Cloning MK 248 Mod 1 - Part 1 - 300 Win Mag

so it's time to start up a new series of videos on the 300 winchester magnum and the subject is going to be duplicating this factory ammo this is mark 248 mod 1. this is a military round that you know they use in their sniper rifles it uses the 220 grain sierra match king just kind of give you give you a look at the rest of the box pretty generic packaging right this stuff is not commercially available like you can't buy it a viewer named jim got a hold of some and sent it to me i'm not asking for details about where it came from i'm just glad to have it and he sent so one full complete box and then the second box had 16 rounds left in it or no it had 14 rounds left in it so we've got 34 rounds to test to get our baseline numbers and then the hope is going to be that we can duplicate its performance with hand loads now hopefully this will be as successful as our mark 262 mod 1 uh cloning series you know for the 556 we've had a lot of fun in that series you know duplicating the performance of that factory ammo with the 77 grain sierra match king and been pretty successful if i do say so myself so hopefully we'll be looking at similar success in this series before we jump into things there's something really cool i want to show you check out this little thing this was sent to me quite some time ago by a viewer named steve and i never really got a chance to show it off and thank him he calls this his hornady bullet comparator storage stadium so we've got like our inserts for the headspace comparator kit that go uh you know they each have their their holes up here at the top and then the inserts for the bullet comparators uh set and let's see here okay that one goes there and the adapter thing see these little posts right here they just slip right over there and you lightly touch tighten it down and that lives there yep get that one where it needs to be and there's even a spot for your little allen wrench right over here it slips right in there and sits right there how freaking cool is that and everything's labeled here and this is just really really cool so thank you very much to steve this is just genius because this this is the sort of crap that just ends up all over my bench and the packages these these come in are pretty useless for long-term storage or they're you know they're not convenient for uh long-term storage so this is perfect he also sent this which goes on the top of the lab radar chronograph and gives you a little barrel to aim down because with the lab radar chronograph it's pretty critical to get it aimed at the target properly and the stock lab radar all it has is a freaking v-notch in the top of it which is awful and you know there's a lot of people that will like glue a like a piece of a drinking straw to it or just to have something to look through this is really cool as well it's got this little plunger here that slides in and out that goes down into uh one of the screw recesses that's on the front of it so it like goes right on that snaps it in place and locks it in place this is really really nicely made so thanks very much to steve as far as i know he's not selling these steve if you're watching and you are selling these please let me know or just post down in the comments i'll pin your comment so people can know where to get it the message he sent whenever you know whenever he sent these in didn't say anything about wanting to sell him or wanting me to show him off or anything like that so i think he's just a 3d printer nerd and likes making really really ingenious little stuff so maybe some of you other 3d printer nerds down in the comments can talk him into giving you the the files or prints or whatever it takes so you guys can make these yourself i don't know man all i know is like hornady should buy the design and give him like i don't know a couple million bucks or something because i don't think these would be hard to sell all right let's move on with our video now you might ask yourself so why isn't this stuff commercially available when like the mark 262 mod one five five six round is well this ammo and we're going to check it here in just a minute but it has a longer overall length than the sami specifications it also runs higher pressure than sami spec so i think it's a safety thing and while i'm not usually one to treat you like a [ __ ] when it comes to safety you know i think everybody sitting down a reloading bench should understand that safety should always be on your mind well you know this is a situation where i feel like i kind of need to harp on it a little bit through most of the videos in this series we're going to be shooting loads over max over pressure and trying to blindly duplicate them in your rifle is a good way to blow your face off so if you're going to be trying to duplicate this round yourself for your rifle then you know hopefully i can help you with powder selection and that sort of stuff like that's what you can take out of it or maybe what to expect as far as accuracy but just blindly copying charge weights rather than you know starting a little lower working your way up to them that sort of stuff well that would be something dumb and you shouldn't do that okay so we've got a huge advantage when it comes to this round when compared to mark 262 because mark 262 we were pretty much working blind while the mark 248 mod one there is a 34-page detailed specification document that is available i'll be sure to link it in the description it goes through every minute detail about the specs of this cartridge so let me highlight a couple things for you here so down here on the the ninth page section 3.4.1 it tells us that the projectile for the mark 248 mod 1 shall be the 220 grain sierra match king hollow point boat tail bullet commercial part number 2240 manufactured by sierra bullets so that part's pretty easy we've got plenty of those part number these are the ones the next part talking about the cartridge case and the head stamp and stuff is pretty generic not much we can take out of there i'll tell you that the the head stamps on these two boxes read fc 11 so they're 2011 head stamps and they just say 300 win mag the primer is not called out specifically it just says it shall be a large match rifle primer non-corrosive nickel plated boxer type and shall be of lead nate styfonate yeah that word that type now next is 3.4.4 propellant each cartridge shall contain hodgdon h1000 propellant the propellant loaded in this cartridge shall contain flash reduction additives or coatings and shall meet the temperature stability and ballistic requirements detailed in section 3.6 see i told you this was going to be going to be easy we've got h1000 so we know the bullet and we know the powder so we're way ahead of the game compared to where we were starting with mark 262. now the document even mentions like primer seating depth you know it uh says it should be between flush and eight thousandths below flush of the head of the case it shall not be staked or crimped in place now cartridge overall length is pretty interesting the nominal overall length of the assembled cartridge shall be 3.5 inches maximum 3.450 inches minimum and it even mentions that the distance from the cartridge case head to the 0.300 inch diameter datum on the projectile ogive shall be controlled to within plus or minus 10 000 inches now that's a pretty generous tolerance if we see 20 thousandths of cartridge-based ogive variation on our loaded rounds we got something seriously wrong going on but i assume that's probably in there meant for you know different bullet lots and things of that nature maybe that would cause that much but i thought that was a pretty wide specification there cartridge headspace shall be 0.212 inches minimum base of the cartridge to the surface of the belt that's straight up sami spec 220 220 thousandths maximum 212 minimum and let's see moving on down to velocity the corrected average muzzle velocity of the cartridge conditioned at 70 degrees plus or minus 5 degrees fahrenheit shall be 2 850 feet per second plus or minus 50. so 28 to 2900 feet per second is the spec the standard deviation of the corrected muzzle velocity at 70 etc shall not exceed 15 feet per second and lastly here i think is chamber pressure the corrected average chamber pressure shall not exceed 68 100 pounds per square inch at 70 degrees now if we go over to the sami document and look at 300 winchester magnum we see that the maximum average pressure is 64 000 psi so the maximum specified for this stuff is 4 100 psi above sami maximum and i think that's that's the important stuff like it does go through like accuracy requirements we're going to test that for ourselves we'll you know be seeing how it performs in our own gun and using that as a baseline rather than what's on this document and i think that's about it like this is a really interesting document to read through though if