6mm ARC - Getting started with reloading

okay folks welcome back it's time to get started with the six millimeter arc this is a new cartridge from hornady designed to shoot heavy six millimeter bullets out of the ar-15 platform you might be surprised that i would tackle another one of these because we didn't have much luck with the 22 nozzler we didn't have much luck with the 224 valkyrie so i really wasn't planning to take on any new ar-15 cartridges anytime soon but this one man it really piqued my interest because the alternative chambering for the ar-15 that i've had the most luck with is 6.5 grendel and while this this six arc isn't like a you know a six millimeter version of the 6'5 grendel it's got a lot in common which we'll look at closer here in just a second i've got a whole bunch of different cartridges to show you and compare the six millimeter arc with which i'll tell you what let's do that first okay so these three cartridges are the 6.5 grendel the six millimeter arc and the six ppc now the six ppc is the king of bench rest shooting hundred yard bench rest or i guess i should say short range bench rest i think they shoot 200 yards as well you might have seen me do some videos on six ppc with my grandfather's old bench rest rifle just an absolutely ridiculously accurate cartridge so the six millimeter arc little bit longer body of the case a little bit more taper it looks like and a little bit shorter neck if you look at the the brass overall length it's pretty close so this guy's got a little bit more neck to it and if we look at it compared to the 6.5 grindel that shoulder is a little bit lower brass length is a little bit shorter and i'm not sure if it's just because this is the shinier piece but it looks like uh diameter might be a little bit smaller below the shoulder tell you what let me measure that real quick thinking that might just be an optical illusion yep that's exactly what it is the six arc only measures about two thousandths of an inch smaller than the other two right below the shoulder so never mind so they're all pretty close these all share the same parent case which is the 220 russian now that's a little bit bigger then this guy right here is a 6.8 spc so you can see it's a good bit smaller and then actually there's a piece of just plain old 223 there so these three different case head sizes are going to use different bolts and we're going to talk quite a bit more about the bolts here in just a minute because it might be a good reason for you to avoid this six millimeter arc cartridge so we're going to test the case capacities here in a minute by but i expect it to fall within the range of the grendel and the ppc so let's move on to a different comparison so with this comparison it might be hard to explain what the hell i'm getting at here but these are six different cartridges made for the ar15 and if you remember we're always we're limited by that 2.260 inch overall length which is our magazine length right so on the left here are some 22 caliber stuff so you got good old standard 223 this is the 22 nosler and this is the 224 valkyrie so in the two on the left the this is the 77 grain sierra match king which is a perfect heavy bullet for those two cartridges if you go much heavier then you run into problems where you need to exceed that 2.260 inch overall length to fit the bullet in there now the 224 valkyrie came out this is the 90 grain sierra match king and it was designed to fit that bullet perfectly now the 224 valkyrie also uses a different bolt right the two on the left use the standard 223 bolt and the 224 valkyrie uses the 6.8 spc bolt the middle size bolt and the 22 nozzler got around using a bigger bolt by having a rebated uh rim yeah there you go you can see the rim is smaller than the rest of the cartridge this was a terrible decision on their part because that was the biggest problem with the 22 nozzler is we couldn't keep brass together for reloading right the case heads were getting chewed up that's a whole lot of pressure on that tiny little case head and then with our testing of the 224 valkyrie we had a really tough time with primer pockets getting loose so we could only get one or two firings on brass before we started having issues it's been a little while since i've checked in on the communities for those cartridges to kind of see if there's been any new information new brass available something like that that helped the situation i've been out of the loop a little bit but with the 22 nozzler we did switch to the larger bolt got rid of the rebated uh rim we used this stuff right here which is six millimeter hager brass and we formed it to fit in the 22 nozzler chamber and that gave us the larger case head to work with and that kind of fixes the the issues with that cartridge but i'm not really sure where things stand with the valkyrie okay i kind of got off on a tangent there over here on the right this is a piece of 6.8 spc brass i don't have any bullets or i'd seat one in there so you can see what's going on but yeah that's a 6.8 spc the one to the right is a cartridge we tested last year also a six millimeter cartridge for the ar-15 the six millimeter woa from white oak armament which to oversimplify matters is a 6.8 spc necked down to six millimeter and the shoulder angle was changed to a 30 30 degree shoulder i think the spc is like 23 degrees i yeah i think whatever something like that but the shoulder angle was increased now if we look on the right this is our six millimeter arc you can see a much lower shoulder and a whole lot more room for a big heavy bullet so this is a this is a 105 grain hornady bullet in there this is a piece of factory ammo for the six arc and this here is an 85 grain bullet which when we were testing the six millimeter woa we focused on that 85 to 95 grain bullet range we did try out the 107 grain sierra match king and i think we did the uh 103 grain hornady eldx but it was just you know the bullets are too dang long for this cartridge we were either have to we either either had to shoot them at longer than magazine length or we had to seed them so low that the oh drive of the bullet was below the case mouth so the sweet spot as far as weight here maybe around 90 85 to 95 grains we had a lot of luck with the 90 grain sierra game changer in the six millimeter woa but with the six millimeter arc we've just we've got a whole lot more room to work with really heavy bullets and that's what this cartridge is all about the factory ammo they've got available right now is the 105 grain boat tail hollow point they've got a that's like their what they call their hornady black which is what this is their hornady match ammo uses the 108 grain eld match so big heavy bullets are what this cartridge is all about so if you are primarily looking at this to shoot light bullets for varmint hunting it might not be the best choice for you all right i think that covers it for the most part there's our there's our grendel that's really my hope i hope we have as much success with this cartridge as we've had with the 6.5 grendel and if we do then this six millimeter arc might be a pretty darn good option for folks who want to mess around at long range and also want something they can deer hunt with for reasonably short range you know like we're going to be limited by velocity that's that's the biggest frustration sometimes with the 6'5 grendel as well like man if we just had a couple hundred more feet per second performance would be a whole lot better but it is what it is you know we're working with a restricted platform we only have so much magazine length to work with and there's just only so much velocity we're going to get but i imagine like the six arc is probably going to be a great white tail deer cartridge for 3 400 yards or so you know maybe 500 that's the same with the 6'5 grendel and the thing is that's more than i need hey guys this is me from the future i was editing this video and realized i forgot to talk about case capacity the easiest way that i know of to measure case capacity is to to take a weight of an empty piece of brass either record that weight or tear your scale and then fill the case full of water and then take another weight and calculate how many grains of water the case held so i compared four of the cartridges we talked about and these numbers i got were from fired brass because that's what i had handy and this number will change a bit depending on you know the the brand of brass you're using and if i was using resize brass the numbers would be just a little bit smaller right so these numbers aren't you know absolute a little bit of wiggle room here but these are the numbers i came up with the six millimeter woa held 34.6 the 6ppc held 33.6 the 6 arc held 34.0 and the 6'5 grendel held 36.1 nothing too surprising here i was surprised that the ppc was that close to the arc you know only found four tenths of a grain of water difference between the two but if you remember like the brass length is pretty much the same between the two cases so six ppc gets a little more extra water in there just because of that long neck while the length of the neck doesn't necessarily give you more room for powder in the context we're talking about right but even still we would only be talking about a couple tenths you know i was also curious to see how close the six woa and the six arc would be you know the 6wa is so much longer the body of the case is so much longer but it's got that smaller 6.8 spc sized case body so you can see how quickly the arc kind of catches up pretty close to it just with that larger bodied parent case so that's about it just wanted to kind of splice this in here where it belongs in the video all right did i make that shot bright enough can you see the faces of these bolts well what we got here these two on the right are my 6.5 grendel bolts this is a 6.8 spc bolt and then this one over here is a standard 223 bolt now if we take out the one in the middle as far as size goes i really should have grabbed a 223 bolt that had some wear on it this is a new one and it's kind of hard to see hold on one second let me go grab a different one okay that makes it easier to see spot to focus on is the thickness right around here look how thin that area is on a grendel bolt and if we bring the 6.8 spc bolt back into the mix you'll see that it's kind of in the middle so nice and beefy a little bit thinner and then we're starting to get like alarmingly thin okay then if we tilt them up and have a look at where you know where the lugs are on the bolt you can imagine how much weaker this must be with so little material behind it when compared to like the 223 with lots of meat behind it so this has always been one of the biggest worries when it comes to the 6.5 grendel and these same concerns are going to carry forward to the six millimeter arc now this is the bolt i'll be using in these videos this is a maxim bolt even back to when i first uh started building my first 6.5 grindel i always heard good things about maxum bolts so whenever i decided to get one i got a maxim but my first grindel barrel came with a bolt it was a barrel from brownells made by saturn i think so i have no idea who made this bolt it came with it and if you go back to my first couple of 6.5 grendel videos years back we had big problems with this stupid bolt but they had to do with the extractor so way back then we ended up having to take a dremel tool and round off some of the edges on the extractor to get it to reliably extract cartridges so i was always a little cautious of this bolt i figured it would be a piece of crap if they couldn't figure out how to get it to extract then it was only a matter of time before i ended up shearing off uh some lugs and over time i've kept an eye on the lugs like i still don't see any problems with this bolt it still works just fine so this is the one i'm currently running in my in my 6.5 grendel and then we're going to use the