6.5 Creedmoor - Getting started with reloading

hi folks welcome back it is an exciting day I am about to wet myself with excitement because we're finally diving into the world of 6.5 Creedmoor or should I call it six five Creedmoor or blaze my own Trail and call it 65 Creedmoor will work all that out in time maybe I'll just try them all out I'll switch up what I call it one thing I will warn you of is I load 6.5 Grindle so I expect to call 6.5 Creedmoor 6.5 Grindle at least five times in every video it's going to be super confusing but this is a 6-5 Creedmoor video and we're going to be talking about six five Creedmoor if I happen to say six five Grendel it's a mistake so today is going to be loading our very first rounds I want to talk over some of the components I bought the dies I've bought and I want to load our first rounds the next video will actually be shooting we've got our new gun right we picked up a thompson/center compass so I kind of want to do a separate video on the gun and shooting it and talking over all the gun stuff so this will be the loading that'll be the shooting and then after that we'll probably get into the normal flow of my videos where we load up some ammo and shoot it all in one video so let's jump right into things here I want to show you a couple boxes of factory ammo I bought so you know here at first I really want to focus on some deer hunting loads I want to test some deer hunting bullets this is a deer hunting gun right so that that's really gonna be the focus and we'll get into match stuff and more exotic crap later but at least for the first you know set of videos that's gonna be the focus so here's the first factory my bot this is federal non-typical this is a hundred and forty grain soft point pretty standard stuff and then a 140 grains this kind of covers the heavier side of things 140 s 143 is Sierra's got a 142 it's a very common weight class for the 65 Creedmoor the other I bought is the Hornady American whitetail this is the 129 grain interlocked bullet and you know although you can go I was looking Sierra's got load data all the way down to 85 grain bullets for 65 Creedmoor but this one 29 1:23 stuff in that range would be considered the lighter stuff for your for your deer hunt and ammo so we'll be exploring some lighter stuff we'll be exploring some heavier stuff luckily our gun does have a one-in-eight twist barrel get a pretty fast twist for the Creedmoor although it's pretty standard I think you're gonna find one in eight twists guns to be the most common but if for some reason you have a slower twist you'll have to keep that in mind as you explore the 140 to 150 range so this is also going to give us 20 rounds of Hornady brass to play with once we fire this stuff and 20 pieces of federal brass this will also give us a good velocity baseline to shoot for as we work up our own loads you know knowing what some of the common factory ammo out there is shootin will help us know what to expect for dies I decided to go with Hornady for a couple reasons I mean 65 Creedmoor is kind of their cartridge right and for reasons I can't really explain I don't have any Hornady dies like at all not really on purpose I don't have anything against 20 B dies I just never bought any so here we go this is a to die set this is they're cheaper set it's called the custom grade new dimension set comes with a fulling sizing die and it comes with a bullets eating die pretty straightforward stuff and another reason why I wanted to go with Hornet II was I wanted to try out this this is a they call it their micro just seating micrometer this was about 25 bucks and it replaces the top part of your bullets eating die in your standard set and turns it into a micrometer adjustable seating die I own a lot of the Forster ultra micrometer seating dies and I've just gotten used to it of having you know that micrometer adjustment on my seating guy and man it sure is convenient it really is convenient so I'm really hoping this works well because this die set Plus this and I also bought an extra seating stem for it all of this was cheaper than a single Forster ultra micrometer seating die they do Forster does these four six five Creedmoor but you know you pay for it and I tried to be as frugal as possible here getting started we've got a nice inexpensive gun no reason to go too fancy with the reloading stuff I'm thinking it's going to get the job done just as well as anything else so brass brass was a bit of a tough decision well like I said right here we've got 40 pieces of brass and your standard brass has got large primer pockets those are large primers but Lapua came out with brass last year I believe and they went with a small primer pocket and Starline came out with brass I think this year and they offer both so you can order it with large primer pockets or small primer pockets I decided to go ahead and pick up a hundred pieces of the Starline brass with small primer pockets I don't really have a good excuse for why other than to say I shoot a whole lot more small primers so I've got a better stockpile of small primers I've got a larger variety we can try out and play with but we're gonna have you know right off the bat here we will have some large primer brass that we can try and you know compare with and if we want to do a very direct comparison like I said Starline does sell the large primer brass so maybe we'll get a box of that eventually but here to kick things off we're gonna go with small primers on the powder side of things H 4350 is when you definitely want to try if you could find it it's very very difficult to find but all reports are that this is your best performer for 65 Creedmoor and I was able to track down a pound of it and get and get some the other powder I'm planning to test quite a bit here with to kick things off as reload or 17 looking in the Sierra load data looking in the Hornet e load data reloader 17 looks to give pretty decent velocities across the full range of bullet weights that Ciara has data down to 85 Green bullets and then all the way up to the 150 gram match King and they've got real odor 17 data for all of them and they show you know this powder giving some of the best velocities so a little easier to find that h 4350 so I'm hoping to bring this guy out pretty well and see if we can get some good performance with 3-letter 17 another one I picked up is Hodgson superformance plenty of load data for it it is a ball powder where you know the other three we're looking at here are extruded powders so you know this and probably like Winchester 760 or H 414 those are gonna be a couple ball powders that we'll be trying out here early on but seems to be mixed results out there with superformance but we'll try for ourselves and find out how it does in our application the other is reloader 22 on the slower side of things right this is a magnum rifle powder we'll probably be trying it with some heavy bullets but those are those are the four powders I picked up that's what was on the shelf I kind of made a made a list of powders I wanted to try and these were you know these were the ones that happen to be on the shelf at the time but for this video here today we're going to use reloader 17 and h-43 50 like I mentioned the focus here early on is gonna be on some deer hunting loads so I tried to pick up some deer hunting bullets which with the exception of will will cover this guy first then I did pick up some hundred and forty two grain Sierra match