you're just curious about this sort of weird stuff they go through all of the specifications for testing and all of that and it is really interesting so we're starting off with a lot of info we know the powder we know the bullet we've got some examples to shoot and directly compare our results with so pretty good stuff so i'll tell you what let's uh let's tear a couple pieces of this ammo apart and have a look at what's inside i'll tell you what before we tear any apart let's get some measurements off of it you know while they're still together okay so we're going to measure 20 pieces so let's grab our 30 caliber bullet comparator and we'll take two measurements with each one we'll take a total overall length first one here is 3.466 and the measurement from cartridge base to the bullet ogive with the hornady comparator is 2.8865 we'll just round down the fives we'll call it 2.886 just to make the math guys angry and i think that's probably enough like we could weigh each one and i don't know take some other measurements but these are the ones i'm most concerned about second piece total overall length 3.465 and 2.887 you get the idea i'll finish up the rest of these and then we'll move on so let's go ahead and pull the bullets out of three of these got a one of these little bullet pullers it's called the gripping pull i'll probably booger up the bullets just a touch but that's okay just want to get a weight on them and get them out of there so we're not going to reuse them okay there's the first one there's the second and there's the third all right let's take a few weights and let's check our scale real quick five grains here's 10 more 20 more 20 more and then four more okay that's looking pretty close and since we're weighing heavier stuff let's do a 10 gram check weight which we go over to grams oops too far there it is all right 10.000 so our scale's in a good mood today let's start with the bullets to 20.0 and here's the second one 220.1 and here's the third one 220.0 good no surprise there now one thing let me see if i can get you a view and let me make this thing insanely bright so maybe you can see down in there this was very much a compressed load all right so maybe i went a little overboard on the brightness here let me back her down just a touch uh somewhere in all that brightness craziness hopefully you saw what i'm talking about there so case is jam-packed and because of that we might actually have trouble getting the powder out of here no looks like it's going to go let me find something to tap on the back of the case with um i'm going to take a decapping pen and try and coax coax it out of there there we go now we're getting somewhere okay i think we're almost there yep that got it all let me see if i can get it to focus right about where the base of the case is there you go you see the flash hole so yep looks like it's empty and that is 76.1 grains and here in a minute we'll compare the looks of this stuff to h1000 okay moving on the second one i'm just going to go straight to the straight to the decapping pen all right i think that's it yep i can see down in there doesn't look like there's any powder left stuck anywhere and that is 76.2 grains and here's the last one all right so that one's a little bit light at 75. cool and i guess while we're here we could just for the hell of it measure actually i tell you what i could pop out the primers i'm not sure if there's anything we'll learn but you never know just to have the info for for future reference okay here they are with primers removed we'll take a weight on them 249 250.8 to 49.8 and the primers 5.6 5.6 and 5.6 and there's a close look at the primers themselves they do have a little bit of blue primer sealant on there it looks like and i think that's about it so i've moved the powder into a bowl that's a little bit easier to see here let me grab a can of h1000 and we'll dump some out here so the size of the powder granules look looks right the color of our stuff is it a little bit lighter or it might just be the the way the bowl is reflecting or the the two different colors of the of the powder pans if it's different it's just extremely slight so it looks right i can't imagine it wouldn't be h1000 so while i've got the camera in this weird angle i want to pull out a couple of the primers we're going to be using which are the gm two 215ms the federal large magnum rifle match primers i suspect that's probably what these are ah or maybe not here the federals have got some sort of purple sort of stuff going on there this is really the thing i'm least concerned about like these are what we're going to use and to be honest right now with all the primer shortages going on it's not like i could go out and buy different primers and try and look for the right one anyway and it just really wouldn't make any difference on our final ammo but just for the heck of it i'll pull out some some cci 250s there is a cci i forget what what's that like the 762 military primer that cci makes i've never really used them let me look that up yeah the cci 34s i don't know maybe it's maybe it's those here are what the cci 250s look like a little more yellow where the mark 248 ones are a little bit green so no perfect matches here on the primer if we run into some sort of problem that makes us need to freak out about this later in the video series then we'll freak out about it then as of right now i'm not the least bit concerned i don't think it's going to matter a bit okay let's look at a couple charts the first one is the overall links that we saw with our 20 pieces we got numbers ranging from 3.460 up to 3.469 this is not all that surprising open tip match bullets like the 220 grain sierra match king are often a little bit wonky right up there at the uh at the hollow point so seeing a bit of variation like this not the least bit surprising now just keep in mind the sami maximum overall length for 300 winchester magnum is 3.340 so this is 125 thousandths longer than sami max so depending on your gun depending on your chamber these might not even fit right the bullet might hit the lands now luckily with my rifle which is a thompson center compass it's got a big old long throat and the previous testing we've done with this bullet has been all the way out at a 3.46 inch overall length of even 10 thousandths longer than this mark 248 ammo so i know for certain that this stuff is going to fit in my gun well and from our previous testing where we've shot this bullet at you know admittedly lower velocities different powders we've shot some with h1000 but lower velocities we've had good luck as far as accuracy goes so these overall length numbers they make me pretty happy it's pretty pretty much ten thousand shorter than what we've already been testing so that's a good thing let's move on to the next chart which is our cartridge-based ogive numbers now with these i expected a little bit better consistency than what we saw we saw the shortest one i found was 2.883 inches and the longest was 2.890 inches so hopefully with our hand loads we're going to be able to tighten this up quite a bit depending on how how much we have to compress the load sometimes that makes it a little bit difficult to get the you know perfect consistent cartridge-based ogive numbers from round around but we should still be you know two or three thousands at most so hopefully this is pointing towards something we're going to be able to improve on but we'll just have to see how it goes so the most common number was that was the longest two point eight nine zero five rounds were came out to that i think that's what we'll go with moving forward as kind of our our basic overall length our cartridge-based ogive measurement because that is exactly 10 000 shorter than what i've been previously testing with this gun so 2.900 is what has been our baseline testing number up to this point so 2.890 that'll be easy to remember and it's the most common one we saw with the factory ammo so the powder charges that we saw of 76.1 76.2 and 75.7 are not quite as ridiculous as i thought they might be because in our previous testing with this bullet and powder combination we were going by the sierra manual for the most part and they showed a max charge which with h1000 of 74.5 so we've shot up to that in previous videos so if the average that we saw out of this was right at 76 grains then we're only talking about exceeding sierra's max load by 1.5 grains that doesn't seem like a ton in a big old fat case you know when we're talking about loads in the 75 grain range and the other thing to keep in mind with sierra's max load they were shooting that sammy overall length of 3.340 and i'm no internal ballistics expert or anything but if you take a gun like mine that has a really long throat and we're stretching out our overall length which is increasing that effective case capacity that's available to us for powder you would think that pressures would