after this with 175 green sierra matchking the 69 grains of 840 350 will probably be our least amount of Caseville all right back for charge - I've already spilled powder all over the bench I kind of overfilled my little bowl of powder did not it went a little bit over that time scoop some out try again there we are 76 looks good all right let me weigh out these next three and we'll go ahead and seat these 168 grain gold dots all right so my first five charges are weighed out I want to look down inside visual inspection make sure there's powder in all of them make sure that the level looks about the same in all of them and these look good and once I've done that I'll go ahead and just cap them with bullets now we're using the Hornet II bullet seeding die and if you remember I've got a second seeding stem for this guy so for each bullet we're gonna seat what I'll do is you just pop off this top part this is the micro just seeding stem thingy and then you just flip it upside down and out comes your seeding stem if you take one of your bullets and just set the seeding stem on it what you're looking for is the most contact between the bullet and the seeding stem that's available for you and generally the best way to tell that is just kind of wiggle can see this very little wiggle like this is an excellent fit or it feels like an excellent fit so let's pull this other one out of the box and see what it feels like okay here's this guy look at that that's not a good fit at all now one of our other bullets may fit better with this stem and I'll be checking every single bullet with both stems to see which one fits the best yeah that one's just perfect now what you'll run into if you have an extremely poor fitting stem like this sometimes you'll get marks around the bullet and especially if you're ever if you're loading a compressed charge we're seating the bullet is going to crunch the powder down there's a lot of force applied between the seating stem and the bullet during that operation and you can end up with very distinct rings around your bullet which can you know deform the bullet and stuff you don't want that we don't want that we want that all right so the seeding stem we've chosen we just pop it down in there make sure that it drops down in there okay put our micro just seeding stem back on there and actually I'll go ahead and just back that guy way out see it's got a little a little scale on it okay we're ready to install this guy now with this Hornady your seeding dies are different and you always want to check your die instructions but here with this Hornady what you do is you take an empty case and run it up all the way to the top and then you screw down the die until you feel it touch yeah that feels like it right there so we've screwed it down until we feel it touch the case and then you want to back it out at least one turn so we'll go right at one turn and then tighten down the lock ring there it is right there so that's all there is to it so let's get this started our target overall length is three point four four zero doesn't feel like you even touch the bullet or if it did it was just barely so I'm gonna go ahead and go down a pretty good chunk there we go that got to hold some of it so now our bullets been seated a little bit and our current number is three point five six four so we need to go down about a hundred and twenty four thousandths there's 5110 20 will go down 120 - we'll see where that puts us that should be just a couple thousands long still yep three point four four five so we're five thousands long what I want to do is is go ahead and seat a couple of these guys and get a bit of an average these gold dots are pretty uniform but they are soft points some of the points are a little bit pointy ER than others and a little bit of variation in overall length is to be expected there's a three point four four three a three point four four six and the three point four four five I'll tell you what I'm gonna go down five thousandths and we're gonna call that good yeah that should put this guy just about perfect yeah maybe a little bit too far three point four three seven the next guy here is three point four four zero so that's perfect I'm going to go ahead and seat the remaining two that we haven't seated yet there we go now what I want to do now is use the Hornady bullet comparator to get a measurement from cartridge base to ogive on these this should be extremely consistent looks like two point eight six zero or two point eight five nine five the next piece is exactly the same two point eight six zero third piece two point eight six zero so I'm gonna write this down two point eight six zero as our cartridge base two ogive number and this number is very useful for downloading it in next time like maybe we got to the range and this is a great shooting load and we want to duplicate what we did this extremely stable cartridge based ogive measurement is easy is easy to dial back in exactly the way you had it before so that's it for that row folks these are our very first five hand loads for the 300 Winchester Magnum feeling pretty good about it so this video at this point is probably incredibly long so I'm not going to subject you to this same powder weighing and bullet seeding process four more times it's all going to go exactly the same we're going to pick the seeding stem that fits our bullet the best we're going to dial in