maxim bolt here in the six millimeter arc so if you're building a six millimeter arc and you're reading about potential bolt problems and you're a little bit freaked out then maybe go with a maxim bolt or a jp so the maximum is about is about 75 bucks and a jp yeah a jp enhanced bolt is about 140 bucks so jp bolts are very expensive but most people seem to think they're good now there is a fourth type of bolt and that's the 762 by 39 bolt which the case head diameter is the same as the grendel bolt but the grendel bolt is a little bit deeper yeah the grindel is actually about 12 thousandths deeper yep just measuring the bolt face depth so the grendel bolt you'll also sometimes see it called a type 2 bolt as far as i know this is the one we're supposed to be using with the six millimeter arc and anywhere you go if you just buy a bolt that's that's labeled a grendel bolt it's going to be the grendel bolt face depth of the you know sami spec grendel now if you decide the six millimeter arc isn't what you want and you're going to go off into wildcat land which there are a lot like the six millimeter ar the six millimeter grendel the 243 lbc like i think all of those are based on the same cartridge but some of them may end up using the type 1 bolt with the shallower deep or shallower bolt face i think the lbc series of stuff uses the the shallower 762 by 39 bolt face all right that's yeah i don't know don't take my word on any of that but just be careful now you might be saying to yourself dude we're here for reloading info we don't really care about bolts what the hell are you talking about bolts for well i wanted to show you the difference because there's something i want to show you there's something i want to read to you so let's jump over the computer okay so i've got something i want to read for you here it's a blog post on the white oak armament website if you're not familiar with white oak armament we're big fans of them here bought several of their barrels we actually worked with them on that six millimeter woa project i was talking about from last year well they posted this blog post which is kind of just their thoughts on the six millimeter arc and just to provide some background they've never offered 6.5 grendel barrels and from asking them about that in the past i got the feeling that it really had to do with the bolts and you know concerns about durability and another thing i should mention is white oak is all about building uppers and barrels and stuff for high power competition so just keep that in mind they're very focused on stuff for use in competition so let's go ahead and read we have been getting a lot of calls and emails in the last week or so asking if we are chambering barrels for the new hornady six millimeter arc while we have not yet made a decision about six millimeter arc we are quite familiar with the various six millimeter cartridges that are designed to work through the ar-15 platform and the limitations and advantages of most of them the idea of six millimeter cartridge with a case capacity in the 27 to 30 grain range out of the ar-15 is a great idea with a ton of versatility you can shoot anything from a light varmint bullet at well over 3 400 feet per second for varmints to a long 108 or 107 at 2700 for long range target work or an 87 to 95 for an effective hunting round with the accuracy and terminal performance to take medium game out to 500 yards sorry but while you may be able to hit one at much longer ranges you will not have the terminal velocity for effective bullet performance and good kills past that range many such cartridges have been developed most based on either the 6.8 spc case with its .420 head diameter or the 762 by 39 case with a .440 head size hornady chose to go with the larger 440 head size for the six millimeter arc cartridge we have built many rifles in various wildcat cartridges on the 440 head size case as well as the 264 lbc what we found is that they just do not give the reliability and longevity that we as target shooters need at the pressures that we typically shoot in the crucible of competitive high power shooting where we tend to tip the powder can to the limit of what the case will hold they just did not hold up other gunsmiths built them and had success with them but lugs set back and breakage was at a level that i was personally uncomfortable with at that time i made the decision to not chamber for the 440 head size cartridges in addition i feel there are other cartridges that are better for the specific demands of the across the course match rifle shooter hornady confirmed my feelings by limiting the new cartridge to 52 000 psi max pressure at that pressure bolts and barrel extensions should last a long time start tipping the powder can and all bets are off if you are one to add powder until primers fall out then back off slightly don't expect to keep all the lugs on your bolt if you shoot a lot at this time our plan is to get a reamer and make up a few barrels to torture test them i will have to be convinced that the reliability and longevity are there before we start selling them to our customers we will keep you informed so that's why i've spent a few minutes talking about bolts there and if we go to the sami drawing for the six millimeter arc which by the way i don't think i mentioned it earlier that's a big reason why i'll take a chance on this cartridge while some of the other six millimeter wildcats which i don't know maybe they're better i don't know i haven't tried them but this one is a sami cartridge which means if it's if it's successful then gun makers are going to make guns and ammo makers are going to make ammo and it won't just be limited to those with the with the desire to get into a wildcat but one thing white oak mentioned was this yeah maximum average pressure 52 000 psi it's the same as the 6.5 grendel and back when i first built you know my first grendel man we did some dumb stuff there wasn't a whole lot of load data published at that point and we were just kind of experimenting and trying different things and you know as reloaders a lot of times pressure signs are what you have to go by when you're loading with with no published load data and we shot some really hot rounds way way way too hot we tore up a whole lot of brass i mean luckily i i still have not had a bolt failure of any sort you saw my two bolts those are the only bolts i've ever shot in the grendel and both of them are in pretty good shape still so they survived some pretty dumb stuff which makes me feel more confident going into this six millimeter arc but as this project moves forward you know we will always be keeping in mind that 52 000 psi limit and it just is what it is like since more published data has come out for the grendel over the years you know i've started trying to stick somewhat close to it and my brass life is a whole lot better and the groups are good and the gun runs well and and all of that stuff so we're going to see what we can get out of this six millimeter arc but i'm not going to push it like an idiot very often okay we might push it like an idiot a few times but we're not going to consistently constantly push it like an idiot so hornady has released some load data just this one sheet as far as i know is all we've got to work with so far and it is for the 108 and 110 grain bullets but there's an interesting little note here it says this six millimeter arc reloading data is intended for use in gas guns and kept to a maximum pressure of 52 000 psi do not exceed the maximum charges separate data will be provided for bolt action firearms pretty interesting so they're telling us okay you know the cartridge can handle it but your gun can't now if we look down here these velocities are really lame like kind to slow right they got up to 2575 with cfe 223 and lever evolution but most of these others are 2400 to 2500. well i already shot some of the 105 grain factory ammo through my gun we're going to talk about that here in just a few minutes but we were seeing muzzle velocities right around 2640. now that's a little bit lighter bullet right three to five grains lighter than these two here but i mean is three grains lighter bullet gonna give us an additional 150 feet per second i don't think so or at least 65 feet per second when it comes to cfe223 and levre evolution i don't know i mean that's why we're going to have to test now the cool thing though is for at least for our specific situation is their test barrel is an 18 inch barrel a noveske 18 inch which is good and their test twist is a one and seven and a half twist which is the same twist that i got so it's good to have a baseline here the powder list is excellent like these are some of our very favorite powders every powder that is on the list which we'll talk about more in more detail here in just a few minutes the only one i don't have on hand like in you know in my stockpile is normal 202 so all of the other powders i've got we'll be able to test as many as we need to find something that works for us and really happy to see some slower options here like power pro 2000 mr yeah there it is power pro 2000 mr and we've got other options powders that aren't on the list that are kind of in that burn speed range that we'll probably be giving a try holy crap can we start reloading yet we're almost there so i just wanted to walk you through the upper really quick i do have an odinworks bolt carrier group that i'm using and as we already mentioned the maxim bolt so that's the bolt carrier group set up the barrel is an odin works 18 inch one in 7.5 twist the hand guard is an odin works roon 15.2 inch the upper is a standard aero precision upper so this is just their standard what m4 not their m4e1 like some of the other aero precision uppers we've got this is just a standard i guess mil-spec upper receiver so you know nothing nothing too fancy here i did uh i went with odin works for a couple reasons our 22 nosler barrel was an odin works and it's shot really well still does but up to this point i still haven't shot that cartridge enough to really give it a good workout so i wanted to go with it here in the six millimeter arc just to kind of give them another chance like i mentioned this is an 18 inch barrel and if you notice the gas block sticking out in front of this 15.2 inch hand guard this has an extra long gas system this was another big selling point for me because i like to shoot suppressed most of the time and i thought the extra the extra long gas system would pair nicely with a suppressor so the odinworks barrels i think most of them come with this they call it a tunable gas block they also sell what they call an adjustable gas block that i guess is a little bit easier to adjust this is adjustable but it's a pain in the butt to adjust yep one of the holes here in the front you got like an adjustment screw plus a lock screw that goes and just locks down right on top of it so it's not one that you really want to play around with too much we have already been on the range with this i put uh 80 rounds of factory ammo through it and we had the we had the gas block adjusted really quickly and it was shooting and cycling pretty darn well both with and without the suppressor so that's pretty much it this scope is going to stay on this guy for a while it's a vortex viper hs 6 to 24 by 50 and this base i think it is yeah this one is an ar stoner this is the first time i've tried one of these ar stoner cantilever bases so we'll see how it goes we've got other scopes in more proven mounts if you know if the gun won't shoot then we'll throw a different scope on it and find one that will or at least rule out the scope as a possible problem well like i mentioned so a couple things that we learned on the range trip i'm not going to include any of the footage in this video because i had camera problems recording problems and the footage is garbage you might have seen it i actually live streamed it on