drop a little bit i mean it's it supposedly gets a little bit weirder once you you know start approaching the lands of the rifling but we've still got room there so like we you know we're shooting longer we're not into the lands so exceeding their max by 1.5 grains of powder is not freaking me out as bad as i thought we would be like i really thought we were going to find a bigger powder charge when we tore these apart so that's good it's all good so the next step is to go out to the range and fire some of these through our gun to get a velocity baseline and an accuracy baseline and see what we're trying to match and i've already done that and recorded it so i'll send you guys out to the range to watch that and then we'll come back and start talking about load data and our loading setup and we'll load up our first couple test charges and see what happens so all right you guys go to the range i'll see you when you get back all right here we go may god have mercy on my soul okay velocity was 2816 on that first shot let's keep going all right no so no no like tough bolt lift bolt lift has been you know pretty normal brass looks okay and the recoil doesn't seem absurd well that shot went way out that's not good so i gotta admit these were pretty disappointing range results especially when it comes to accuracy let's have a look at the group again on shop marker yep 1.65 inches this gun can do better than that and it's done better than that with this same bullet at almost this same overall length so this was a little bit surprising for me even if like let's say we hide this number six that was really the farthest one out that only brings us down to a 1.32 inch group still not very good now on the velocity side of things our 12 shot total average velocity was 2817 which was a little bit lower than i was expecting so it was hot 89 degrees fahrenheit 60 humidity 30.01 inches of mercury maybe we'll track that throughout this series you know just to keep track of how velocity varies with temperature with the different powders we're using but average of 2817 feet per second 6.2 standard deviation which was excellent and an extreme spread of 19. now that does fall within the spec you know that was on the document where i think it said yeah 2850 plus or minus 50 feet per second now i'm assuming so the thompson center compass which i think i gave out some bad info out there on the range i probably cut it out of this video but i had mentioned i thought the barrel was a 22-inch it is a 24-inch barrel so i don't know what the barrel length is for the military sniper rifles that they're you know that they're basing this velocity spec on i assume it's probably a 24. i'm sure it's in the document if i cared to read it but it doesn't matter we've got a baseline for our gun of 2817 really happy with those statistics you know like this was very consistent velocities with h1000 or you know with the factory ammo no huge surprise h1000 is known for consistent velocity and excellent temperature stability so hopefully we see the same sort of performance with our hand loads i think that's pretty much it like have we covered everything about the factory ammo we know our velocity target we've got a crappy baseline for accuracy which hopefully we should easily be able to beat hopefully we know the overall length we're going to shoot so i think it's time to get started now for the first video here we're going to just stick with h1000 so we'll load up a couple groups approaching that let's see what we find yep approaching around that 76 grains of powder and then we'll hit the range and see how they do but just to give you an idea of what else we might be talking about in some future videos i pulled out some other powders you know some ones we've had luck with imr 7977 and imr 8133 8133 is pretty bulky i don't know that we'll be able to get enough powder into the case to hit the velocities we're after not sure we'll probably test it at some point both of these are the uh imr enduron powders which kind of similar to the hodgston extreme line like h1000 or h4350 or whatever there's a whole list of them but they're supposed to be insensitive to temperature change and they got some copper fouling stuff reducing whatnot so those are a couple couple more imr options we're going to test on the alliance side of things we've got reloader 26 23 and 22. i think 26 is a very good candidate to get to the velocity number we're after and all of these might be i don't know and for ball powder i've got some alliant power pro 4000 mr we've got some accurate mag pro we've got a couple of vidivori options this is vidavori n160 and we've also got some n565 i might try and see if i can get a can of n560 i think 560 might be the better bit of vory option here so as the series moves along we'll be testing all sorts of crap and this will be a long-term series like this isn't something i'm in a big rush for just like the mark 262 series has gone on for years as i get more powders or new powders come onto the market that we want to test then we crank out another video so this is the start of a very long journey maybe assuming we you know have some success and it seems like something worthwhile to keep pursuing so i already mentioned our primers a little bit these are the two we're going to start with and well this is the one we're going to start with the federal gm 215m large magnum rifle match primers and if for some reason we come up with a reason to try something different we might try the cci 250. one thing i'm a little bit worried about which is the same in both of my thompson center compass rifles is primer cratering which that's what we didn't do we didn't look at the brass hang on let me rearrange things and we'll have a look at the brass okay so i've got 20 pieces of brass so there's 14 that we fired and the ones with the black sharpie mark on them had already been fired when jim sent me the box so i assume i think he fired these in his rifle so the ones fired in his gun looked just fine i think we'll go ahead and use these as well because this is this is the brass i want to use i'm going to go ahead and just start with this brass let's grab one that we fired in the thompson center compass and let's see if we can have a look right around that primer strike you'll see it kind of looks like a crater it's a little raised up spot and that's part of the primer that extruded its way into my firing pin pinhole now often that's oftentimes that's a sign of pressure and it's a warning sign that you're going to have pierced primers soon so that's a big sign of pressure as well right if the part where the firing pin struck ends up just being a gaping hole that's bad that's pierced primer but the thing is with the thompson center compass a little bit of primer cratering is totally normal it does get more pronounced as you get to you know higher pressure loads and stuff like that but this amount of primer cratering doesn't worry me at all for the thompson center compass we see it all the time with the 300 wind mag we see it all the time with my 6.5 creedmoor now where this could be a problem since we've got our mystery primer here that was in the factory ammo if we go to the federal primers and we start piercing primers what we may try is moving to the cci's maybe they maybe the cup is a little bit harder and could could withstand the cratering of the compass bolt i don't know we haven't had any problems with the federals but we've just never quite pushed them as hard as we'll be pushing them in this series here's another piece same sort of deal this really isn't too bad like we we've seen worse case head otherwise looks good rest of the brass looks good so it's all good and these 20 pieces are what we're going to use these are what we'll load up today we'll we'll load up 20. we'll pick out four different charge weights and load uh four or five shot groups i guess we could compare a couple of them that were fired by jim and a couple of them that were fired by us just to see how our different chambers compare to one another here's our headspace comparator with the 420 bushing in it which if you don't already know it the 300 winchester magnum headspaces off of the belt right so the headspace measurement is actually cartridge base to the top of the belt once it's fired once we don't really care we're going to index off the shoulder we're going to kind of head space it like we would any normal non belted cartridge now one thing you got to be worried about when you're taking a measurement like this so like you're 2.282 i was just showing you how the the primers are cratered so sometimes your calipers can hit the primer crater or if you've got imperfections on your case head from i don't know whatever that can screw up your measurements so i'll tell you what i'm going to do i'm going to pop the primers out of these six pieces real quick i've actually already got the universal decapping die set up in