the overall link that we want we're going to record the cartridge-based Oh Jeff number and then we move on to the next one so I'll tell you what let's just go ahead and get all on the range unless something comes up if something comes up that I think is interesting I'll flip the camera back on and document it but I expect this part to go extremely easy so let's just head to the range okay folks time to see if we can get this guy to shoot let's review the specs on the gun one more time this is a Thompson Center compass it has a 24 inch barrel which is threaded and you'll see that I've got my suppressor and magneto speed chronograph screwed on there right now it is a one in 10 twist barrel and I'm using a 6 to 24 power vortex Viper PST Gen 1 on it right now the only modification I've done to the gun so far is to lighten up the trigger I use the same technique that I used in the 6.5 Creedmoor update video where I removed one of the screws to lighten it up it results in about a two and a half I think two or three pound trigger but it does render the gun no longer drop safe as long as the guns on safe it's okay but when it's in the fire position it is not drop safe the stock trigger weight which is dropped safe is not half bad like you get in there and adjust it to as light as you can I don't know it's four or five pounds maybe something like that I shot the 6.5 Creedmoor that way for 1500 rounds before I changed it so I'm not necessarily advocating for this trigger mod that I've done but it does make shooting off the bench a little bit easier we've got a target at a hundred yards the dots on the target are one inch in diameter I shot a few rounds of factory ammo to get the gun sighted in here just a few minutes ago the temperature is right about freezing we had a heavy frost this morning and it's just now burning off so it's 30 to 33 degrees something like that the winds I've noticed a few gusts here and there but it's mostly pretty calm now the magazine in this rifle is a four round magazine so if I want to get all five in here I need to put one in the chamber and then top off the magazine I'll tell you what the magazine on this 300 Win Mag doesn't go in and out quite as easily as the one in the 6.5 Creedmoor I'm hoping that's going to work in overtime I don't know we'll see so let's start out with hand loads we're gonna start with 168 grain gold dot and seventy-six grains of a lion tree loader 26 if you remember our overall length is three point four four zero so a hundred thousands longer than the book calls for so interested to see how these guys do alright ones are in the chamber so let's see if she'll shoot all right so we successfully fired our first hand load and the gun didn't blow up that's a good start having a quick inspection of this piece of brass it looks just great the velocity on that was 28 72 which I think it's pretty modest for a 168 grain bullet let's see if they'll group alright thank God I've been freaking out about this gun just being a piece of crap and our very first group is stacking them right in there good man that is a huge relief okay velocity 28 66 with a 7.9 feet per second standard deviation that's good stuff now I assume we're going to be able to get a whole lot more velocity than that with a bullet that light you know different powder selection or working our way up there with three loader 26 later or something like that but we got to take baby steps right next up is the hundred seventy-five grain sierra matchking this is with h-43 50 69 grains of it to be more specific now this one we're 35,000 soft the lands with a three point four to five inch overall length so let's see how these guys do all right first shot velocity with that guy was twenty nine hundred and twenty feet per second so we're already faster than we were with the lighter gold dot the brass looks okay I am seeing a little bit of primer cratering which we'll look at later but it doesn't seem severe so let's keep on shooting I mean I can't tell you how happy this makes me another great group there with the 175 sierra matchking velocity twenty nine thirty nine with a fourteen point three feet per second standard deviation and a pretty sweet group so i'm afraid we might be about to hit a brick wall though because we're going from the least amount of bullet jump you know that's 175 green sierra matchking we had 35 thousandths of jump and now we're switching to the bullet with the most jump this is the hundred and eighty five Greenberger hybrid target we're loading it out at full magazine length of three point four seven five and it still got that much jump so we'll see i'm afraid i might have got one a little bit too long i can't get the fourth round into the magazine no big deal I'll probably just single feed those last couple all right let's see what happens yeah once again no pressure signs here I forgot to mention the load this is H one thousand seventy seven point five grains of H one thousand the first shot was twenty eight hundred ninety five feet per second and I don't see any issues on the brass alright as we thought it might the group goes to crap with the burger their velocity was twenty eight ninety eight with a twelve point zero feet per second standard deviation so it could have been worse the shifting point of impact is kind of weird to me like that the difference between that first and second group I mean that's a little bit more