twitch and i uploaded the live stream here to the youtube channel so if you watch that you know kind of what happened with the video footage it's garbage but we did run into a couple different issues the biggest one that we ran into is so this is the ammo this is the only ammo i could find and we just need brass right so i bought five boxes of this stuff this is the hornady black 105 grain bow tilt hollow point and the problem we ran into which other people have reported the exact same problem is that whenever you chamber one of these factory rounds it actually jams into the lands and you can't eject it like it it seems to be pretty darn close which we're going to test like uh maximum overall length with this exact same bullet the 105 grain bottle hollow point yep got a box of them right here so we're going to look and see exactly when these hit the lands and just how far this factory ammo is jamming into the lands see i ended up getting one stuck and then i was trying to get it out and then i couldn't get it back into battery i ended up having to pound it out from the muzzle end with a cleaning rod it came out easy like i said the bullets aren't like sticking in there like crazy but it's enough that you know the case pulled out of the bullet pulled out of the case powder went everywhere and it's a big mess now the other problem i've been out of things for a while now folks i haven't made a video in forever and i just really haven't been following what the hell is going on so i'm sure this has been talked about i think somebody in the live stream mentioned that it was early lots of this uh ammo that we're having issues so i i don't know we'll we'll look at them closer here in just a few minutes and like i said we'll we'll play around with that 105 grainer and all of the others and see what sort of overall links we should be shooting because these are a little bit too long that was really the main problem otherwise the gun ran fantastic most of our groups were decent they were you know a little over an inch we kind of had some flyers and some crazy stuff which i guess we could review the targets on the shop marker yeah let's do that let's jump back to the computer and i'll show you the targets on shop marker okay so here's our shop marker window let's uh go up here to our previous targets so the very first group this one right here was terrible it was a three and a half inch group well as it turned out my suppressor was loose so this was a completely worthless uh group so let's close it let's go to our second group and that was much better so we had five shots that went into 1.15 inches if we hide the fifth real quick just uh you know that's the one that's out of the main group yep the best four went into 0.67 inches that's pretty good shooting so let's close that one and go to our third group there we go five shots into one point three four inches i guess i could zoom in a little bit there we go yep yep nope there we go so four of them good and then one that was out just a little bit but still you know for factory ammo that's not terrible at all yep let's not save that change then this next one is a 17 shot group that was 2.52 inches let's hide this one little guy that went way the heck out so 16 shots into an inch and a half you know that's that's not bad for factory ammo and see here's a 20 shot group things opened up a little bit we did do some rapid fire shooting like i was loading up 10 rounds and shooting them as fast as we could by this point it was just a matter of dumping rounds to get the brass so once we kind of had an idea of how this stuff was grouping a lot of this was just messing around to be quite honest with you and you know still 20 rounds of screwing around it was a little over two inches i'm cool with that and let's see there's a five shot group into 1.02 inches and then the last group got some hidden shots here i don't remember why i hid those let's unhide those yeah that's weird okay i think that's all of them uh hang on this doesn't even have a box around it there it is 1.86 inches that was 15 shots so you know you kind of get the idea a little over an inch it was kind of trying to group but then again it was factory ammo that was jamming into the lands and plus we were screwing around a little bit not taking it all that seriously now velocities were pretty good like on the the lab radar chronograph i had recorded six different strings the lowest was 26 31 the highest was 26.47 all of the standard deviations were in the teens except for the first one which was 22.7 so let's call it 2640 and then you know like uh yeah that standard deviation of maybe an average of about 15. not exactly great stuff but that's about what i would expect from some factory ammo and that velocity of 2640 like we already mentioned earlier is going to be hard to duplicate if the uh yeah let's go back over to the load data here yeah so these these velocity numbers are a good bit lower than 2640 so we might have our work cut out for us okay so i think we can finally get started with some freaking reloading here as i mentioned the whole point of getting all that factory ammo was getting brass because brass just hasn't hit the market i'm still waiting on brass that i ordered at the same time that i ordered the barrel which was months ago so i guess all of hornady's brass is going into making factory ammo so there's a nice shiny box of 50 and here is 29 more we're missing that one because that's the one where the bullet jammed into the lands and we had to yank it out of there yep this is actually that guy right here and still got the primer in it but we're going to find a use for that guy here in just a second as you might be able to tell i've already wet tumbled these so i used a universal de-capping die to pop out all of the primers and then ran them in a wet tumbler for about an hour so they're all nice and shiny and clean now one thing you may have noticed when we were looking at the gun i am getting some pretty hard hits on the brass deflector there so i don't know if it's gas is still set a little bit too hot or i might just put a freaking uh piece of felt or like half of a piece of velcro there or something just to soften the blow but definitely getting some brass dings let me see if i can find a piece that took a pretty good hit here's a piece there we go you know nothing terrible nothing terrible at all just a lot of them got dings and we'll be handling this brass and you know messing with it a lot more as we go through the resizing and loading process but as of right now where all i did was decap them and tumble them i haven't found any bad pieces or pieces that are damaged to the point where they wouldn't be reloadable so we definitely did get some ejector marks on the brass yeah there you go right right at the top there at 12 o'clock you might see a little circle nothing bad like no no burrs raised up or anything crazy like that from the factory ammo just a little imprint of that bolt face nothing i'm going to worry about so that's what we're working with as far as brass goes now for bullets i've got more but i want to kind of keep the focus a little bit narrowed here because that's what i've run into in previous projects like this like here in the first video i'll shoot like 30 freaking bullets and 62 powders and it just ends up being a confusing mess i mean you get a lot of feedback as far as you know what bullet a gun might like or what powders might be giving better velocity but it just gets it gets to be a freaking mess so as you can see we've got three bullets from hornady the first is the same bullet that i showed you a second ago the one that is we've already seen in the factory ammo the 105 grain boat tell hollow point the other match bullet is the 108 grain eld match this is what they're going to be loading in their factory match ammo i believe i think some of that has made it out into the wild but i wasn't able to find any in stock to order some so whatever i really don't care at some point maybe we'll get a box just to see what their velocities look like but i am interested in the bullet and seeing how it's going to shoot in our six millimeter arc the last bullet here is the 103 grain eldx right the x stands for expanding so this is a hunting bullet to be honest like i want to see how it's going to shoot like i don't know we may find that for match purposes the gun prefers the 103 eldx over the 108 eld match whatever i mean they're they're both good bullets so you know whatever but i'm afraid that for hunting purposes we're not going to be able to get the velocity we would need out of 103 grain bullet to get that effective range we're looking for but we're going to test it we're going to see what sort of velocities we can get and we'll do some math and maybe we'll shoot some ballistic gel and all of that sort of stuff there's a lot of options in that 85 90 and 95 grain range like i mentioned earlier we had a lot of uh success with the six millimeter woa and the uh 90 grain was that a 90 or 95 i could never remember whatever but the uh yeah it was a 90 grain sierra game changer that bullet shot really well in that gun so we'll definitely be expanding the search for hunting bullets down to some lighter options the last bullet i want to test i wanted to get a sierra bullet because i love sierra bullets this is the 107 grain sierra match king yep that right there that should be a good bullet to compare with the 105 grain and the 108 grain that should be yeah that should be more than enough to get started with we might load up you know some of all of them we could probably just use the same load data for all of them so maybe that's what we'll do we'll pick a couple powders pick a couple charge weights and then just load all four bullets with each charge weight now for dies right now what i've got is the rcbs small base taper crimp set they call these their ar series yeah there you go see group ar dies these are you know so the sizing die is a small base resizing die but we've used these die kits quite a bit like uh there's a 224 valkyrie set can you even see my finger yeah you can see my finger there's a 300 blackout set we've got a thr we've got a we've got a 308 sizing die it says group a dies i don't remember if that's whatever but you get the point we've tried out these these series of dies and while they are small based dies like i haven't really found that they're oversizing our brass really bad or they're difficult to use or they're prone to stick cases or the brass life goes to crap because they they're all stretching because you're oversizing in you know that sort of stuff the stuff you might worry about if you choose a small base sizing die haven't really noticed it they've just been pretty good dies so we'll try those out i'll i have a set of hornady dies on order but they're stuck in back order with the brass so i tried to order a couple hundred pieces of brass plus a set of hornady dies and i never imagined that the brass would be back ordered for months so what i need to do i need to call up i think it was mid-south shooter supply where i ordered them and just have them go ahead and ship the stupid dies and either cancel the brass or separate the two whatever i need my dice right but for the time being this rcbs set will be just fine for us to get started with we'll deal with additional dyes later and comparing them and all of that stupid crap now the sizing die or the uh i'm sorry the bullet seating die in here we probably won't use it we'll probably use one of the hornady dies yeah we'll probably use the hornady die i'm trying to remember i think i bought one for six millimeter back door during the uh six millimeter woa project i'm not sure where that stupid thing went yeah whatever i'll look i'll look more later so what we need to do next well we need to size brass that's probably the the first step here but we also need to come up with a way to test our bullets and see how long we can