the press so this will only take a second there we go that'll make our life easier and actually this is one from jim's gun with the sharpie mark on it so we got 2.272 the next one is the same 2.272 and the last one here is the same 2.272 i'm going to write that down so let's move on to our compass looking like we'll call it sometimes with these you got to spin them and wiggle them make sure you got them perfectly aligned in there yeah let's call it 2.278 and a half we'll drop the half here's the next piece yup that looks right 2.278 and here's the last one which is yeah the same 2.2785 all right so we'll call that 2.278 so that is six thousandths difference my chamber is six thousandths longer from the shoulder to the bolt face than his this compass is pretty sloppy so while we're here let's uh let's take a measurement like right at the belt like i want to take my calipers and just bump the belt right up to them 5 11 turn it 90 degrees 5 5 12. let's measure another one that one's 513 512. we've got a die that is going to size this area right above the belt 513 512 okay i'll write down 512. now here is jim's gun 513 513 the next piece 513 513 and the last one right about 513 okay now this is a little bit less precise but i want to go down just a little bit below that you can kind of see there's a spot where you can tell like it's a little bit shinier right above the belt let's go to the part where it looks clear that like the wall of the case made contact with the chamber wall and see what we get 513 512 513 okay so it looks like his gun's about 5 13. this is mine 513 about 512. okay i'll tell you what let's move to just below the shoulder see what we get 491 490 491 490 okay so we'll call that below shoulder and we'll call mine 491. this is his 490 490 490 490 491 490. okay i'll tell you what we'll call his 490. so it looks like for the most part you know there's a significant difference in that cartridge base to shoulder number you know the the what we'll call the head space even though we know it's not the headspace so we had six thousandths of difference there but the body measurements seem to line up i guess we could check the neck so 339 turn it 90 degrees 339 339 339 okay let's call his neck 339 and we'll check mine 341 yep turn 90 degrees 341. next piece 341 and we'll take one more here on the last piece 341. so it looks like my chamber has a little bit larger neck area so good but i mean you know all these differences should be easily ironed out by our full-length sizing die and speaking of fooling size and dies i think it's time to talk about that now those previous measurements i was taking comparing my brass versus jim's brass would have been a whole lot more interesting if i was also comparing them to some factory pieces so hopefully i put up info on the screen as i was talking about it that cartridge base to shoulder measurement was pretty dramatic like the the factory ammo is measuring out at about 2.261 and my fired brass was 2.278 so that shoulder needed to stretch out 17 thousandths for mine now gems was a little bit better was about 11 but still you know pretty that's a lot that's a whole lot and that leads me to the subject of dies if you've been following my 300 winchester magnum videos from the beginning you'll know we started out with a set of hornady dies they're custom grade dies where you get a standard full-length sizing die you get a standard bullet seating die we put a micro just adjuster on there to make it a micro adjustable and life was kind of okay we ended up testing one batch of brass and i think we got four or five firings and started having some case head separations so i wasn't very happy with that brass life and my brass has always been very difficult to resize like it takes a lot of force it feels like you know a whole lot's going on there a whole lot of resizing work is going on and well somewhere along the way we also bought the match grade yeah the hornady match grade full size die as far as i know very similar to the standard fulling sizing die except this one is a bushing type so you use a bushing to set the size of your neck and you can adjust your neck tension and all of that sort of crap but that never really you know that didn't change the fundamental problem of perhaps oversizing our brass so right about the time of my last video you know nearly a year ago six eight months ago i ordered this guy right here i can get all the accessories out of the way there this is a wooden custom click adjustable sizing die you might notice the threading on the die has got little notches and this uh adjusting ring you probably won't be able to you know hear it or anything but you can see it's like clicking around so when we're setting it up in the press we're going to be able to precisely you know count the number of clicks we go as we adjust how much we're going to bump our shoulder this is also a bushing type die and we're just going to use the same hornady neck bushings we've got three of them we've got a 331 a 332 and a 333 we'll take a few measurements here in a few minutes and decide which one we want to use so what you do so you actually send wooden some fired brass this is this is brass that i shipped to them and it just so happens it was some federal brass that i sent them so i sent them these pieces of fired brass and they cut this die specifically for my gun so the hope is that this is going to full length size my brass but only enough that's needed for my gun you know especially in the the body portion and then of course we'll adjust how much it you know bumps the shoulder by adjusting it like this and then we'll adjust our neck size and our neck tension with bushings this is not cheap this die was 164.99 and the wait time was i think it was it was three or four months and you know they tell you on the website like that that's the wait time it just is what it is so this is the one we're going to be using today this is the first time i've used it we'll see how it works i've got high hopes that this is going to perhaps extend our brass life but we're going to need to save a whole lot of brass to make up 165 that was a little bit ridiculous now a lot of the the normal die manufacturers i think lee rcbs maybe hornady i don't i think pretty much all of them have a program like that where you send them brass and they'll cut you a custom die and they're much more affordable than this wooden but i've always just heard really good things about the wooden i've always wanted to get one and this seemed like a really good opportunity to try them out so this was a little bit of a ridiculous purchase but that's okay sometimes a ridiculous purchase can be fun it comes with some other stuff so it actually comes with a shoulder bump gauge yeah that's that's what they call it shoulder bump gauge and this is the 420.420 inches you'll remember the hornady we used was the 420. yep there we go the e420 if you look on the sami print for the 300 winchester magnum you'll see a line right there on the drawing at about the middle of the shoulder that says .420 inches so that's the right number to use this guy i'm sure it's i'm sure it's fine i'm sure it's nice we'll probably just continue to use the hornady this guy could use a little maybe a knurled lock screw instead of needing to grab an allen wrench every time like that that would just be annoying but that's fine i'm glad to have it the least they could do for 165 dollars it also comes with this right here well let me take it out of the package yeah so it comes with this guy right here which i think what this is we'll read the instructions here in a minute but that's not nearly as much fun as speculating yeah so the standard decapping pin actually has an expander ball i think that is let me yep that's an expander ball that reads about 304.5 now usually with a bushing type sizing die you don't want to use an expander ball you're setting you're precisely setting the neck tension you want with the bushing and then dragging an expander through it on the way out would just screw up what you've done but occasionally you know i don't know you get a dinged up neck or something you need an expander ball to iron one out that just a standard bushing won't do so i think this guy goes on there like that and now you can have a decapping pin but no expander ball messing anything up for you so that's probably how we'll usually use it because with a bolt action rifle like our compass we're not going to have too many dinged up necks or anything we've got to worry about ironing out with an expander now if that wasn't enough money spent i had also picked up the lee ultimate die set because i wanted to try out their collet neck sizer at some point and maybe their fulling sizing die but by the time i got this it was right about the time where i just kind of quit making videos and we never got around to testing this so we've got no shortage of dies here but today we're going to be