than a two MOA shift and then this one back up in the middle alright so let's see we're 15 rounds in recoil hasn't been terrible so far like that 185 was the first one where I started kind of feeling it the loads with the lighter bullets weren't you bad my front rest is kind of banging around a little bit the front sling stud is sitting right in front of here so during recoil it kind of hits and makes things bounce around a little bit but it does help to absorb a little bit of recoil I guess I'd really like to have a Boyd stock on this like we put on the 6.5 Creedmoor and if it's going to be a decent shooting gun I'll probably do that pretty soon so alright time for a break okay time to get back to work next up is the 208 grain Hornady eld match this is 70 grains of free loader 23 this is another one that's gonna have quite a bit of jump 143 thousands have jumped to the lands which is only about 15 thousands less than the burger hyper target we just shot so we might be in for another crappy group here so let's see how they do all right our first shot is a twenty seven hundred and sixty one feet per second the brass looks fine holy crap the Sun came out and my camera is all screwed up now alright that's a little bit better alright let's see if these guys group alright so that wasn't quite as tight as the first two groups but still better than the burger right 27 61 feet per second fifteen point eight feet per second standard deviation so that shows a little bit of promise right maybe that's something we can work with in the future with that bullet tighten up those groups a little bit so next is the 220 grain serie match king and we're shooting 72 grains of reloader 26 I ran into something weird when I was loading these I almost turned the camera back on but decided not to in the end when I was measuring cartridge-based ogive with the Hornet II bullet comparator I had two rounds that measured quite a bit different than the others so I basically got a three shots three shots with one measurement and two shots with another so I don't know if somewhere in the past maybe I mixed lot numbers of bullets and they ended up in that box or what the heck happened but I want to keep my eye on it the first two shots we'll see if they group together and then we'll see if the other three shoot into the same group or perhaps shoot off a little bit hopefully that makes sense now we're back to a sierra matchking with an ogive shape that's a little bit easier to get close to the lands right we're at three point four seven five inches which is full magazine length but we're only 26,000 off the lands so this is this is even closer than we were with our first two groups so let's see what happens here okay first shot was 27 49 feet per second our brass looks perfect alright so this first two looked good now let's switch over to the other three that had the slightly different cartridge based ogive number yeah that works for me holy crap folks don't screw it up ah that's okay it felt like a good shot yeah we might have found a bullet this guy really like twenty-seven twenty feet per second twenty point three standard deviation yeah that's not great but hey it's a place to start from right like that's a really really good start for our five hand loads so it's time to leave the wonderful world of hand loading and go to the uncertain world of factory ammo we're going to start out with you can't see that yeah there you go the PPU this stuff 165 grain errs so as I load more into this magazine I'm finding that three rounds is really the comfortable spot like you can squeeze the fourth one in there but three of them go in much more comfortably so that's probably what I'm gonna stick with with this guy alright let's see how bad the group is with this pp you that last shot just had to go wild on us it was putting together a halfway decent little group their velocity 29:59 nineteen point six feet per second standard deviation so next up is the Hornady American white tail which is upside down there you go that stuff these use the 180 grain Hornady interlock bullet and I guess one thing we can look at on the box it does say these are rated at 20 960 feet per second so we'll see how hard numbers compared to that here we go all right so the group's garbage but our velocity was 29 46 so we're 14 feet per second slower than the Box said we should so that's pretty much right on the money a surprisingly good standard deviation number of 8.5 pretty good stuff okay one more group to go and this is the Hornady precision hunter that uses the 200 grain eld X bullet let's see what the box velocity is with these twenty eight hundred and sixty feet per second is our expected velocity so let's see how they shoot all right so they shoot pretty bad our velocity was 28 35 which is about 25 feet per second slower than the box said we should be that's pretty close so there's a lot of ugly groups down there on that target but I feel like we've learned a lot and I feel like I feel very optimistic that with careful bullet selection for this gun we're gonna be able to get it to shoot so let's get back to the bench and talk it all out all right folks let's have a look at some of the fired brass and we'll start these three rows over here are the factory ammo here are a couple of pieces of the PPU it's always a good idea to get a good look at some factory ammo and a new gun you know see what sort of pressure