Kings that's not something you'd want to hunt with but they ought to be accurate and we'll get to them later but I picked up several options from Hornady the first is the 129 grain interlock which if we go back to our Hornady american whitetail factory ammo that's exactly what's in this guy 129 grain interlock it's a nice standard flat base soft point bullet with a candle lure nothing fancy about it but should get the job done and I picked up its cousin here the 129 grain SST this guy has a boat tail and a plastic tip it does also have a cane lure so the hundred twenty-nine grain interlocked and 129 grain SST pretty similar bullets should give us a good opportunity to compare some flat base versus boat tail with otherwise similar construction in our gun to see which one maybe it likes over on the sierra side of house I picked up some of the hundred and thirty grain game kings this is a hollow-point boattail it's got that mean-looking cierra hollow-point that they put on some of the game King bullets pretty gnarly looking I'm a huge fan of ceará bullets they generally shoot very accurate so honestly I was picking out a whole bunch of Hornady bullets and thought yeah I probably need to grab some Sierra's just as a as a sanity check in case the Hornady's aren't shooting well this will give us another brand to look at so I'm expecting good accuracy out of the hundred and thirty grin game King on the heavier side of the spectrum I picked up the hundred and forty grain SST just a bigger version of the 129 grain SST that we showed earlier still a plastic tip to boattail with a candle or just a little bit heavier and the 143 grain eld X so if we line this guy right up next to the hundred and 40 grain SST can see it's good bit longer no can lure and it's got more of a vld high bc sort of design so so those guys ought to fly really well you'd think so one big omission here is burger burger makes some awesome bullets but they're a little pricey and in my first order I passed I just I left him off I thought we'll try out some Hornet ease a few Sierras and see how they perform but I was exchanging some messages with Mopar madman and he recommended that I should try out the 135 grain burger classic hunter he's had good performance with that bullet in his Ruger precision rifle said he shot a doe with that bullet this year and it performed really well so I went ahead and picked up a box of those they'll be here soon they'll get tested really soon but not in this video at least and you know what this discussion of burger bullets here might be a good time to jump into another discussion I wanted to have because a lot of the burger vld style bullets they recommend being right on the lands and that was another reason I didn't want to order a bunch of bullets that I needed to shoot right up against the lands well I should say really quick before I continue this the the burger classic hunter I was just talking about a minute ago is a more traditionally normal shaped ogive that is jumped tolerant so that bullet doesn't necessarily apply to this but a lot of the other burger bullets do and I didn't want to waste money on extremely expensive bullets when I don't know how long the throat is in this gun and I didn't know how much room the magazine was going to afford us to shoot things long because 6.5 Creedmoor uses the same the same magazine just 308 actually here the Thompson Center magazine on the side says 308 243 7 millimeter 0 8 and 6.5 Creedmoor I'll share this same magazine so once I finally got the gun and threw around of this magazine look at all of that room for activities holy moley we are going to be able to make some crazy long rounds and still magazine feed them at least that's what it's looking like to me from what I can tell magazine length for this gun is going to be around two point nine eight inches and just to compare here's my tikka magazine from my 308 and we barely get past two point eight two point eight two five two point eight well actually that was showing two point eight four zero but I think I generally keep things at about two point eight to five max so we're gonna have an extra hundred and fifty thousand stup lay with in the magazine of the compass when compared to the tikka magazine that is awesome and unless this thing has the most ridiculous giraffe throat of any gun on the planet we're probably going to be able to flirt with the lands and play around with overall length right up there next to the lands with a whole lot of different stuff and keep them in magazine length that is awesome so hopefully that'll bring into into play all those cool burger bullets that can shoot itty bitty little groups sure a box of bullets cost twenty-five percent of what the gun cost but still should be fun to play with so let's jump right into it and get to loading what I've done is I pulled out the old Hornady manual they have a very good selection of 6.5 Creedmoor data and like I said I want to play around here first off with some reload or seven team so with 129 green interlock they show a recommended overall length of two point six nine zero that bullet does have a can lure so that that should match us up pretty close with the can lure and I really want to I want to load some grandma loads here right first shots through the gun I don't want to get crazy so they show a max charge a forty three point six what I want to shoot is 41 and 42 pretty close to the middle of the range hopefully it won't get us into trouble so I just want to load up five of each of those will just load up ten Rams will try a couple bullets will just load up ten rounds with several different bullets to try out just get a feel for how well the guns shooting with some different bullets so the second bullet I want to do is the one hundred and thirty grain Sierra game king Sierra has their six point five Creedmoor load data on their website so you don't even have to own their manual they show an overall length with that guy F two point six seven zero and they show a very similar max charge so Hornady with their bullet with their 129 interlock was forty three point six Sierra shows forty three point two so I just want to shoot the same loads let's shoot 41 and 42 grains both books show starting charges down in the well Sierra goes all the way down to 36 and Hornady starts at 39 so we're not quite going down to the true grandma loads but we're not really flirting with max either so it's just some middle-of-the-road sort of loads so I want to load up some heavier stuff the 143 grain eld x and back to the Hornady manual they show an overall length of 2.8 inches so I want to try Hodgdon age 43 50 with this dude I want to shoot 39 and a half and 40 and a half keeps us a grain below max also looking at the Sierra data looking at their data for the 142 grain bullet they have a very similar max 42.1 with their bullet 39 and 1/2 40 and 1/2 should keep us you know nice and safely below max we shouldn't be getting into any trouble here as far as pressure goes and should be kind of a good inventory of performance here with our gun between our two different types of factory ammo and then these three different bullets should give us a pretty good idea of what's going on all right let's go up be closely with our dies here really quick the fooling sizing die is pretty straight forward like this expander ball design plenty of taper you know so if you got like a smashed case mouth or something that really needs some work to get back into