sizing with the wooden and then we'll be bullet seeding with the hornady seating die so that's the plan as far as dies go so let's nail down some load data so we can go ahead and get started like i mentioned we're gonna we're gonna shoot 20 pieces so we'll shoot four groups as i think i mentioned i've already shot up to 74.5 grains in this rifle with this bullet and this powder so and you know we didn't blow our face off so we're going to use that as our starting point and the powder charges we measured out of the cases varied from 75.7 up to 76.2 so let's see let me do a little bit of math here all right here's the plan back to the the load we've already shot 74.5 we'll go up from there four tenths of a grain and we'll keep going four tenths of a grain for four loads so that means we'll be loading up ammo up to 76.1 grains which is right in the meat of where our factory ammo was and we'll just you know we'll keep an eye on the brass and everything as we go up and see how far we get see what sort of velocity numbers we get so let's see so we're shooting once fired brass with the fc 11 head stamp federal gm 215m primers our overall length well cartridge-based ogive is going to be 2.890 which should put us at about 3.465 inches of total overall length and i think i think that does it sweet so the next step is to size some brass with our fancy pants sizing die let's do that all right so we're done with the universal decapping die but we are going to be doing some decapping with our sizing die so i'll go ahead and leave the primer catcher thingy and the this thingy the arm in the press because that's what directs the primers where they need to go so let's see we're gonna have to read some instructions okay with the proper shell holder for your caliber in the press ram raise the ram all the way up now i have to be careful here with this hornady press because all the way up does not actually bring the ram all the way up so handle down is actually a little bit below our highest ram point it's this thing's got a pretty aggressive cam over so as we're putting it in the press i'm gonna have to kind of mess with the handle a little bit to bring the to move the ram up and down and kind of find that true uh top ramp position screw the sizer die into the press until it just touches the shell holder then rotate the die counterclockwise approximately one third of a turn so that's going to be out move our adjustment ring back a little bit a little bit more dang i'm running out of adjustment here there it goes okay all right so there's about the point where it lightly touches the shell holder so let's bring it out about a third and tighten the lock ring yeah so it says screw the lock ring down snug to the press but do not tighten the pinch screw at this point which i think is uh there's a couple screws here i'll probably i guess i could just remove it with the bushing yeah so this thing has a couple holes and it looks like a couple pinch screws maybe hang on let me grab the allen wrench okay yeah so these other three holes don't seem to have allen heads in them but this guy right here has got one that fits this guy so i guess that's our pinch screw put her back in there install the supplied shoulder bump gauge on your calipers which we're just going to continue to use the hornady because that's what we took our preliminary numbers with measure your brass to determine headspace already done that once you have your headspace measurement you can adjust the sizer die downward clockwise a click or two at a time to establish your desired shoulder bump one click of adjustment will result in one thousandth of shoulder bump continue adjusting your die down until you have bumped the shoulder the desired amount for bolt action rifles it is recommended that you bump the shoulder back two thousandths for auto loaders you your shoulder bump needs to be a little more generous of around three or four that's about right that's about what we normally do so that's what we'll shoot for we'll shoot for two thousandths now that you have your die set to desired shoulder bump the die lock ring screw can be tight and snug installing the bushing remove the decapping assembly by unscrewing the top plug on your sizer which i've already done drop in the bushing reinstall the capping assembly do not over tighten top assembly plug allow the bushing to float as this floating action is key to prevent run out check the adjustment of de-capping assembly to ensure the capping pin is protruding at proper length wooden gun gun works bushing dies will accept wooden gun works redding and wilson bushings i got hornady bushings i think they'll work now we're going to set up the die with the brass that was fired in my gun which means the shoulder probably won't get hit whenever we get to sizing the brass that was fired in jim's gun so when we get to that point we'll see what happens i think i'm just going to use a little touch of uh yeah this stuff right here imperial sizing dye wax get a little bit on our fingers here i'm trying to decide so should i go ahead and put the shoulder bushing in there or set up the shoulder bump and then put the bushing in i'm thinking i should hold off on the bushing no reason to mess with the neck until we get to that point right we can run it back up in there later on so let's see what was our headspace number uh it was 2.278 but this piece still has the primer in it so i'm getting an incorrect measurement so let me go back to one of the pieces we've removed it from yep yeah 2.2785 so our goal will be 2.276 or 2.2765 something in that range and perfect timing i think the battery's about to die in my stupid camera we'll try this first one and then change it so up in there man that went in there nice and easy not a lot of work going on it didn't seem which is good which is really good so we're not hitting the shoulder yet and our number actually got just a little bit bigger so now it's 2.280 so let's move down which i think i'll just be able to turn the die within the the ring or do i kind of have to loosen the ring a little bit man i think i've decided i freaking hate the hornady lock and load system especially on this press they don't lock in and it just it it's in your way whenever you're trying to change settings on a die all right so that's about four clicks let me see if i can get the bushing back tight but the lock ring is still loose all right i think we're good yeah so now i can move the die without jacking with anything else so let's run that same piece a little bit more lube don't want a stuck case let's run it back up in there one more time and see if that touched it yep it sure did and we were a little bit too far now it's 2.275 not a huge deal back it out one click and then i guess at this point what we do we lock down this allen screw just for the heck of it okay okay one more piece no bushing let's see if we get the right headspace number man that goes up in there like butter totally different experience than our sizing other sizing dies that we've used up to this point yeah we're at 2.277 so maybe i accidentally went two clicks the clicks aren't quite as clicky as you'd think they might be so let me i guess i need to loosen this dude a little and tighten it again okay whatever that number ends up being that's just that's what we'll roll with here's one more piece with no primer battery still holding in there yep still still getting the job done and let's see all right so this next piece is just about perfect 2.2765 let me change the battery and then we'll come back and talk about our bushing see if we can get these hornady bushings working in this die okay so we need to pick the right bushing and to do that you know luckily we're using the same brass that the factory ammo uses so let's take a couple pieces of the factory ammo and we want to measure around the neck so this one i'm getting right about 336. yep 336. this second piece i'm getting the exact same thing 336 and you know you measure several times around sometimes you'll get a 335 sometimes you'll get a 336 and a half but it looks like 336 is is our average okay so what we do is we take point three three six inches and we start subtracting so we start with one thousandth for spring back right whenever it goes up in the die and then comes out it's gonna spring back a little bit so we'll subtract point zero zero one and then from there we choose how much neck tension we want one thousandth two thousandths three thousandths somewhere in that range so let's go for uh let's let's start with two thousandths you know if we don't have enough neck tension then our bullets could move you know as they're working their way through the action bumping into stuff you know we could get set back and stuff like that and you know what now that i think about it so this is going to be a compressed load that's another thing that can happen is you can press your load and then the bullet can back back out