load them so that's yeah that's what we'll do first let me go get a dremel tool okay folks so it's me from the future and there's a portion of this video that i'm going to cut out and it's the entire discussion about measuring maximum overall length for my chamber because i had absolutely nothing but problems what i did was took a resized piece of brass cut a slit down the throat and then we would set a bullet in it and then i would you know carefully chamber it you know letting the the rifling seat the bullet and then remove it and take an overall length measurement that's how i do it for most cartridges and i absolutely cannot get consistent readings out of this gun and even when i did think i was getting reasonably consistent readings later on in the video when we get to bullet seating there were a couple of the bullets where the overall length i chose wouldn't fit in the gun i had to see them shorter because they were hitting the lands like our factory ammo so this entire subject i'm going to be pushing it to the next video i'm going to try and get a hold of a modified case like this this is one for the 6.5 grendel this is a modified case for the hornady overall length gauge i haven't been able to find one in stock to order yet but i mean worst if i have to i'll take this one and see if i can form it to six arc and see if maybe with the hornady tool we can get better numbers more consistent readings than i was getting with my with my hillbilly method i don't really know what's going on so next video we'll think about it some more we'll test some more we'll pull out the borescope and look and see what's going on in there maybe compare it to a grendel and some other cartridges and see if maybe we can see if there's anything that could explain what i've been going through so that's where we'll leave that basically all of the discussion about overall length in this video is garbage all of the load data i'm going to show you on the screen is going to be the numbers that finally fit in my gun so if what you're seeing on the screen is not matching what i'm saying at that particular time just know that the text on the screen was put there at the end when i was editing it and that's what you should go by oh what a mess all right let's uh let's move right along so let's start out by removing the seating stem from this rcbs die there it is that's our seating stem and let's grab one of these 105 grain hornady bullets and see yeah that's not the world's worst fit it's not great but hopefully it's good enough so that we're not scaring up our bullets right so that's what we ran into with 6 woa as we were causing rings around the bullet where the seeding stem was making contact hopefully this will be better and this is a taper crimp seating die so we should be able to let me get the get that out of the way so we should be able to run this all the way up and then our seating stem i've got it backed out as far as it'll go okay i should be able to turn screw this down until i feel it touch and that will be the taper crimp touching the mouth of the case there it is right there so let's back off uh i don't know two turns we could probably read the instructions but whatever it doesn't really matter so now our seating stem we can go ahead and screw it down and it'll go down and make contact with the bullet there it is right there and i need to put the lock nut back on there these are pain in the ass to adjust i've become spoiled by using micro adjustable seating seating dies almost exclusively but these get the job done as well just a little bit harder to adjust so let's get a baseline number from this guy i'm reading 1.7 now my measurement said this needs to go all the way down to 1.715 so 35 thousandths we looked at the standard overall length 2.256 my measurement said it should be around 2.217 so that's a few more thousands than our ogive measurement whatever so hopefully what we can do is just bump this down slowly 1.752 is that what i said the first time yep it's 1.752 let me write that down so we've got it to where the stem is just barely touching the bullet so let's go down a half turn i don't have any idea how much i have how much a half turn is going to change it but it should be a little at least so let's see that and take another measurement all right that's a pretty good jump so that's we moved it 12 thousandths so now we're at 1.740 so let me grab the upper and we'll see if the cartridge will chamber so we're putting it in the same way we were doing earlier and it should go in and click pretty easy it clicked but it wasn't that easy i'll come out of there okay so it came out let's see if it pulled the bullet out nope we didn't pull the bullet out but it definitely still still jammed into the lands a little bit so that was 1.740 so this time let's go down a quarter of a turn all right that might be just a little bit more than a quarter of a turn okay okay so it came out to 1.730 try it again okay we want it to go in uh pretty dang freely and that seems to cool so let's go to the next one and seed it and we'll see if we get the same number yep we do 1.730 and that one also seems to be chambering pretty easy good so i'll tell you what i'm going to do i'm going to go ahead and run through the rest of this box of ammo and get them all done while we've got the die set up might as well okay let's move on for crying out loud i'm dying here let's do some actual reloading so first step is going to be to resize our brass so we got four different bullets i say we shoot uh 10 shots of each bullet we'll pick out two powders and we'll shoot five shot groups with each powder and bullet combination all right so i am going to use hornady one shot case lube this stuff the spray-on stuff a lot of people hate this stuff but i've had pretty good luck with it i had never used it before and i got this can in the kit with this hornady press and i thought yeah whatever i'll give it a shot like i had completely avoided it because everybody always told me it sucked and my favorite for a long time has been lanolin you know lanolin and alcohol blend which works great and i still love it but it is a bit greasy you know and what i normally end up doing with lanolin lube is lubing them sizing them and then tumbling them again just to get the lube off but this hornady one shot actually dries and doesn't really leave a greasiness behind you know and it says on here will not contaminate powder or primers i haven't run into any problems that i thought was powder contamination due to this stuff so i don't know that's what we're going to use you watch i'll freaking stick a case now i just had to open my mouth so they tell you you shoot it down at a 45 degree angle so you get some down into the case mouth and they tell you to make sure you get the entire side of the body you'll notice this loading tray here this is a frankfurt arsenal perfect fit reloading tray a number four fits these cases really nicely but you'll see like a good portion of the case is down in there i haven't run into any problems so just kind of lubing this upper part seems to be working out for me i don't know we'll see i'm really setting myself up for a stuck case like i i can just i can feel it coming small base dies not lubing the bottom half of the case using the lube that everybody hates i mean if i if i don't stick a case here i don't know what's going on i'm pretty liberal with it and flip it around and hit it again and then always make sure to give it plenty of time to dry this stuff dries pretty darn fast most of it but i like to let them sit for i don't know 15 20 30 minutes something like that the other thing that stuff says it's good for is for lubing your dies especially when you get a new uh a new die set you know these sit on the shelves for 25 years so most of the manufacturers are pretty liberal when it comes to the comes to oiling them up which i'm not complaining so i'm going to wipe this off with a paper towel and then shoot a little bit of one shot into it tell you what here's another thing i like about these rcbs dies the expander ball like the you know the bottom part of it here has got a nice taper to it so if you got cases like we do with dinged up case mouths it's pretty good about smoothly expanding them some of the ones that are a little bit uh more blunt can make life a little bit more difficult but the rcbs ones do a pretty nice job all right just a little uh all right so just a quick shot up inside of there maybe maybe a little bit on there and we'll call that good enough okay so our sizing dies about ready to go one thing about these rcbs is they have got a freaking decapping pin that's about two and a half feet long so that decapping pin really sticks out but you can see the beginning of the expander there is just about in the right spot so we're pretty much ready to size once we give this stuff just a minute to uh to dry a little bit more and i'll tell you what while we're doing that let me uh let me pull out the instructions yeah there we go ar series reloading dies okay so our sizing die instructions tell us to screw the die down until it touches the shell holder then drop the ram and go an additional quarter turn we're not going to do that and i'll show you why in just a second especially on this press what we need to do is take a measurement of our headspace so we've got a baseline to work with so the hornady headspace comparator kit kind of similar to that bullet comparator we were just using yeah these two pieces go together okay tighten that down and then throw it onto your calipers there we go so now what this is going to read is the distance from our cartridge base to a spot on the shoulder of our brass now this these kits comes with with several sizes this is the b350 now why did i choose a b350 if you look on the sami print you'll see there's a line drawn across the shoulder there that says .350 and these numbers are pretty standard so like you'll see 0.330 0.350 0.375 0.400 and these headspace comparators come in those sizes so that's what the size of that hole is right there so if we take a fired piece of brass well first of all what we need to do is zero out our calipers yeah if we take a fired piece of brass and get it fitted in there i'm getting 1.1915 if we move on to the next one it is 1.1915 and if we move on to the next one it is 1.191 this number should always come out very consistent because this brass has been fire formed to my chamber so they've all of the all of this brass has been fired with the same load the same bullet the same pressures more or less in the exact same chamber and they fire form to that so we should see very consistent numbers so i'm going to write that down so the next question is what was the brass when it was new just out of curiosity so we can put this guy right up in here getting 1.1825 so what is that nine thousandths difference yup the next one is the same number 1.1825 you won't always see the exact same number with new brass or a box of factory ammo like if we test a few more we should be seeing some numbers that don't line up perfectly but they're usually pretty darn close there we go this one's a thousandth and a half shorter 1.181 so for our fired brass that means the new cartridge blew the shoulder out almost ten thousandths so the shoulder moved forward almost ten thousands and when that happens the source of that brass to lengthen that cartridge base to your headspace datum line they call it is generally right down here so the cartridge stretches that gets a little bit thinner so now that we're about to resize this again we know that uh you know that first firing we got a little bit thinner here so what we want to do from this point forward is we want to minimize the amount that we bump the shoulder back like we don't want to move this ten thousandths back and then let it fire form again ten thousandths forward and then constantly ten thousandths ten thousands that's going to shorten our case life and