shape this should be good for that sort of work they've got replaceable decapping pins the problem is I haven't been able to get this stupid thing off of here yet so it's on there pretty well and I'm not gonna worry about it too much until I have a need to change the decapping pin these are nice beefy decapping pins too so hopefully I'll never even need to change it it does come with two spare decapping pins yeah there's two of them in there so that's nice of them let's see what this expander ball measures looking like a 262 yep looking like a 262 our bullets are 264 diameter yeah maybe 261 and a half so good maybe hopefully we won't have any neck tension issues the threading on the rod is a little bit weird let me zoom in just a touch yeah the threading is kind of flattened I'm not sure if it's meant for like you're you're able to loosen it up and then like you know slide it up and down I I can't really do that or it doesn't it's not doing it easily and I really don't want to jack up the threads by trying to force it but it does seem to thread well enough yeah they call this the zip spindle is my camera too dark it's too dark admit there we go yeah they call it zip spindles so I think you're supposed to be able to loosen this up and then make crude adjustments by dragging these flattened threads but yeah I'd rather just screw it in the easy way and not wear my threads maybe I don't know maybe I'm a weirdo but yeah there's a better look at that decapping pin an expander ball that I cannot get off there oh yeah hopefully it never needs to come off tell you what the dyes themselves are very nicely made like I said I don't have a lot of experience with Hornady dies but the knurling is very nicely cut they have the best lock rings in the business pinched style very beefy very nicely made that's one thing I have tried I have used Hornady lock rings in the past because they have such a good reputation so it's nice to already have a nice set on your die as you can see it does have a bleeder hole there for air and excess Lube and crap to get out rather than dent the shoulders of your cases so that's good and nothing really to see down inside of there but yeah it seems like a really nice resizing time I did not get a neck sizing die which might seem weird some of you who are you know experienced at reloading for a bolt-action neck sizing can be quite useful but at least here for this series we're just going to be fooling through sizing being careful to either not bump the shoulder at all or just bump it a tiny little bit and to be honest if we do get into neck sizing it'll probably be more about neck tension than anything something like a leak call it dial where we can use different columns to get the neck just the way we want it or something like that but just for standard resizing I'm just gonna go with the good old Foley three sizing die I was looking at the instructions for this guy it's you know totally standard resizing die setup you just screw it down until it touches tighten down your lock ring and adjusting your spindle I think they let me yeah yeah let me pull out 3/16 of an inch is what they is their guidance on how far out the decapping pin should stick not really something I'm gonna worry too much about probably I don't think we're gonna be measuring it I'll just screw it down until it looks about right and call that good enough that's actually probably pretty darn close right there so that's our fulling sizing die this is our bullet seating die once again very nice you've got some beautiful knurling like just look at the threads the threads are very nice and the way the Hornady setup is I'll tell you what let me pop this guy out here's the top part with its little washer then we can dump out our seeding stem now so this is the seeding stem that was in the die this is another seating stem that came with the die set and yep you remember me mentioning this this is the third seeding stem now if I'm angry and Hornady about anything it is this they are not marked in any way and this seeding stem that I bought separate which was labeled for the eld match and a max 130 140 LD match at a max I have no idea whether this is actually one of the seeding stems I already have that came with the die set and to be honest playing around here a little bit with some bullets none of them seem to fit things particularly well here's a hundred and forty three grain eld match so this is the one I bought and they're yeah that doe that actually is pretty nice fit I don't remember if I tried this particular bullet yet in this guy but that is a that is a pretty snug and excellent fit so let's see let's see what was this is the one that was in the die originally not quite as snug like I don't think sometimes it's hard to tell I don't think any of these are like you'd have problems with the tip bottoming out at least I don't think that's what's going on now I pushed it down and they're really hard and you can see a little line that I created around the bullet so that is where it's touching so it is touching the ogive it's just the shape of the ogive of this bullet just doesn't quite match up as nice as you might like in this standard stem so let's look this is the second stem that came with the die set that is a better fit than the first one but not quite as good as this stem yeah man you could feel it it just goes down in there and you can tell that it is cradling that ogive just perfect so good it does look like I have three separate different stems of three different styles good so I'm hoping that no matter what bullet we choose I should be able to find a stem that at least fits it well enough I think this additional stem was ten or eleven dollars somewhere in that range not terribly pricey here's a hundred and thirty grain Sierra game King just as an example let's see if we can find which stem would fit it best so that's our a Mac stem yeah that's not good that's not a good fit at all I think this is the one that came in the die not terrible a little bit of Wiggly miss yeah that's the worst of the three so I think this one here would be our best fit not perfect but not bad not bad at all so basically every bullet we play with that's what that's what I'll be doing is pulling out the stem collection and seeing which one fits best see if I can get these back where they belong I think this guy was the one that came in the package this is only going to last like ten more minutes before I get them confused and mixed up and that's okay I wish Hornady had a little you know one two three sort of marking on them or something but they don't what you gonna do huh back out just a touch and look a little bit at the rest of this eating diet you can see there's kind of this sliding chamber sort of thing now the Forster ultra micrometer seating dies also have you know kind of a sliding chamber but basically the whole case goes up inside of there and it holds though you know most of the case aligned while bullet seating is taking place this is not quite the same thing here's a piece of brass you can see like that right there that's as far as it goes in and I don't know how much you know alignment is actually going on there but it's better than nothing this is held in by this little retainer spring thingy there we go we remove that and then I'm thinking mmm still incoming oh there went and there's that piece now from what the directions said this is their standard six point five millimeter die so if I got a six point five Grendel