from the pressure of the powder so maybe we should go for 3 000 you know what let's do that let's do that so we started with 336 we want three thousandths of neck tension plus one thousandth for spring back that leaves us with point three three two and we've got point three three one two and three neck bushings so there's our 332 this might be too much i probably should have went with the 333 but whatever man we'll be all right so with the hornadies there's one side that has writing on it you can see it says 332 on there with a lot of them that goes down but for some reason with the hornady's it goes up so we want that to go up and this does kind of like it's not a tight fit whatsoever so it is just floating around in there so we take our d-capping assembly thingy i'm gonna screw it down until i feel it touch the bushing there it is right there and then i'm gonna back it out just a little bit yeah like uh not quite a quarter turn maybe an eighth of a turn is about what i went and then tightened down that lower lock ring so it should be in there and able to float we'll see now the other thing we want to do is adjust the depth of our decapping pin so that looks to be about enough right there then there's a separate little lock thingy for that guy up at the top there we are so i think we're good so let's take one of the pieces where we already bumped the shoulder good make sure we got a coating of our grease on there and let's run this up in there and see how that neck sizing operation goes okay up and in there didn't feel any great resistance or anything i have got to lock this press yeah this stupid the bolts are coming out i got to go i got to go get some other bolts oh crap folks all right i think we're back in business i think good grief i didn't have hardware as big as i'd like but at least it's through bolted now should have fixed that after the last video where it was already flopping around on me good golly all right let's try this again here's another piece that we've already sized the body of it looks like it's going up into that neck bushing just about all the way up the neck can you kind of see where the bushing stopped somewhere right there yeah so it got most of the neck that's good i'm used to like you know the using neck bushings and stuff in like six ppc and that cartridge has a really long neck and it's like the bushing sizes like half of it and it always kind of freaks me out a little bit but 301 mags got a pretty short little neck it seems like all right so let's see which bushing did we choose we chose the 332 so i would assume this should be right about 333 so there's a 332 and a half there's another 332 and a half there's a 333 so it's coming out just about right and i tell you what if i grab a bullet see if that kind of seems like it's going to be right yeah looks like there's definitely enough whether it's too much or not we might have to see our groups are you know now back to the measurements we took before i think the necks on my brass out of my gun we're starting out at 336 so they're coming down several thousandths these first three pieces are the ones i've already sized once before just running them back through again and now we'll move on to one i haven't touched let's see how hard this one is to get all the way through the process went up in there pretty darn easy i think it's popping it out of that neck bushing seems to be the hardest amount of work that's going on here let's take a headspace measurement on this piece so that's about the same as we were seeing so our original number was what two point two seven eight and well a second ago it was reading uh 276. yeah so we're bumping it one and a half thousandths or so which is plenty and actually i tell you what i brought my gun up here so we can make sure the the brass out of this sizing die is going to chamber okay yep i'm not going to try and get the gun in the view but just know that the brass went right in no problem and ejected out no problem so we're in business so let me get these last 10 that were fired in my gun finished up and then we'll move on to the ones fired in jim's gun tell you what i don't know if it's that bushing kind of getting worn in a little bit now because it was a brand new bushing that had never been used maybe it had a had a burr or something i don't know but it was kind of sticking right there at the top of the stroke just to touch needing a little bit more force than i thought it should but now it's buttery smooth i feel like i'm resizing nine millimeter or maybe you just took some time to get some lube on the dye and all of that stuff now this is the first piece that was fired in jim's gun now with this sizing die set up we're not going to be touching the shoulder on this brass and i honestly expect it to it probably got longer than it was yep just a touch so 2.273 or 2.274 is what i'm seeing and our initial measurement was 2.272 which is good because this shoulder still needs to move forward six thousandths to fit my chamber let's just make sure this is going to fit in my gun which i'm pretty confident it will yeah no problem whatsoever nice easy easy bolt closure and all that stuff so good yeah it's really like it's like night and day like it's just so easy now going right up in and popping right back out i'm hoping that neck bushing wasn't maybe not quite centered yet or something that could cause some problems we'll just call it a mystery now eventually like i don't know once i have a little bit more experience with this die i'll probably do a separate video on it just to show it off paid enough for it might as well make sure everybody gets to see it right all right there's one more die we might end up using during this resizing process and that's our larry willis belt sizing die now this die actually comes with a built-in gauge to test uh pieces of brass to see if you need it so if we plop that down in there you see how it's not quite going all the way down in you see how it kind of hung up there just a little bit so that one's kind of borderline that one's exactly the same way these are the ones that were fired in jim's gun all right let's switch over to the ones that were fired in mind there you go see how mine just plopped down in there or at least that one does not the next one hangs up just a little bit next one plops next one's good next one's good that one eh it's close that one goes in okay yep that one that one goes in okay so trying to look back whenever we took measurements i wrote down the same number for our two guns of uh 0.512 and that's what this die is supposed to resize things back down to 0.510 let me make sure i'm not lying to you there yep 0.510 is what it gives you as a target so i'll tell you what let's just go ahead and use it why not so we'll go ahead and remove the fancy pants die this crazy thing screws in from the bottom which hopefully that's possible with these bushings and i'm hoping it's going to clear the automatic priming system arm thingy if not we'll just remove it yep just barely clears all right all right so that's in there i think we leave it all the way up i could read the instructions but whatever now we take our piece of brass and put a little bit of our imperial sizing dye wax on there and then this collet goes down over and goes down and touches the belt so what this die is going to do is squeeze this down and it's just going to squeeze that bottom part right at the belt so i need to put some sizing dye wax on this guy as well and let's see if this works which i guess at this point i can remove the depriming stuff that goes up into the die man that's a lot of seems like it's taking a lot of force i don't think i've used this die on this specific press before yeah that's taking too much force let's take another reading of the size right there above the belt make sure we didn't go too far nope we just uh barely touched it if at all you know what i don't feel like screwing with this stupid thing i think i'm probably going to end up changing presses again just because the whole lock and load system is kind of driving me nuts lately i think i might look into a lock and load eliminator or something do they make those like just give me normal threads i'm tired of fooling with that thing it drives me crazy but yeah i never had any issues with this die before with the reading t7 or the lyman eight station press or you know anything so we'll just we'll revisit this on the next firing they're still like you know we already checked them in the gun they're still chambering just fine you know that's the worry is that that part above the belt which doesn't really get hit by a standard sizing die and if it gets bigger and bigger over time you're going to start having problems getting your bolt to close and that's what that die is supposed to fix so all right what i'm going to do next is wipe off the lube from the brass and we'll decide if any other prep needs done to it so i'm wiping