we're gonna end up with case head separations if we're oversizing our brass so while our sizing die instructions said to screw it down until it touches go a quarter of a turn that would probably work but that might be too much sizing so let's get over the press let's test that out let's see what numbers we get when we follow the instructions all right so let's remove our bullet seating die i probably should have went and just grabbed another hornady lock and load bushing but i didn't so we'll just do things the hard way so we raise our ram all the way to the top screw it down until it touches then we drop the ram and go a quarter turn and then tighten the lock ring so there it is by the instructions now the problem which is kind of hard to explain on a video i can't even if i really really pushed hard i might be able to get this to go down it won't go that die is way too low and the reason is because this hornady press has got a very aggressive cam over if i'm not feeling too lazy i'll try and get a close-up and insert it here so you can see it but at the top actually hey i happen to get the camera lined up just right so right now the ram the handle is all the way down so you would think that the ram would be all the way up but it's not like i'll lift the handle a little bit and you'll see it actually goes up a little bit so as you bring down the handle the ram comes up and then at the very last second it comes back down so with this hornady press most presses or the presses i've used are not quite this aggressive with the cam over but this hornady is very aggressive so if you are trying to set something up kind of by the instructions that rcbs gave us you bring it down until it touches and then you kind of lift the handle a little bit and you can kind of seek out that the kind of the true top of the stroke which there it is right about right there so now if we go down a quarter turn from that spot and tighten the lock ring now we've probably got something that's a little bit more manageable yep man that's still you can hear that handle popping at the bottom of that stroke that's just too much it's just too dang much so i'm gonna try and back this out a little bit which this is a pain in the ass with the the hornady lock and low kit because their bushing doesn't lock in some of the lee presses with their quick change dive set up when the die goes down in there's a little pin that locks it in place this this hornady is not that way maybe some hornet horn these presses do i don't know this one doesn't and it drives me freaking crazy so like this die that i need to back out like an eighth of a turn i need to back it out until the bushing quits moving and then there we go do my little bit of a turn so yeah you just you got to navigate the quirks of your bushing system i guess man that's still awful awfully hard i'm gonna back it out just a little bit more okay that was maybe a 30 second of a turn there we go so you can you can hear it's still uh making extremely solid contact with the die so okay whatever we'll consider this to be by the instructions so let's grab our first piece of brass and let's just size it with this setting and pray to god that it doesn't get stuck in the die so up and into the die and then down and out nice and smooth so i should have shown you before i put it in there but this one did have a particularly dingy neck so all that got ironed out nicely and it's yeah nicely resized so let's take a headspace measurement of this guy and our number is 1.184 that's actually really good so that's about 1.5 thousandths longer than the factory brass on the factory ammo so that's kind of good some dies whenever you set them up like this where they're all the way down they bump that shoulder a ridiculous amount way shorter than even you know factory new brass so this is good let's see one point let me do some math okay so that is seven thousands of bump that's what we would say or that's how we would say it so we we just bump the shoulder seven thousandths that's more than we need now for a bolt action rifle sometimes you'll just size the neck you won't even bump the shoulder or if we're using a full length sizing die like this and we're shooting a bolt action we might just barely bump it like try and bump it a half or one thousandth of an inch because you don't need any more but with a semi-automatic rifle we want to make sure to you know size it enough so that our gun runs smoothly we don't have malfunctions but even when you're looking for that we don't need seven thousandths like we've got now we need more like two or maybe i don't know three so let's try and do that let's try and set up this die to bump the shoulder two thousandths let me wipe all of this uh lube off of my loading block there it is so there's our first piece of resize brass all right so let me try and back this guy out that was probably almost a quarter turn so at this point it might look like on camera that it's making contact but like i'm not feeling any contact whatsoever so here's another thing we should uh pay attention to which i should have done on that other piece let's see how much this piece grows as far as the length of the brass 1.480 is what we've got right now let's write that down okay let's size it yep there we go and we'll see how much that grew because the sizing process is when your brass is going to get longer so i'm seeing about 1.486 or there's 1.485 and a half yeah i think 1.486 is about the right number that's a fair amount of stretch now here's something funny for you this piece that we just sized is now the headspace number is 1.1955 this number actually got longer how is that even possible well sometimes when you've got the die too high and it never actually makes contact with the shoulder of the case but it made contact with the body of the case right so the case the body of the case was getting squeezed which kind of lengthened things but the shoulder never got hit by the shoulder portion of our sizing die so this is actually longer so at this point we're not touching the shoulder i went way too far back okay so i just went back about a half half the distance so maybe about an eighth of a turn our ram is making very light contact with the with the die now now the piece i just resized i'm not going to continue to use it and size it over and over and over i'm going to go ahead and move on to the next piece because that would put a ridiculous amount of wear on this piece of brass because as the brass goes up in the neck gets squeezed down then the expander ball on the decapping pin gets pulled through it so you're constantly making that neck small and then big and small and big plus the additional work that's being done to the body and the shoulder let's just move on to the next one so let's see i should have measured its length i forgot all about it we'll check that once we get our once we get our die right where we want it then we'll see how much the rounds are stretching yep this one's still long 1.930 okay down a little bit farther a little bit more contact with the shell holder there let's see what this one gives us oh we're getting really close now so 1.1905 so that is 1 000th shorter than our original number so this would actually be just about right like this would probably be just fine but let's shoot for two let's try and get to 1.1900 or you know 1.1895 so let me see if i can just get this to nope can't do it okay and this one will monitor the length of the brass yeah this is the same as the last one we measured at 1.480 see how much it stretches a little bit more than the last one so 1.487 so it stretched seven thousandths and i went just a little bit too far on the headspace 1.189 so we're currently bumping it two and a half thousandths so this one we went a little bit too far but it's a it's done now so we'll put it in the loading block let me see if i can just move it out a smidgen these are extremely small adjustments tell you what this brass length is consistent so 1.479 and a half so just a half a thousand shorter than the other pieces we've measured and let's hope hope we got that headspace number dialed in just right and it looks just right 1.1895 so that's exactly 2 000 shorter than our original number so that's good fantastic 2 000 it's a shoulder bump the other nice thing it's actually good like you know we're actually touching the shell holder the case is getting you know put up into the sizing die almost completely right i mean we've only backed out just a couple thousandths so we're getting the full body resize i've had some dyes that well in particular i can't blame the dye it was my first 6.5 grendel like the chamber was just long or something because the sizing die i used with that like i had to have it backed way out and there was a gap between the shell holder and the sizing die it never really caused many problems i never had any function issues but i always worried about it because i wasn't able to get the body of that case fully up into the die so it could you know be properly resized double check the next couple here yep that was perfect check the length again 1.481 before and after about 1.487 so was that six or seven something like that so cases seem to be stretching a fair amount but it's not really a straightforward comparison to test cartridge length before and after resizing the question will be like i don't even know what the trim length is or you know whether we're going to need to trim these but the true question will be how much did they grow so after sizing this time to after sizing next time how much are you know are the are the cases growing in that context so that's pretty much it for sizing i just need to i just need to work my way through the rest of them i'll leave the camera on that way in case i stick a case i'll bring you back and we can all laugh at me now one thing i should mention while i'm finishing these up still no stuck cases by the way i'm 25 pieces in and all is well but after all that headspace discussion we just had i i should mention that sometimes you will see differences in headspace coming out of a chamber or coming out of a sizing die if you're shooting mixed brass you know different brands different uh brass types react a little bit differently like maybe during the firing process they spring back a little more than another brand or maybe one batch has got five firings on it and it's become work hardened and the the other batch is brand new and it's nice and soft things like that will affect the headspace number so it's not it's not a huge deal just something you got to be aware of so you know what's happening whenever you see it and adjust accordingly all right that's the last piece and it didn't get stuck so another successful outing for hornady one shot lube all right so i got bad news the length on most of these is 1486 1487 but there are a couple like let me see if i can find oh yeah this one here is 14.91 and a half they show a maximum case length on the hornady load data sheet of 14.90 so that one's pretty darn close but there was one or two of them that were like pretty long there's a 1493 1493 yeah there's that that one's 14.95 so we need to trim i was hoping we didn't need to trim but we need to trim so i think i'm going to do this the hard way with my rcbs trim pro frankfurt arsenal case trim and prep center that i was thinking about pulling out but a little bit faster but this is easier well that statement didn't really make any sense talk about doing it the hard way and say this is easier it's uh less annoying to set up i guess just a little bit more manual labor now the load data sheet shows a case trim length of 1.475 so that's 15 000 shorter than the maximum length i don't think i want to go quite that short i've seen some others where the the trim length was fifteen thousandths less than max but it's usually ten most of your load manuals or your yeah you'll see a ten thousandths differential so let's just shoot for that i'll