set or something it would come with this exact same die okay there's our our little clip reinstalled and they actually do provide a spare little clip that's nice of them do you know you know give us plenty of spares of the little of the little parks like that I'd dig that that's a good thing so there's that then you just select your seating stem pop it down in there I need to back out a little bit more do I yeah so and I'm surprised how well the seating stems actually I should have looked at it while I had this off yeah when I first looked at this die I thought it was going to be a huge pain in the butt to get this guy kind of to go down inside of there while it was inside of the die but it seems like every time I just drop it down in there it manages to make its way down in there and be ready for seating so that's basically what's going on seeding stem this little alignment thingy that moves and with the standard setup you've just got this guy right here that makes contact her and set your seating depth and over to the micro just seating micrometer this guy simply replaces this so you pop out this part you put in this part and you're off to the races with a micro adjustable bullet seating die which is pretty freakin sweet if this works well I'm going to be a very happy person you know what I wonder if that's what you're supposed to do like take this out install the stem and then put it up in here I wonder if dropping it down in there and trying to get it aligned might over time bugger up the leading edge of your seating stems that wouldn't be good man I don't want buggered up seating stems let me double-check the directions on that yep they provide no guidance on that so that clip is pretty darn easy to get in and out so hmm I don't know so I think what we'll do we'll start things off with the standard adjustment stem make sure that it's going to work which I can't imagine it wouldn't this is pretty straightforward setup here and then once we see this guy works then we'll swap in the micro just and see how it does these don't seem to be too oily a lot of a lot of companies man they all down the dies like crazy and these are certainly oiled but it's not so insane to where I'm all that freaked out about it but even so I'm gonna go ahead and turn apart and wipe them down just to get rid of some of that or I'll tell you what it is almost midnight so I'm going to get these dyes wiped off finish getting them wiped off and then resume this in the morning but couple things I wanted to mention before I forget this die set did not come with a shell holder so don't forget to buy a shell holder if you already load 308 or any of the other cartridges that share case head dimensions with 6.5 Creedmoor you won't have to worry about it and that was my case I've already got a couple of 308 shell holders the other thing I never really mentioned were primers so like I said I've went with the small rifle primer brass and the problem is that all of the load data is going to be for large rifle primer brass and it's going to take some investigation for us to learn what that's going to mean as far as how it might act differently here and all of that junk to be honest primers just never seem to be a big deal for me like we've done multiple primers shootout primer test sort of videos on this channel the difference our differences are always minor well I guess I shouldn't say they're always minor there's always some difference between primers but anything you change seems to change everything so where one primer might give more velocity with reload or 17 if we went to age 43 50 everything might switch around and it would be a different primer that would shoot better or more consistently so what I'm gonna go with in the near term here are the CCI 450 primers these are the Magnum small rifle primers and I'll tell you why these have very thick cups they're hard primers and from what I've read and heard this this cartridge can be rough on primers they flatten early that's usually how you wear out your brass if you're shooting hot loads your primer pockets get wiped out before you know before you get next splits or case splits or case heads separations or anything like that and I'm hoping you know maybe the small rifle primers will be better for that because you know less brass cut out for a primer means more bulk more more brass therefore you know structural integrity I don't know that might be that might be crazy talk but it seems like that's how things might work the okay so the reason why I ended up going with the CCI 450 is because everywhere I've read it's it's it it's funny how I was actually looking at barrels the other day and different barrel makers and somehow I ended up on some results pages for some long range matches and those generally include like an equipment list right what barrel brand they were using in that sort of junk and that's kind of what I was looking at but they also had their components and that there was some six you know six Creedmoor and six five Creedmoor but also the six five by forty seven Lapua which uses small primers and the six millimeter dasher and a lot of small primer cartridges on the list and in the primer column it was absolutely 100% CCI 450s so those guys know what they're doing I have to assume so while I don't think it really makes all that much difference here as we get started or I'll say it it's the variable I want to spend the least time worrying about right now so yeah might as well take their advice and just stick with the 450 so that's that's my justification I've used them to see see I 450 and then after that I ended up seeing an old post a couple years ago on the precision rifle blog website where they talked about the subject a little bit so I'll link that down in the description if you're curious about that discussion of you know the the 450 being the primer of choice in these types of cartridges so all right I'm going to go to bed and I'll see you guys in about two seconds all right I told you I'd be back in two seconds however it is the evening of the following day I had some family commitments this morning so I've had additional time to think about our situation here was 6.5 Creedmoor and we're already a half hour deep into this video so I figured why not just make it longer this is my diarrhea of the brain video right I want to explain everything that's going through my head right now and explore things as closely as possible and the the magazine situation like we talked about earlier where we've got a ton of room in this magazine I want to know where the freaking throat is in this gun I can't wait until after we get on the range with these rounds and finally get some fired brass because unfortunately I do have actually a viewer sent me a stony point gauge or a Hornady overall length gauge whatever you want to call it I did not buy a 6.5 gread Creedmoor modified case because I'm an idiot I should have picked one up so I really needed a piece of fired brass so when I got back home this afternoon I went out and fired one piece of our federal factory ammunition in my gun here it is piece of fired brass now my intentions were to go ahead and tap this guy you drill and tap this case so I could use it with my Hornet II overall length gauge the problem I thought I had every freaking tap known to man but I don't have the one that's needed here let me let me look it up hang on yeah so it ends up you need a 5/16 tap that's thirty-six threads per inch and I didn't