signs might be present in factory fired rounds and these just look great don't see anything that causes me alarm there's maybe just the tiniest little bit of primer cratering and but then again not really I mean if it's there it's not bad primers are nice and rounded no odd marks on the case heads that's just good stuff so these two are from the Hornady American whitetail a little bit flatter primers nothing severe just maybe just a touch of flattening not bad no other damage to the case had whatsoever edge of the primers still have you know a little bit of roundness to them but they just seem a touch flatter than we saw with the PPU again with these nothing weird going on I've had a pretty close look through these you know just first time with the gun wanted to make sure there weren't any neck splitting or anything weird going on and there's really not just looks like good fired brass this is the Hornady precision hunter and these primers don't seem as flat they might have just been brand of primers tell you what let's just grab one of each so yeah so maybe that was just a you know loaded with a little softer primer that was more prone to flattening nothing serious at all just kind of making making something out of nothing here but precision hunter was good all around as well here's a random piece from our hand loads I'm not going to show you all of them individually you know from each load we shot because they all look the same they all look great I'd be able to notice like I was saying maybe just a little bit of cratering on the primer but certainly nothing severe nice rounded edges around our primer and just good-looking stuff yeah that's just good stuff this was a new piece this was from the first two rows were new brass these were the ones fired stuff and they all look equally awesome so that's enough of that okay so let's take another look at these groups we started off great that 168 grain gold dot was a point six nine five inch group and right after that the hundred seventy-five grain match King was a point seven five eight that was really good stuff I didn't realize how much I had screwed up that 220 grain sierra matchking group right bottom row on the left those first four were stacking right in there I mean we were one shot away from 0.3 or 0.4 inch group and that one that flew to the left turned it into a one point zero one seven inch group I still like the looks of that group I have very high hopes for the 220 green sierra matchking same thing with 175 green match king i've got a bunch of both of those bullets so they'll be fun to play with third group on the top the hundred eighty-five grain burger just awful one point nine seven one inches wasn't even really trying to group you know what one target isn't going to tell us the whole story but I really think we're on the right track here focusing in on that long throat and the amount of jump that burger I'm sure it's an awesome bullet but it just didn't go to work in this gun with this throat it just ain't gonna happen right next to it the 208 grain eld match that wasn't terrible like it's that's a one point zero eight eight inch group it definitely wasn't trying to stack them in there but still reasonably respectable right that's not not the worst thing in the world and then our last three groups on the bottom the factory ammo all of it was garbage 2.75 two inches one point seven eight four inches and two point four nine three inches just terrible and this is just further confirmation that the results I got the first time I shot these loads and they were terrible was legit right I mean need these digits this gun isn't going to shoot these I mean I have to wonder if this gun would shoot any factory ammo because it's all gonna be down that Sammy maximum overall length or shorter so I just I have a feeling this gun would struggle with just about any factory ammo you threw at it I'm pretty happy with the velocities we saw we were lagging maybe about a hundred feet per second behind the factory ammo which is good right our first time out reloading for a cartridge first time ever loading for a gun I'm not trying to push him hard so the fact that we're only lagging about 100 feet per second behind factory ammo of similar bullet weight is a really good start if you ask me so I would consider this an extremely educational and very successful range trip feel like we learned a lot I feel like we're on the right track bullet selection I feel is going to be critical in this gun and as you can see I've been pulling out a bunch more bullets to see how they fit in this gun and figure out whether whether they can get anywhere close to the lands so we'll get to those here in just a minute a couple of things I want to clean up holy crap my entire Collett versus bushing confusion it wasn't even a confusion like I sat down and started editing the video and I'm a what is Wow why was I saying collet I don't know if my brain just went fuzzy now there are call it resizing dies like something there's someone right here the Lee call it neck sizing die and if you pull one of these guys apart it's got a mandrel and a collet this is a collet this is not a bushing my Hornady uses bushings not Kaulitz so if you found all of that annoying I'm with you man I was annoyed tube sitting there editing the video I wanted to reach through the screen and choke myself another thing I should have mentioned back when