i'll trim them all to one point four eight zero i need to grab the proper allen wrench i hate i hate these things hate them all right let's see where that puts us no it barely touched it 1.489 so i need to go nine thousandths and it's been so long since i used this trimmer it's got like a graduated uh scale on it but i don't know if that's thousandth of an inch or if that's just random dashes all right we'll move it by five and see what that does yeah 1.485 so i guess those dashes or uh yeah that scale actually means something it's been so long since i used this darn thing i used to pull off the handle and put a drill on there i think it was or i don't know it's been a while all right hopefully that's it right there all right on the money perfect so that's what i'll do is trim each one then we'll take our chamfering and deburring tool hit it on the inside hit it on the outside and there we go that guy is ready for a primer all right let's do one more here trimmed inside outside looking good double check the length on this second one perfect totally perfect so i'll get these knocked out and then we'll be ready to start talking load data because it's primer powder bullets and we're going to hit the range and it's currently 11 30 p.m so that might be tomorrow morning i don't know for you it's right now okay so it's the next morning i'm feeling good feeling refreshed feeling sharp and it's time to pick out some load data for these first 40 shots i pulled out six powders that are listed on the hornady load data one that i think we should go ahead and definitely test is hodgdon cfe223 this is the highest velocity option they show so we'll give it a shot the second powder is a tougher choice let's have a look at the chart here this chart's kind of deceiving so you got to keep an eye on that velocity for each column they switch from increments of 100 feet per second for the first three columns and then they go to 50 for the next three columns and then the last column is 25. so this is not a linear chart here folks they're kind of deceiving us a little bit so cfe 223 and levere evolution aren't quite as far ahead of the others as it appears my first thought was that we should try maybe an extruded powder you know cfe223 is a ball powder so i thought maybe for the other one we'd choose an extruded powder not a lot of extruded options here on the list well i shouldn't say that so like there's reloader 15 n140 vargat 8208 xbr and h4895 those are kind of the extruded options on the list and i'm sure we'll get to all of them eventually but what's kind of jumping out at me is power pro varmint i've had good success with that powder and some other cartridges it's one of our 2500 feet per second options here on their chart so let's just go with that now i'm not that worried about kind of starting a little bit higher than we otherwise might because remember these are 52 000 psi loads so as long as our you know as long as our bolt holds together as long as our gun holds together we're not going to be you know popping primers and blowing having case head separations and that sort of stuff that you would be worried about as you were approaching the limits of the brass and stuff so i tell you what let's jump down one step from max for each of them so let me grab my notebook all right power pro varmint let's shoot 27.2 grains and that tells us that'll be about 2 450 feet per second and with cfe 223 let's shoot 28.8 grains which they say should be 25.50 okay good that was easy now for primers they uh tested with the federal 205. i don't have any 205s right now but i do have some of the 205 m's yeah there we go 205 m's these are just the the gold medal match version so we'll go with those why not now for a good little while i've been using the cci 450 primers which are actually small rifle magnum primers in the 6.5 grendel i've never really had many problems with primers in the grendel or ignition issues that i could can remember but we'll keep an eye out for any of that right both of these are ball powders which are the you know which is the the more challenging powder to ignite so if you know if we run into any i don't know wildly varying velocities or you know even hang fires or delayed ignition that sort of deal we've got other primers we can try whatever the gm-205ms those are good primers i don't expect we'll have any problems whatsoever so our brass is ready to go it's all trimmed and completed so the next step is primers so i pulled out the lee hand priming tool i found the shell holder that seems to fit these the best yeah there we go the number one so that a little loose the number two is a pretty good fit i could freaking uh just google it so i know i've got the right one but whatever we're fine switch out the cartridge in this guy from large primers to small primers all right we're ready to go see if i can get these in the tray without spilling them okay looking good all right got them shaking around to flip them over the right way come on there's always one there we go and ready to go that into there switch it to the on position cycle it once and of course our first one ends up sideways there it is little jiggle a little jiggle got it straightened out all right that primer pocket feels good like that felt nice and tight took a decent amount of force to get the primer up in there it's sitting in there nice just below flush and that's good okay second one feels about the same feels good now i did pull out our little go no-go gauge for primer pockets right this this thing came in extremely handy when we were doing 224 valkyrie and having all sorts of primer pocket problems it's a uh yeah swage gauge from ballistic tools these things aren't terribly expensive and i'm found them pretty handy so what you do is you take your piece of brass there now the small end should go down into the primer pocket without any problem so it's definitely big enough and then the big end if we flip it around should not go in and that is definitely not going in so let me run through a few just with the no-go side wrong end there we go yeah that one's not going in that one's not going in that one's probably it's going in more than the others like it goes in just the tiniest little bit but it's definitely not yeah no matter how much wiggling i do i can't get it to go all the way in let's see if this one feels a little bit looser than the others it did kinda did like it just kind of went in a little bit smoother it still felt like okay though which you know you're gonna have that you're gonna have some pockets that aren't quite as tight as the others that one's good that one's good that one so that one's kind of like that previous one where it kind of goes in just the tiniest little bit but it doesn't go all the way in not even close so i think you know i think we're good i'm not going to test them all but as i'm priming them i'll certainly be paying attention to how they feel like here's one that was supposed to be a little bit tighter yeah like maybe just a hair tighter than those other two okay now the boring part of weighing out all these charges since i'm only loading 20 with each powder it's not really worth the time to fill up my powder measure so i'm gonna just do these by hand and i did uh i've been warming up my scale i ran it through a calibration i'm going to check it with some check weights really quick just to make sure everything is okay it's been a long time since i've used my scale or loaded anything so 20 gr 20 grain check weight reads 20.0 that's good let's add in five more 25.0 two more 27.0 good so we're right on the number i do have my lee scoop kit yeah one of these with a big old bunch of scoops so we'll find the one that gets us close i bet it's going to be this 1.9 cc yep that came out to 29.8 so that's a little bit too much let's see what the 1.6 gives us 1.6 gives us 25. so we'll go with that now and i did something extremely stupid right i left both powders on the bench here luckily you know i caught it soon enough to remember like yep varmint is what i poured in so we're just going to take cfe223 off the bench now if i got a phone call or went to the bathroom or something then came back it's like crap i think that's varmint i hope that's varmint that sort of thing can get you in trouble so always try and work with only one powder on the bench at any time all right 27.2 so i just need to weigh out 20 of these then switch powders and weigh 20 more so i'll do that and see you guys at the bullet seating die okay so the charges are weighed i've sat bullets into all the cases here got to be careful not to get myself mixed up so my loading block i took a sharpie and put a v on one end for power pro varmint and a c on the other end for cfe223 so hopefully i can keep this stuff straight i did leave our sizing die in the hornady lock and load bushing and i made a little little kind of index mark there on the die and the bushing and also put one on the press there because we got this sizing die set up nicely might as well just leave it that way so i've got a new bushing in here this is going to be quite an adventure here with this seating die so let's start out with the 103 grain eldx we'll go from light to heavy so we'll do the 103 the 105 the 107 and then the 108 so let's run a piece of brass up into the die we'll screw it down until we feel it the taper crimp touch that case mouth just like we did earlier okay there it is and we'll back it out uh we'll back it out one turn that should be more than enough especially since we just trimmed all of this brass they're all the exact same length we don't need to worry about a you know a long piece maybe getting up in there a little farther and hitting the the taper cram i'm not going to do any crimping whatsoever with this cartridge nothing wrong with crimping if that's your thing but uh yeah we're just not going to do any here with the six millimeter arc in the short term so i backed out our adjustment adjusting stem a little bit so let's just seat the first one and see where it goes now on the load data they call for an overall length of 2.245 we're going to go a little bit longer than that you know we tested each bullet in the chamber earlier and all of that crap and we know that we can go out to at least 2.260 with all of them okay so right now i'm about 2.290 and another thing that the first seating here on the 103 you might see a little bit of a ring forming there where the seeding stem touched the die i did uh go ahead and get seeding stems on order uh hornady offers a custom seeding stem for the 108 eldm and also the uh what is it the 110 grain a tip i'm gonna go go ahead and get both stems so between those two custom stems plus the standard six millimeter stem that comes with the dye once we get the dye that variety of stems should should give us options that will work with just about everything let's go a half turn what did i say it's 2.290 yeah let's see what a half turn on the adjustment gets maybe we can figure out about how much each adjustment gets us so that's a half turn now we're at uh 2.271 so a half turn equals about 20 thousandths so one turn is 40 thousandths can we remember that i think we can remember that which means that another quarter turn should put us pretty darn close and i'm going to go a little bit less than a quarter turn let's seat this one and see where we're at yeah that's uh just about perfect 2.2605 let's get a cartridge-based ogive measurement i think it should be around 1.720 nope a little bit less than that 1.715 and after seeding that bullet a couple times our spot on the bullet is a little bit more pronounced it's just kind of scuffed it doesn't feel like we've got like a proper groove or anything so hopefully it won't affect performance too much let's see the next one and see if the number comes out the same there it is they're seating pretty smooth yeah it came out exactly the same 1.715 and a total overall length of 2.2605 good i like it now the