have one I thought for sure I'd have one but I did not have one so I'm gonna have to order a modified case however those of you who watch my channel regularly will know that I like to do it another way as well I take a fired piece of brass I resize it and then I chop a big ol slit down the neck with a dremel tool here's a couple cases from my collection it's got a 308 got a 75 by 55 Swiss 762 by 54r and you know it lets you just you know you kind of pinch it down a little bit make sure it's tight you set a bullet in there you put it in the gun you close the bolt that pushes the bullet in and then you each act it and and measure the overall length not the most precise thing in the world but it does get us in the ballpark give us an idea of what's going on so that's what I want to do with this one fired case that I've got I want to go ahead and chop this dude so that we can get an idea of how long the lead is in this in this gun however there are a few measurements I want to take on this case to get an idea of what my chamber looks like before we go modifying it with a dremel so let's go I'll be closing here with this dude and see what we can learn all right folks I'm a visitor from the future unfortunately the segment of video that was supposed to go right here had a little technical difficulty so I need to fill in some blanks so looking at our freshly fired case I wanted to measure the head space with Hornady case comparator gauge I looked around online for the drawings for the 6.5 Creedmoor and from what I can tell the the spot where you measure head space is 0.4 inches so the D 400 size insert for the Hornady comparator is the one we need now unfortunately our nicely fired case that I was measuring at this point has been resized and no longer really can be measured but what I found here's here's a new piece of brass a new piece of our Starline brass and these come out at one point five three two or one point five three three I get the same readings from our new star line the Hornady factory ammo 1.5 33 the federal factory ammo 1.5 33 so all of the new stuff factory ammo and new brass is coming up 1.5 33 our fired case measured one point five three five so whenever I shot it the shoulder blew forward to thousandths of an inch which is pretty darn good that tells me that they're very least we don't have a nasty sloppy chamber where our shoulders getting blown forward way too much so that was extremely good news the other measurement I took was the size right below the shoulder yep just kind of right below the shoulder what I found from our fired brass was point four six four inches and that is the point where my camera screwed up so I will send you back to the normal timeline of events with that information now our new brass and both of the factory ammo are measuring about 457 in that same spot so right below the shoulder seems to be getting blown out about 7 thousandths so when we take our fired piece of brass and run it through our folding sizing die it will be interesting to see where the sizing die puts it and I don't want to go overboard with a whole bunch of other measurements that should be enough to to get us started now one thing I didn't mention earlier about our our new Starline brass it is pretty good-looking stuff I've tried the the 308 Starline brass and the 223 Starline brass and had pretty good luck with them so far but actually this one I've got right here is a good example necks are not quite gonna be perfectly round so we're gonna run these guys through the sizing die I don't expect the body to get touched at all it'll really just be rounding off that neck a little bit now I did go ahead and weigh all 100 pieces of the Starline brass and the weight consistency wasn't I don't know it was 3.3 grains from the lightest to the heaviest so it seemed to have a fair bit of weight variation but I also measured them you know measured their length and was really happy to find that the shortest was one point nine zero eight and the longest was one point nine one three and the vast majority were exactly one point nine one one trim length is one point nine one zero so lengths pretty much perfect tell you another thing I should probably we do Matt a little bit yeah so here is my flash hold deburr but I born these flash holes they seem to be just fine so let's get this guy in there get through the flash hole and I usually turn it backwards and you can as the blade drags across it as it goes backwards you can feel any irregularities and there really aren't any so the flash holes in this Starline brass not only this 65 Creedmoor but 308 and 223 we're excellent as well so I'm not going to freak out at this point about any advanced brass prep we're not going to do any flash hold D burn burning or flash hold uniforming or anything of that nature here in the first loading we'll save that nonsense for later once we see how yeah what sort of performance we're seeing maybe we'll never have to worry about it it's alright finally now let's get to some loading alright so we've got our one piece of fired brass that we're going to use to set our resizing die instructions on this guy our totally standard screw it down until it touches and then tighten your lock ring so let's just try it out right there for Lube I'm going to use some reading imperial sizing die wax and we'll try and get a little bit inside the mouth of the case there since brand-new expander ball gonna need a little bit of Lube on it so let's see where this shoulder ends up with just standard settings no like no press came over or anything it's just you know basically down until it touched and then and then lockdown man that was going in there rough like that felt like a whole lot of work going on let me just add a little bit more Lube here we might end up denting the shoulder but that's better than getting a stuck case alright let's try again okay what's up in there little bit of daylight between our shell holder and the bottom of the die but let's see where our shoulder ended up alright one point five three five that's exactly where our shoulder was beforehand so we haven't bumped it at all that might be a desirable thing eventually but for the time being let's go ahead and take our die down just a little bit more I don't want to get crazy so there it's a little bit tighter so it comes up makes contact and then you know you can probably see the press move just a tiny little bit at the top of the stroke not what I would call like I don't feel the press camming over on it or anything just a little tighter fit between the the die and the shell holder so let's see if that gets to the shoulder 1.5 3 4 yeah so he definitely moved it about a thousandth of an inch now so good so it looks like our die is right in the sweet spot we're not gonna have to crank it down so hard that we're camming over the press really hard to get the you know shoulder to bump or anything goofy like that or on the other hand it's not you know bumping the shoulder ten thousandths or something crazy like that so nice job Hornady I like your da so far yeah beautiful so this case right here our die is now set this case ratch here our fired case that's been resized we're now ready to cut a slit in the neck so we can play around and look at our maximum overall length with a couple of our bullets but before we do that what I want to do oh really quick if you remember that number below the shoulder right about there remember that measurement what I'm seeing is 460 