off the cases with just a you know rag with a little bit of 99 isopropyl alcohol because these cases since they weren't tumbled you know especially up around the neck there was a lot of like powder residue and stuff and once you put the imperial sizing dye wax on there it kind of like dissolves that stuff and makes it pretty darn easy to wipe off so these honestly are completely clean now and looking good so one thing we didn't do is look at how much these were stretching during the sizing process so our max brass length uh by the book is 2.620 2.618 and there's a point six 2.622 six there's another two point six two two so it looks like it'd probably be the smart move to go ahead and trim these a little bit i wonder if the ones if you remember we had a bunch more headspace slop or uh you know shoulder to base slop then jim's gun so let's see what his numbers 2.615 2.616 2.614 so if you remember this brass we never really touched the shoulder because they're already short enough so that's why those don't appear to have stretched any yeah i guess i'll probably ought to trim these so let me grab a trimmer so i was about to use my uh rcbs trim pro but then i remembered i've got the lee case length gauge and shell holder for 300 win mag this would probably be the easiest you buy a you buy the case length cage and shell holder and also this cutter there's a cutter and lock stud they call it i can't find the lock stub all right finally found one this little guy right here is what i was looking for this is the lock stud and the shell holder goes onto the lock stud and your piece of brass goes into the shell holder and then you tighten it down and there you go that's that part then the other side is the cutter and the case length gauge so the case length gauge goes down into the brass through the flash hole and you're trimming baby and you can chuck this up in a drill to make things go a little bit quicker which depending on how much material this has taken off i may end up doing that i got a drill right behind me there we go and at some point it stops and what makes it stop is the tip of that making contact there right so that's what uh that what that's what sets the distance to the cutter so let's see what length this comes out to the trim length is uh what is it one zero 2.610 and this came out at 2.6125 good so let's do the next one see what this second one comes out to 2.613 good so you know of course this isn't adjustable but i've got a bunch of them and i've never seen it come out to a goofy number so let me show you what else i'm going to do to this brass and then we'll move on so we just trimmed them so we got the square cut there on the case mouth so we need to grab a chamfer and deburring tool there's one right there so we put that in there and give it a couple twists and then move to the outside and give that a couple twists so that's our case mouth in good shape now the other thing primer pockets a little bit a little bit scuzzy they'd probably be just fine you know the the flash hole is perfectly clear no big deal but just in case we are going to take yeah one of these little it's a lee primer pocket scraper some people just use a flat blade screwdriver you just drop it down in there and give it a couple twists and tap out the crap it's not perfect but gets a lot of the gunk out of there you can also go with a primer pocket brush like this one so this does a little bit better job so that might be what i use there you go see that's that's looking pretty clean so i think that's it we're not going to go any farther i've been debating whether or not to anneal i still could you know some people anneal before resizing some people anneal after resizing whatever that's a debate i don't think i'm going to yet we'll anneal in the next video on the second uh resizing of these guys yeah i guess i'm just feeling lazy which isn't a good way to kick off this project but we'll be fine so that's where we're at i'm going to do this to all of our pieces of brass i'm going to chuck this guy up in my drill to speed up the process and then we'll be we'll be ready for primers all right so it's time for primers oh man that primer that was the first one that went in way too easy like way too easy let's try the next one here oh no man i'm thinking these primer pockets are blown we've got a gauge for that okay this is a ballistic tools swage gauge large primer pocket gauge if this brass is toast i'm going to be mad all right so it's got a little side that goes in no problem and then the big side should not go in all right that that piece seems okay let's go ahead and put a primer in it and see if it also feels yeah that that feels pretty loose as well so okay maybe it's not a maybe it's not a huge deal nope here's the next one man they are almost going in but not quite almost is fine yeah they all feel about the same tell you what i doubt we get many more firings out of this though because it's really close all right crisis averted all right so it's time to weigh out some more charges and i'll tell you what just to be sure let's grab our check weights again 20 40 50 55 57 59 looks good to me so the first charge weight is 74.9 i'm going to start with a big old lee scoopful a little bit more and then trickle in the last little bit once i get close i like to lift it up set it back down yep 74.9 let's see what case phil looks like here on this first one yeah i probably won't be able to maybe you can see some granules down in there but it's down about the bottom of the shoulder maybe something like that it shouldn't be too insanely compressed but we're definitely going to get compressed as we already saw with the factory ammo oops too much all right you get the idea i'm going to finish these up and then we'll be ready to see some bullets all right folks let's see some bullets first thing we need to do is pick a seating stem because we're going to be using the seating die from our hornady custom grade set got the micro just seating stem thingy here insert is tight yep so we take a case with no bullet run it up into the die and then screw it down until we feel it touch all right then we back it out at least one full turn i think is what they tell you and tighten down the lock ring i usually back it out one turn and then go however far it takes to uh you can't even see up there there we go let's try that yeah so i back it out one turn and then keep backing it out until i can easily read the adjustment scale thingy here so let's go ahead and remove the adjustment thing and i've got quite a few 30 caliber seating stems got one for the 230 250 grain a-tips another for the elds see the the newer ones they started actually marking them thank god yeah that one has the part number written on it some of the earlier ones i have don't have the part numbers on it so i don't know which one's which which i'll tell you what while we've got this one out we'll go ahead and test it i grab a bullet set the stem down on the bullet and see yeah that's not a good fit not a good fit at all so i think that is the eld stem seven one four zero and this is a seven one four zero okay so the atip stem ain't the one here's another one now that one fits pretty nice a little bit of movement a little bit of wobbliness but all in all that feels like it's making some pretty good contact so we'll put that one in the maybe pile yeah and the other two i've got don't have the don't have any numbers on them so i don't know which ones they are but try that one out nope that ain't it and the next one that ain't it either good so this is the one that fits best seems to fit pretty darn nice so we'll drop that down into the die drop our case and screw our micro adjust stem back on there now we're going to be pretty close to the factory ammo or pretty much exactly like the factory ammo so i've got a piece of it let's go ahead and run it up into the die yeah yep we're actually hitting so i need to back this out a little bit more back it way the heck out okay ram is all the way up but remember like i was talking about earlier that's not really all the way up so there we go i can feel it touching and i'm going to go ahead and back out like a good bit because with this stem you know it's very accurate adjustments if we're four thousandths long i just dial four thousands and and we're done so that gets us in the ball part and our target is a three point eight nine zero inch cartridge based ogive measurement so here's our here's our first one yep this these 301 mag rounds are right on the edge of too long for this press so it's a little bit of a pain in the butt to get them in there yet another reason why i might just switch to a different press before the next video so there we are let's go ahead and seat it that didn't feel bad at all like it felt like the bullet seated reasonably well i am still hearing a little bit of powder moving i heard a little bit of crunchies at the top of the stroke but it's not bad