question is will it fit in the gun and i'm going to try and bring the upper up here and chamber these guys without knocking over my loading tray some pretty advanced coordination going on here okay here's the first one and it's clicking in and clicking out okay all right so i think we're good now these are the cfe 223 loads the case fill was pretty good with these like it seemed to be down a little bit below the shoulder like you know pretty nice full case but plenty of room for the bullet and i do feel a little bit of powder moving when i shake it so let's go ahead and seat the other three of these and i'll just spot check another one for cartridge-based ogive length just for the heck of it 1.7155 perfect now since it's not compressed we should be able to go over to our powerpro varmint load and just use this exact same seating die setting and get the exact same overall length because the case fill was a little bit less with power pro varmint certainly feel some powder moving inside the case and it's exactly the same 1.7155 so that's good news okay so our next bullet is the 105 grain boat tail hollow point now this is the one we need to go shorter right so our target overall length i want to try and match the factory ammo or what we set the factory amo to once we fixed it so let me grab a piece of this i'm going to back the stem out just a little bit run this up into the die okay so that's pretty close now keep in mind if i just screw this down until it i feel it the stem touch the bullet i'm gonna end up being in trouble because of that aggressive cam over we talked about earlier so i'm gonna actually back this out just a little bit and move the uh move the handle around a little bit to try and find about where we need to be yeah that's as close as i feel safe going hopefully that made sense right but that puts us in the ballpark we'll probably be a couple thousandths too long so here's the first one let's hope uh hope that wasn't a dumb move so 1.730 is what we set the factory ammo to cartridge based ogive 1.7345 so we're four and a half thousands long right now the overall length of the factory ammo was right about two point two three zero and we're about six thousandths long good good good good so we know the full turn is forty a half turns twenty a quarter turn is ten and we need to go six is that right i know we need to go four yeah we need to go about four so let's see if we can nail this on the first adjustment a tenth of a turn right hopefully that's close ah still a little bit long 1.731 so just i'm just going to breathe on it these dyes are such a pain in the butt to adjust ah that i may we just went too far hopefully it's not way too much nope that's actually right on the number 1.730 cartridge based ogive should be a total overall length of right about 2.230 and it's pretty close 2.233 and just to be sure yeah let's try and chamber this guy okay up it goes goes right into battery and comes out a battery good so that's the process i mean i guess i don't need to walk you through the last two bullets it's going to be exactly the same so i'll flip the camera back on if i run into any problems but if i don't run into problems i guess i'll just see on the range so i did end up running into some problems with the last two bullets the 107 grain sierra match king and 108 grain eld match neither one of them fit in my gun at the overall length i had ridden down so the the sierra match king wasn't bad and they would actually go into battery you just really kind of had to push harder than i felt like so i think it was right up onto those lands so i just bumped that back about two thousandths so those are still tucked right up next to the lands over average overall length was about two point two five eight cartridge base to ogive about one point seven zero eight so i just had to bump those back a couple thousands the 108 grain eld match i was way off at the 1.715 inch cartridge base to ogive that i thought was going to be off the lands a little bit i i could not get them to go in the gun at all i ended up having to shorten that 13 more thousandths down to 1.702 inches cartridge base to ogive so ended up with a you know an average overall length right around 2.253 so this is kind of crazy folks i can't believe how short the throat is in this gun and as we you know explore more bullets in future videos maybe we'll find some others that fit a little bit better let us take better advantage of that full magazine length or even out to like 2.3 inches with our grendel magazines i don't know so hopefully i've been showing you guys the right numbers on the screen all along but if not you know this is these are the overall links that i ended up going going with so now it's time to go out and see if they'll shoot so i'll see you on the range all right folks it's time to see how these loads are going to shoot and i think we'll start off by shooting a few more rounds of the hornady black that we seated a little bit shorter and hopefully it's going to fit in the gun properly now so that way we can get our gun warmed up make sure we're sighted in okay and be ready to go before we start with the hand loads so i think we had things pretty well sighted in last time we've got five rounds of the magazine let's go ahead and start with a five shot group oh i'll tell you what we probably ought to do first is [Music] cycle them all through a couple of those were a little bit a little bit sticky on the old charging handle not seeing any major marks on the brass i didn't bring calipers out here to like measure them again make sure none of them had uh had like stretched back out when they got slammed into battery i don't know whatever let's go ahead and see how they shoot they're certainly a whole lot better fitting than they were okay here we go five shot group did i for yep why didn't you guys tell me like hey man drop the bolt jackass all right that went way down low yeah and now that i think about it where our group was in the last video yep i'll tell you what let's go ahead and just make a scope adjustment i think that's about 3moa all right let's try this again yeah that's a little bit better and i'll tell you what might as well zoom on in a little bit and what we can do is hide shot one act like it never happened through the magic of shot marker let's go ahead and put one extra in the magazine and take four more shots okay so that's not too bad except for the fact i made it to where you couldn't see it all right so 1.26 inch not too bad there's three there kind of trying to group so it's about like it was last time i honestly didn't expect any miraculous improvement but uh yeah it is what it is okay so our factory ammo velocity dropped a little bit from the last test i did with it it's now down to 25.91 when before it was 26 40. like we shot a lot of a lot of rounds we shot 80 rounds to get that 2640 average and i don't remember seeing any shots whatsoever that were all the way down below 2600 like our you know our 2591 average that we saw today so is it weather it's a little bit cooler today than it was whenever we shot those 80 or is it related to seeding those bullets a little bit deeper and changing the pressures you know getting the bullets a little farther away from the lands or out of the lands right i mean they were jammed in before maybe that was causing that pressure spike that everybody always seems to talk about that you should be wary of as you're approaching the lands with a bullet i don't know but we definitely dropped a little bit of velocity so it's time to move on to our hand loads we're going to start out with 103 grain eldx and we're going to start out with power pro varmint it's going to be a five shot group our target's at 100 yards i forgot to mention that we are using the shot marker electronic target system which i need to clear so as i mentioned earlier in the video our barrel is an 18 inch odin works and yeah you got all the details earlier in the video so let's move on here's our first group 103 grain eldx with powerpro varmint i'm going to cycle a couple of those through make sure yep those went uh those went through with no problem so let's see if they'll group so we are sighted in with the factory ammo and we know that our velocities are going to be a little bit lower here or at least we expect them to be so i'll be interested to see what happens with our point of impact at the target need to arm the chronograph there we are all right let's see if they'll group okay that hit pretty close to our previous point of impact let me run down that piece of brass okay pretty easy to find i don't see anything crazy going on here yeah it just looks like a good piece of brass nothing to freak out about here as far as pressure good let's go ahead and shoot the next four see if they'll group so that i forgot to uh spot what the first shot's velocity was but this second shot was 2566 that is much better than the 2450 feet per second that we were expecting from the load data interesting all right that's a pretty good start shot marker shows 0.85 inches yep 0.85 inches let's see what the velocity looked like 2570 was our average standard deviation of 9.3 and an extreme spread of 23 feet per second 0.85 inch group man that is a good start that is a really good start i am absolutely shocked by that velocity i am absolutely shocked we are 120 feet per second above hornady's test number what like they're uh yeah what they show on their load data what the hell i can't wait to see what the cfe223 number is i'll tell you what i'm feeling a whole lot better about this whole situation now one thing i should mention which yeah i'm a bit of an idiot here i was didn't really have my head screwed on straight remember the load data is for the 108 110 grain bullets and this is a 103. so we're five grains lighter than the test bullets so that might that might explain a good portion of it so once we get to the 108 grain eld match maybe we will lose it but man it seems uh it seems ridiculous to think we would lose 130 feet per second or whatever yeah that's pretty wild let me go chase down that brass all right folks we're going to move on to cfe223 with that same bullet 103 grain eldx one of the folks who's watching this live on twitch reminded me i forgot to mention the cartridge overall length this is uh 2.260 so the eldx is at 2.260 our powerpro varmint powder charge was 27.2 grains and here with cfe223 this is 28.8 grains let me arm the chronograph okay ready to go [Music] see if cfe223 will shoot okay let me run down that first piece of brass okay so the first piece of brass looks perfect it looks outstanding so nothing to worry about there and our first velocity uh i think it was 25.88 so let's see what was our average 2570 was our average with varmint so a little bit a little bit faster than varmint it looks like we'll see if they'll group so ooh that doesn't look quite so good 1.12 inches see what our velocity numbers were average velocity 25 75. so only five feet per second faster than we saw with uh power probe varmint 10.4 feet per second standard or standard deviation 28 feet per second extreme spread those numbers are pretty similar to what we saw but that group opened up 1.12 inches that kind of sucks all right let me run down the brass okay so moving right along we're going to move on to the 105 grain hornady botel hollow point we're going to start out with power pro varmint same load 27.2 grains our overall length is 2.230 so these are 30 000 shorter than we seeded the 103 eldx to so let's see if they'll group all right man power pro varmint is getting the job done holy crap 0.46 inches i like it i was a little bit worried about that bullet right because the factory ammo just wasn't really shooting all that great i mean it was kind of shooting like you'd expect factory ammo two but i was afraid maybe you know maybe the gun wouldn't like the bullet clearly that was a mistake all right let's see what our velocities were okay