new brass was 457 brass out of our fulling sizing guy looks like it's coming out at 460 and our fired brass was 464 so I think that's going to be pretty good it's not quite you know squeezing that shoulder back down to where it was as new brass but it is you know bumping it in a couple thousands so looking good looking very good so our new brass like I said we want to go ahead and run it through the sizing die I don't expect it to touch the body at all we're definitely not going to be touching the shoulder at all we've taken measurements to prove both of those things so all this should really be happening is a little bit of neck sizing I'm gonna put the world's lightest coating of Lube on this guy just in case like I really don't want to get a stuck case but I really don't think much if any Lube is necessary at this point yeah that went that went really easily here's the next one I'm just like the residual Lube that's on my fingers but not really anything on there it you know goes up in a little bit tough as you get that neck over the expander ball but once it's passed there you really don't feel much force at all I guess I could pull out my dry neck Lube and use that but these last few cases I haven't even put anything on them and what I probably do is just continue to just throw them in there unlubricated the case here and there but so that's it I'm gonna get thirty cases run through this guy and I'll see you guys when we're ready to start priming all right so our case is successfully chopped down the neck there just a quick little cut with a with a cutting disk on a dremel clean up a few burrs and you're ready to rock and then you've got a neck that will hold on to a bullet as you might be able to tell I pulled out just about every six point five millimeter bullet that I own try these guys out and the basics of it are this this is a 143 143 grain al DX one of the bullets we're gonna be loading today just set it down in there just a little bit then you grab your gun open up the bolt and then kind of work this guy in under the extractor and then try to tilt it until it's straight and then once it's straight you just push your bolt straight forward you want to hold on to the case and keep it straight as long as you can and then you just push it straight in and close the bolt then you open the bolt and once again as soon as you start seeing brass there try and get your finger on it to keep it straight to keep the ground from you know tilting up and knocking the bullet around and then once it's out you just take your overall length measurement my earlier test with this bullet it was two point nine one five and two point nine one six all right two point nine one seven pretty close so that would be my axe absolute maximum overall length before I'm into the lands more or less now the good thing about this 143 grain LDX is if you look through the slit you can see you can just barely see the beginning of the boat tail right there at the bottom of the neck where the shoulder starts so this would be a suitable length with this bullet we've got plenty of contact between the bearing surface of the bullet and the neck and what's really cool is that if we grab our magazine and drop this guy in there we've got still tons of room to play with these guys go down in there no problem at all and from everything I can tell looking at like the little feed ramp in front of the magazine I think they're going to feed fine so this seems totally doable in this gun totally doable now I tested 8 million bullets here like 15 different bullets and as you get lighter with bullets and they get shorter there were a lot of them where there really wasn't enough bullet below the case mouth to make it you know a usable length you know you got a seat enough down in there to where you got enough contact to keep your bullet from moving around so the heavier bullets seemed fine yeah just like this 143 that that's that's totally shootable here's the list of maximum overall links I found the shortest was the hundred and thirty grain Sierra game King at two point seven oh five and the longest was actually the Nosler a cue bond long range at two point nine thirty six so if you can't already tell I'm pretty excited about this magazine configuration in this gun I think it is gonna make for a fun little reloading platform not being limited in our overall length right well you know with a bolt gun it's always a it's always an option to just single feed them but that's annoying to find a really good shooting load and then not be able to use the magazine so at least in this gun no matter what load we find by god they're gonna fit in the magazine so back to our brass the only thing left to do before we can start priming is a little deeper and chamfer on the case mouth a little on the outside a little on the inside and also I'm probably gonna grab a q-tip just to be certain there's no residual Lube left inside of the neck and that guy is ready for a primer so let me get these guys finished up and we'll be ready to ready to prime alright folks I think we should switch up the plan earlier in the video when we were talking about load data 143 grain al DX we were going to shoot it at a 2.8 inch overall length which is what the Hornady manual yep that's what the Hornady manual recommends is 2.8 inches now that we know our maximum overall length with that bullet is 2.9 1 5 so instead of shooting to different charge weights 39.5 grains of H 43 50 and 40 point 5 let's instead shoot the same charge wait but switch our overall length so we'll do a five shot group at two point eight inches of overall length let's do another five shot group at two point nine inches so that'll be the first group we'll have about a hundred and fifteen thousands of jump and the second will have about fifteen thousand sub jump that sounds like fun so let me review the load data here yeah let's go with the 40.5 charge weight so that's what we'll do rule will stick with 40 point five and we'll have a two point eight and a two point nine overall length that'll be fun that way during the gun testing video I want to be able to show that the SuperDuper long cartridges will actually work in the gun and I want to have some rounds to actually try to feed through the gun to make sure they're gonna feed just as smooth as the short ones so that'll be good for that test all right finally let's get to some priming we've got our CCI 450 primers I'm going to use my RCBS hand priming tool the other Starline brass I've been using and it's had pretty decent primer pockets so I'm expecting the same out of these first primer got a little bit sideways on me there so let's yeah that felt just fine pretty smooth reasonably tight I always brush over them with my finger just to make sure I got them all the way down in there all right good stuff let me finish these up we'll be ready for some powder so I'm starting things off here with reloader 17 laying out our first charges of 41.0 grains using the Lyman Gen 6 powder dispenser to throw them just a little bit light and then trickling up the last little bit here with a trickler I'm not really going to obsess over these powder charges and you know worried about getting them measured down to the last granule but I want them to be very close and the case Phil looks really nice here with reloader 17 here our first charge of 41 grains our case fill here with our first charge 41 grains of real odor 17 it'll be hard to show you but it's a little bit below