I was talking about our reloading equipment and going into all of this detail with the Hornady match-grade bushing die like you don't need to go this direction if maybe you're just looking to get into reloading for your 300 Win Mag and that's your entry into reloading like this this was this was way complicated it's too much to think about don't worry about it just get a standard set of dies something like Hornady custom grade die set or a Lee set or a reading set or just about any of the standard die sets they don't use bushings they use a type section up in the neck of the die and then they use an expander ball that gets pulled through the case to expand the neck out to the appropriate size for seeding bullets so there's no freaking bushings to worry about measuring necks and all of the garbage that I spent so much time on in this video and I should have made that more clear I'm afraid I might have scared somebody off who was looking into you know what it takes to to get started so with with our bushing die I'm definitely going need to turn the necks on these cases think about it we're just not going to get consistent results unless we do and that makes the bushing decision even more complicated like those necks that right now what were they averaging like thirteen and a half thousand so if we need to turn them down to thirteen or maybe twelve and a half or something like that to make them uniform then that's going to need a tighter bushing so I may end up ordering remember I have the 333 and the 332 I definitely want to get a 331 and I may just go ahead and get a freakin 330 that way we're kind of we're ready for whatever may come when we get to neck turning so I feel like there's a million more things to talk about but we'll just save them for the next video but I do want to cover like I mentioned I pulled out 16 I think it was 16 more 30 caliber bullets and measured their maximum overall length in this gun I was extremely surprised I found very few that I think are gonna work well for us I had high hopes for the there's a 208 grain Hornady match I thought it had a pretty phat ogive I thought it might be similar to the sear match Kings where we could get these tucked up near the lands and it just didn't happening this bullet in particular had about 77,000 sub jumped to the lands at full magazine length not sámi length full magazine link that still has 77,000 thousands of jump the 225 green version same bullet a little bit heavier is just slightly better at 67,000 so close but not quite tell you a couple that were surprisingly good the 180 grain Hornady SST this guy is right at the lands at magazine length and the bullets long enough to wear at that length there's still plenty of bearing surface down in the neck right got plenty of bullet to get a hold of and we can get them near the land so the 180 grain SST is going to join the good ones we found from today the 174 grain sierra matchking the 220 grain sierra matchking I need to get some 200 grain Sierra match Kings to check those out that'll probably be down the road like I think we should shoot through some of the 220 grain match Kings I've got before we go by and more crap the 168 grain Hornady match is actually not bad I'd like 18,000 so jump with these @ mag lengths so that guy might get at it to the list the 167 grain Lapua seen are these were reasonable these were right at the lands at magazine length however the bullet length didn't quite give us complete contact which isn't isn't a big thing like I'm making a bigger deal out of that that I need to you know like the bullet does not have to have complete contact between bearing service and neck I'm just a little bit nervous I guess because I'm new to this cartridge and that neck just seems so freakin short it's probably nothing to worry about we could probably use these just fine seated out that long but we'll get to it eventually I tell you what here there's a list here's all 16 of the bullets I just measured with their numbers I was surprised to see the worst one I measured was the the new 165 grain Sierra game-changer that guy needed to be at 3.6 1-0 to hit the lands so we'd have 135,000 to jump with that guy at full magazine length all right two more quick things and then I'll let you go I do have a big old box of these guys these round nosed Hornady interlocks these are the 220 grain Hornady interlock these guys we can get almost 70 thousands of Jam into the lands at magazine link so no surprise right with that Oh jive shape so we might give these guys a try that would probably put a serious wallop on a deer but not exactly a long-range bullet right all right folks I think the marathon is over I feel good though I feel like I got most of what I needed to say out those of you who like the long videos I hope you enjoyed it those of you who hate the long videos go jump in a lake so that's where we leave it a huge thank you again to everybody that made this possible all the people who donated to the gun fund for the 300 Win Mag or bought me equipment and just generally support me a whole lot more than I deserved thank you guys very much so that's it folks I will see you next time

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 272,609

Rating: 4.8832116 out of 5

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Id: g33otalNvtg

Length: 102min 45sec (6165 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 28 2018