average velocity 25 63. so seven feet per second slower than with the 103 grain eldx standard deviation of 7.3 extreme spread of 17. that is fantastic for a ball powder so that's you know back to back single-digit standard deviations with powerpro varmint that's good stuff that's really good stuff so the brass looked fine nothing to worry about there okay folks moving right along to cfe223 with 105 grain bowtail hollow point same overall length same charge weight that we shot with the 103 so this is 28.8 grains of cfe223 let's hope it performs better than it did with the 103. okay that's not the worst thing in the world .80 inch group i can live with that now the really good thing about this is that 105 grain bullet just the standard hornady boat to hollow point is by far the cheapest bullet we're shooting today the elds and the uh the sierra match kings are a good bit more expensive so i love it when my gun really likes a cheap bullet and that seems to be the case here now the ballistic coefficient on the hornady or you know the 105 is not quite as good as the other but it's still a pretty darn slick bullet i mean it's a it's no slouch okay velocity there was 25.71 so that was eight feet per second faster than we saw with power pro varmint the last the last bullet the differential was five so we're just barely getting a few few extra feet per second here with cfe 223 when the low data said we were going to get 100 feet per second more standard deviation 14.5 extreme spread 35 not exactly terrible but not even close to as good as we're seeing with power pro varmint so i did see a few little shiny spots on the case head like nothing crazy definitely no burrs or anything yet and i've seen the same thing over there with the power pro varmint loads like you know nothing to freak out about it's one of those where we get back to the bench and i try and show it to you under the lighting in there and we won't be able to find it sort of deal so nothing to freak out about okay folks it's time to move on to the 107 grain sierra match king i am extremely excited to see how these shoot i love me some sierra match kings these are just under 2.260. they're 2.258 is what i wrote down so just a hair under we're shooting the same loads so we're starting out with power pro varmint 27.2 grains of it let's see what happens all right that's not bad that last shot got us didn't it crap ola that's okay not too shabby .75 inch group see what our velocities look like 25 26 is the average standard deviation of 12.7 which is the worst we've seen so far with uh with powerpro varmint all right not too bad okay so this the ejection pattern has been really nice with all of these so far it's not spraying brass all over the place and they're you know back there at about yeah four o'clock 4 30 something like that you know just behind me so that's good to see brass looked uh pretty good couple little shiny spots like i was mentioning before so we better just move right along i'm not quite running out of daylight but i don't have a whole lot of time to be screwing around see what the yeah the barrel's not hot see what it feels like in here yeah barrel's not too bad at all so let's move on next up is cfe223 with our 107 grain sierra match king same load 28.8 grains all right pretty similar group to what we saw with varmint 0.84 inches see what our velocity numbers were 2548. with a 9.2 standard deviation that's the best we've seen with cfe223 so far that's good and an 18 feet per second extreme spread it's not too bad that is not too bad at all okay folks we're down to our last bullet the 108 grain hornady eld match overall length on this guy it's a little little under 2.260 it's 2.253 and once again we're shooting the same loads we're going to start out with powerpro varmint 27.2 grains i need to clear my target and let's move to a new dot there there it is let's see if it'll shoot man if it wasn't for that one that went high yeah that one hurts dang it so that was a 1.10 inch group crap ola i mean you know not too bad occasionally you're going to lose one high it does happen velocity average was 25 22. now this is like i mentioned back to our load data this was supposed to be a 2 450 feet per second load so i find it interesting here on a cool day you know the temperature is in the 60s i'm sure like it's nice and cool this evening and we're still 70 feet per second faster than their target a 4.4 feet per second standard deviation with an 11 feet per second extreme spread man varmint has really been impressive today with the velocity statistics and i'm really happy that our point of impact hasn't been moving around a bunch as we switch from bullet to bullet sometimes that can be a pain in the pain in the butt when a gun wants to shoot you know different bullets all over the freaking place and i guess we could look at that group let's uh let's take number four out of it and see what it would have been yeah the other four went into .63 inches so that's a little bit disappointing i'll tell you what i'll write that down just so i can remember that we had a bit of a flyer there the best four was .63 inches like you know that might be significant all right folks one more group to go i need to clear my target first here we go cfe223 22.8 grains of it oh baby that is what i'm talking about holy crap look at cfe 223 get the freaking job done 0.35 inches kiss my butt man and just just earlier i was chatting with people on twitch about how disappointing cfe223 always seems to be it heard us talking holy crap best group of the day by quite a bit oh my god oh man what's this what's the standard deviation show on shot marker 3.2 so shaw marker shows 3.2 lab radar says 2.5 holy crap so average velocity 25.50 exactly 25 50. standard deviation of 2.5 extreme spread of six six man [Laughter] oh what a way to finish that target off holy crap that is awesome so i could not be happier with a first target of hand loads we shot eight groups six of them were under an inch two of them were under a half inch and we really only had like you know yeah none of it was terrible none of it was terrible so really happy so far with this odin works barrel it seems to be getting the job done the cartridge you know this is a certainly a good start i'm hoping this brass you know we haven't blown out primer pockets or you know anything like that if this brass is going to be durable and it's going to be shooting groups like this with just two random powders that we picked and two random charge bytes that we picked like man where are we headed once we get a little work in find the the the bullet that it really likes the powders that it really likes this could be a pretty awesome shooting rifle man that is good stuff that is fantastic all right so let's get packed up get back to the bench okay so let's take a look at our fired brass and you'll notice i took the primers out of one of each of the loads because i want to pull out our primer pocket checker here in just a second and see what sort of shape these primer pockets are in see if i can get my camera settings a little bit better to actually show you what's going on here some of the brass is a little bit beat up nothing crazy there's one of the case heads like uh nothing terrible still getting my case mouths dinged up but i don't think the hand loads were hitting the brass deflector as hard as the factory ammo was and you'll notice the two kind of streaks there that's from the barrel extension so i don't know if the barrel extension is where i'm getting the dent or if it's on the brass deflector like i mentioned earlier in the video i think i need to just put something soft on the brass deflector to maybe help out a bit there maybe a little bit of gas system adjustment that sort of stuff we'll clean that up but it's nothing i'm going to obsess over because those sorts of flaws iron out pretty easily yeah it's kind of like i had mentioned on the range i had a feeling we would get inside and i really wouldn't be able to show you some of the shiny spot there you go there's one kind of kind of right there no nothing nothing really going on here we're just picking nits right all right now this is what i'm worried about or i'm nervous about let's grab our swage gauge and just see we can do so that's the no-go side right remember the the go side should go in no problem and the no go side should not not even close nope definitely not nope nope all right that's six good ones there's number seven that one probably comes closest like i can kind of get it to barely go down in there like we were showing a little bit earlier but yeah that's that's not anything to freak out about yet and there's the eighth one is looking good that is excellent news all right so it's finally time to wrap this god godforsaken video up i never meant for it to be this long but i'm out of practice man it's been a while since i've made a video and i just couldn't stop talking i'm coming out of this very happy and very optimistic clearly our our odin works barrel will shoot a group so that's really good news you know i feel like the upper is kind of proven at this point we found two powders worthy of more investigation i thought it was interesting that so varmint was clearly the better powder with the two lighter bullets well and i guess it was also a little bit better with the 107 sierra match king but with the 108 grain eld match you know cfe 223 shot our best group of the day our best velocity numbers of the day as far as standard deviation and extreme spread so feeling pretty good about both powders i'm not particularly upset with any of the bullets although we had the best groups with the 108 eld match and the 105 boto hollow point i'm sure you know the next couple powders we tested might just be the other way around i don't know none of them were terrible so 10 shots in i'm not ready to make any judgments there so i think that's pretty much it like i said we're going to get into more discussion about determining max overall length with these bullets in the next video like i just was it was a mess in this one and i've never had problems this bad so we'll get it figured out eventually but yeah my efforts today were just a mess i should have my hornady dies for the next video and also my brass back order was finally filled so i've got some brand new hornady brass coming although not in a big rush with it i mean i want to go ahead and shoot these first pieces until you know either they fail or we get up to a number of firings where they're starting to get a little bit raggedy i'm sure somewhere along the way as we you know try different powders and get a little bit stupid we're going to end up tearing up some brass just going over pressure and being idiots but hopefully it's going to be reasonably durable all right so that's it i'll be starting the next video pretty much immediately i might wait a couple days for like i said those those dyes to come in and that sort of stuff but the weight shouldn't be long so i appreciate you guys joining me thank you very much to the people who put up with the length and made it here to the end and that's it i'll see you guys next time

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 175,780

Rating: 4.9000349 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: dOZDbYIc-w0

Length: 105min 59sec (6359 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Joes_Reddit]

Oddly enough I just found his youtube channel yesterday. I've been binge watching his .308 playlist and loving it. I never even knew he was gone, but now I'm glad he's back.

[u/shreddykruger]

I can't wait until next year when I can try this 6arc thing. Till then I'll be shooting the shit out of my grendel ARs....

[u/arsenal104fr]

Yup, I am super excited he is back. He got me through college lol

His channel is far better than most of the stuff on cable

[u/s_gorilla45]

Who has the time or patience to sit through an hour and a half video to get ten minutes of information?