the shoulder but a pretty nice full case good deal so our first 5 charges are weighed out it's time to see our first bullets alright so our first bullet is gonna be the hundred and twenty nine grain Hornady interlock so before we can really get started we need to look and see which one of the seeding stems works best with this bullet you know I think the second stem that came with the seeding die is the one that fits this guy the best none of them are perfect but this one's good enough to be honest all three of them are probably just fine but since we've got three we might as well pick the best one we can so I'm going to start out with our you know our adjustment stem is just barely threaded in here I think I mentioned earlier the instructions seem to imply that this seeding die is a generic point five millimeter seating dive so the instructions on how to set this guy up tell you to put a case in your shell holder and run it to the top of the stroke and then you just screw in your die until you feel it make contact with the case there we go I feel it make contact and that is the crimp engaging so they tell you to back it out at least one turn and tighten down your lock ring so there we go so let's go ahead and feed it up in there with a bullet I don't expect it to make contact it's not so with the bullet and everything up in there I'm gonna go ahead and screw this guy down until I feel it start to touch there it is and I'll drop the RAM and go like on a full turn there so that should have actually started the seeding process yep there it is but as you can tell we are about a mile and a half long still so let's go ahead and go yeah there's two full turns getting closer to the can lure but not quite there another full turn and a half hopefully that wasn't too far now we're getting really close to it so let me go ahead and just lightly tighten down the adjustment lock ring thingy and let's get an overall length measurement our target here is two point six nine zero this guy's coming out to two point seven zero two good so we're only ten thousandths long right now now a soft point bullet with the tip like this always shows some variation in overall length like the tips get smushed in the box and you got a seat a couple and take a bit of an average you can also measure overall length with the Hornady bullet comparator which this is actually a 22 but yeah whatever but they've got an appropriate size insert it goes over the bullet and you measure overall length from the cartridge base to the ogive which is a much more consistent number we might do that here in just a couple minutes but here for the first one we'll just we'll just measure it the old-fashioned way two point seven or seven that one's just a touch longer we'll seek one more before we take our average two point seven or seven so our last two were two point seven oh seven and the first one was two point seven or two but it clearly kind of has a little bit of a buggered up nose so the two that are two point seven or seven those are what I'm going to use to set it so we need to come down seventeen thousandth go give it a little bit of a tweak two point seven oh one a little bit farther two point six nine one that is pretty much perfect so tell you what if I just tighten this guy down a little bit make sure we don't move that'll probably account for that last one thousandth of an inch actually it might be just a touch short but it'll be close enough to point six nine zero two point six nine zero and this one should be a little bit short because of the boogered up nose yep two point six eight five let me seat these last two and then I'll pull out the bullet comparator and we'll see how consistent they how consistent they read to the ogive it's a measure to the tip this is our longest guy at two point six nine two and our shortest guy was the first one at two point six eight five so 7 thousandths of variation in overall length here but it's all completely accounted for by the soft tip crap I thought I'd ordered one of these I don't know where it's at the basic yeah this is a good tip for you maybe if you're getting into 6.5 Creedmoor and you're about to buy the bullet comparator set it does not come with the six point five insert it comes with everything else it comes with six of them that cover basically all of your comments off except for 6.5 I thought I bought one but I can't find it so I'll have to get one of those ordered but there's nothing wrong with measuring overall length the old-fashioned way so that's what we will so that's just what we'll do all right our first five rounds ready to fire I need an ammo box all right this one has a couple couple 308 rounds in it but that won't hurt anything all right I need to keep bond weighing out powder charges all right so I seated our second row of five with the 129 Green Hornady interlocked so I'm ready to switch over to the hundred and thirty grain Sierra game King and I think at this same time I'm gonna switch over and try to start using the micro just seating adjustment stem so the standard adjustment here on the Hornady was good we have plenty of remaining adjustment room right right like lot lots of threads here so this standard adjuster worked just great so nothing to complain about there what I'm trying to decide is whether I should go ahead and put this rubber washer under this one or as well or whether I would you know rather have just the metal on metal contact I think I want the metal on metal I want to lock this guy down and don't want it moving on me so that seems like the best way to go about it so except for screwing that out and put them this one in I mean I think that's it like it would be ready to use just like this there's no adjustment needed on the main die body but here on the die there is a you know graduated measurement thingy and I cannot see it the way it is right now I think it's on the backside so I am going to go ahead and loosen up the die and bring it out there it is now we can see our adjustments so that was about an additional quarter turned out on the die to get that to line up properly so let me take one of our completed rounds here's one of our completed rounds with 129 grain interlocked I'm gonna run it up into the die this is backed out there we go as far as it goes so let me run this guy up in there and then I'll screw this down until I feel a touch just to get an idea of about where this would have been on the interlock there it is I just felt it so it looks like just below the 4 here which is if you notice the range which you probably can't read because of crappy camera work and glare on the die and stuff but the readings go from 0 to 8 and with the interlock we would have been right about 4 so right in the middle of the adjustment range would have been perfect so now let's back it out a little bit so here is our the first one or 130 green Sierra game King loads the overall length on these guys is going to be two point six seven zero doesn't feel like we made any contact so I'll go ahead and bring this guy down until I feel it touch which it's kind of feeling smushy so I think it's probably is actually touching just a little yep it sure is so I'll tell you what let me every rotation is 50 thousandths so I've got this guy zeroed out now let me take an overall measurement length that is two point seven eight five that's good we've got over a hundred thousandths to play with but so it's 2.75 I tell you what I'll go ahead and zero this and let's go down one full rotation on the die which should be 50 thousandths there we go so that should be fifty thousand shorter now we should read negative 50 neg 49 five sweet so that half a thousandth there would just be you know a little bit of error in my reading so it looks like this is going to track properly hopefully so let's go one additional turn see if it does the same magic again okay there it is should be negative 100 now neg 98.5 that is totally inside of acceptable that's actually really really good so now that we trust in the readings here our overall length right now is two point six eight seven our target is two point six seven zero so we're seventeen thousands long I should be able to dial in exactly 17 thousandth there's 10 there's fifteen sixteen seventeen or pretty close to it two point six seven zero brother right on the number outstanding so I'll go ahead and seat the rest of this row and see what sort of consistency we're getting here with the Sierra two point six six seven two point six seven one two point six six seven two point six six nine and two point six seven zero so close enough if I had this stupid insert for my comparator I could show you that these are most likely right on the money when it comes to you know cartridge base to ogive but I don't so whatever it's not the sort of thing I'm going to lose any sleep over especially whenever you know we're shooting recommended overall length with this bullet I think we're looking at thirty or forty thousands jumped to the lands so a couple thousandths never hurt anybody now I'm not crimping at all this bullet and 143 grain eld X were about to see don't have a can lure and generally in a bolt-action rifle bullets with no canler I'm not going to cramp anyway but back to 129 grain interlock that did have a candle or I didn't crimp those either but I did go ahead and order a li factory crimp dye for 6.5 Creedmoor I haven't received it yet so will might play around a little bit with crimp in the future but for a bolt action like this it's it's the least of my worries not something I'm gonna freak out about all right so I need to switch powders over to H 4350 and get some charges weighed out I'll tell you what the 5-minute opinion here of the Hornady bullet seeing dye and the micro just seeding stem thumbs-up so far man it seemed to do exactly what I was wanting and this package the custom grade dyes and that micro just seating micrometer are just there man that's a real really affordable package with some pretty gold pretty cool features all right I need to weigh some more powder alright since we're only shooting 10 rounds with H 4350 just going with a little Lee's scoop here from the 2.8 CC scoop gets me right in the ballpark our charge weight is forty forty point five this has given me right about 40 then I'll just trickle in another half grain and that's close enough like I said just using my cheap scale reading to a tenth of a grain you know trying to get them as close as I can but I'm not agonize over every kernel or every you know two one hundredths of a grain like we might with with the other scales all right so this is 143 grain eld X and if you remember this seating stem is a perfect fit for it we need to swap it in there and I'm trying to decide the best way to go about this I'm wondering if we can do it in the press without removing the die hopefully we can so off comes the seating stem let's see if we can just poke an Allen wrench up there and get it high enough to get a hold of yes just barely come on there we go and I guess this goes back to my comment earlier about so I'm dropping in the new seating stem hopefully over time dropping it in like this doesn't bugger it up yeah so it's in there it went down in the hole that it's supposed to go into and back on goes our micrometer adjuster thingy and we're ready to rock so I'll go ahead and back this guy out a little bit we'll go out to the number six and see where that puts us yep felt like it did make some contact so let's see where we're sitting right now 3.0 to 2 so let's go ahead and shoot for 2.9 first remember we're doing two point nine inches and two point eight inches so let's try and go a hundred and twenty thousands which should still leave us a couple thousands long so one rotation is fifty two rotations is a hundred and there's twenty so let's see if that's just about right sweet two point nine zero five so we're five thousand so long let me go ahead and seat a couple more so we can get a couple readings an average two point nine zero five two point nine zero three yeah two point nine zero nine 2.90 two and two point nine zero four so I want to go down four thousandths this isn't the easiest thing to read you kind of even got to get up on it to see the numbers but they seem to be accurate let me run these guys through one more time two point nine two point eight nine nine two point eight nine eight two point nine and this last one should be our long one that weirdly long one yeah two point nine zero four so we just happen to have one that's a little bit weird so two turns of the die should take us down one hundred thousandths which is where we need to be so there's one and there's two two point eight zero one fantastic fan flip antastic yep so we got a two point seven nine eight an eight zero one an eight zero one an eight zero four and A two point eight close enough all right folks that's going to conclude this video we've got our thirty hand loads put together and we're ready for the next video which is going to be the gun overview and initial accuracy tests and break-in and trigger adjustments and although the guns specific crap overall I'm very pleased with the equipment that that I bought the Hornady dies I don't have anything to complain about yet I really need to get that bullet insert so we can take more precise overall length measurements I'm going to do that today I'm gonna order it today that'll that'll allow us to evaluate that Hornady seating diet a little bit closer but man it is looking good so far the micro just is right on the money so nothing to complain about so if you'd like to help support my channel you can come to you patreon.com slash reloading we're seeing a strange phenomenon over on patreon everybody who supports me shoots tighter groups immediately we don't have a good explanation yet but it seems to be happening all of the crap I use today I will have links down in the description so that you can go buy it yourself and most of those links are affiliate links to places like Brownells matches shooter supplies amazon.com and if you follow my links and make a purchase they'll give me a couple pennies on the dollar for the referral same price for you we all win brother now I'm not saying spending any more money than you need to if you find a better price at Midway or mid-south shooter supplies then go for it brother I'm just saying if you happen to already be planning to shop at one of my places then hey why not click on my link so I'll see you guys next time this will be going this video will be going up first the shooting video should be up immediately like I'm either gonna put them up at the same time or the shooting video might be a day later but you shouldn't have to wait long so I'll see you guys next time

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 234,763

Keywords: guns, shooting, reloading, 6.5 Creedmoor

Id: 28NI-eaOI18

Length: 70min 39sec (4239 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2017