okay so right now we're reading 2.902 there it is 2.902 so we need to go down 12 thousandths so there's ten eleven twelve let's see it again and see what we get that is absolutely perfect at two point eight nine zero let's seat another one and see if it's the same just a smidge and longer 2.8905 this one's reading 2.891 so i'll tell you what i'm going to go ahead it's a little bit ridiculous but i'm going to go ahead and bump down a thousandth of an inch and i'm going to run these first three back through the die and then we'll seat another one i want to put the put the case in and then set the bullet on top just not quite enough room there we go all right and now we're perfect 2.890 so so far these are seating consistently we're getting consistent cartridge-based ogive numbers which will hopefully give us an edge over that factory ammo now i am keeping track of which bullets or which uh which cases were fired in my gun so these are the ones that were fired in jim's gun still have the mark on them and there were six of those so it's the five from the first group and then we're going to have one of them in this second group and when we're out on the range we'll uh we'll track we'll track that shot just to make sure it doesn't do anything weird okay second one it's steel i can still feel a little something moving this one's reading 2.891 so let's go ahead and seat a second one and see if it's also a little bit long like as we approach getting compressed and then become more compressed it's not unusual to see the overall length grow a little bit you kind of got to chase it with the die as you go see now that one's a bit longer 2.893 that's weird i'm gonna run this guy back up through one more time and i'll do the same thing with the other one the first one's still 2.891 and second one's yeah still 2.893 now the one that's pretty close to the last group is that one from jim's gun and the next one is for my gun i can't think of any reason why that would make a difference so the shoulder is a little bit lower on the gym brass there was a little bit difference in neck diameter before it was sized i can't imagine that would make any difference this one's 2.892 this is kind of weirding me out usually these numbers come out pretty much the same now that one's back to 2.893 here's what i'm going to do what matters is that cartridge-based ogive number so the first one in gem brass i'm going to take it down a thousandth of an inch and seat this one again so now that one should be right on the number now there we are 2.890 now for the next three i'm going to come down three more thousandths there's one of these that might be a touch short but they should be a lot closer to our target that's weird like i i can't come up with any reason why that would be but it seems like it is all right so there are the four that were originally fired in my gun 2.890 2.890 yeah this is the short one that's at around 2.889 and then this last one should be just about right yep it's 2.890 now the ones fired in my gun just because the show the shoulders a little farther forward you'd think they would have a touch more case capacity like just a touch so i don't think it would be related to being more or less compressed causing that difference this first one in the next row is just right 2.890 and still feeling just uh just a little bit of powder movement but it's very slight i mean we're definitely approaching a full case that next one was perfect okay so the rest of that next row was right on the number so these are our final ones didn't feel any crunchier than the ones before and i am still hearing a few granules of powder moving around and our overall length is perfect now our our actual overall length to the bullet tip we were i had written down that we would expect about 3.465 like this one this first one i've looked at 3.471 let's go through a couple couple others there's a 3.464 3.466 so that number is right about where we expected every every few like this one right here seemed like particularly hard to get the neck or to get the bullet started in the neck just a little bit of extra and then it slid in pretty easy but overall link number came out perfect okay last one here and i've checked them all as far as overall links i might as well just go ahead and finish this last one and that one's perfect 2.890 as well so that's it folks we've got 20 rounds ready for the range so let's get out there all right so it's time to see how these rounds are going to shoot we are shooting at 100 yards we're using the shot marker electronic target system our test gun is a thompson center compass in a boyd's pro varmint stock with a silencerco omega suppressor and a vortex viper pst scope 6 to 24 by 50. thompson center compass does have a 24 inch barrel with a one in ten twist so we have warmed up the gun with some factory ammo and we're ready to get started our first load is 74.9 grains our target velocity is 2817 feet per second we're going to be taking our velocities we've got to elaborate our chronograph here which i need to arm let's see what happens wow so our first load is already our first shot here was already 2 848 feet per second brass looks good a little bit of a primer crater like we always see in the thompson center compass both this gun and the 6.5 creedmoor but the primer isn't too flattened or anything like that so it looks good yeah that shot was 28.56 well we may we might not make it very far with our loads here we're already past our target velocity and we're only four tenths of a grain above what sierra has as their max load of 74.5 very weird very weird i need to get settled in better like i'm fighting my bags a little bit here okay second and third shot went right in there all right yeah there's a lot those uh last four felt good they felt really good stupid first shot jacked everything up so 1.25 inches and if we hide shot one the next three went into 0.38 inches that sucks really bad check our velocity average of 28.54 standard deviation of 12.4 which is not good extreme spread of 29. our factory ammo had a standard deviation of 6.2 so yeah so we've already exceeded the velocity of our factory ammo significantly like it was averaged 28-17 but i'm gonna keep going at least one more group because you know we're four-tenths of a grain above published maximum for you know sierra's load data plus i want to shoot another freaking group so i can uh redeem myself there let's see if that first shot was just me being me or if it was uh yeah i don't know what it was so we'll let the gun cool down a few minutes and just move on okay so our guns had some time to cool off and we're going to go ahead and move forward next up is 75.3 grains if we hit like if the velocities are insane we'll second guess this but if you remember this is the group where we have the one piece of brass that was fired in the different gun all right so these first three shots all of these were previously fired in this thompson center compass so we'll save the the the other one for last the one from jim's gun will shoot it last so i need to clear my target okay let's see what happens no change on velocity 2846 so that's below the average from the last group nothing crazy on the brass yeah brass looks fine huh kind of going all over the place so that velocity was 28.69 and that one's up to 28.77 hmm [Music] interesting and i have a hard time aiming with this gun because you know you got to put a lot of shoulder into a 300 win mag trying not to put too much into it to where it'll hold steady so it's a weird balancing act all right two more to go nope no no difficult bolt lift bolt lifts no problem at all primers are still you know nice and rounded on the edges so it looks good all right this last one here this is the one with the uh the brass that was originally fired in jim's gun shouldn't make a huge difference but okay so nothing to freak out about on brass this velocity number's probably going to be crazy well it's 28.68 yeah 2868 standard deviation of 12.7 extreme spread of 31. group is 1.14 a little bit disappointing but i mean these are the sorts of groups we saw with the factory mo and if the factory ammo does indeed use the exact same powder which from all our investigations it looks like it does i mean it's not a huge surprise so let's see i don't know maybe we'll shoot at least one or two of the next row just to see what happens these velocities are a little bit crazy but you only live once right but we definitely need to do a little bit of barrel cooldown okay so we're going to shoot we're going to at least try and shoot this next row we're all the way up to 75.7 grains of h1000 this might not be a smart move but that's all right we'll see what the velocity is at least the brass has just it's looked fine so far with the other two loads i don't know let's see what happens hey that went off i was aiming just a little bit low when that went off at least the gun didn't blow up that bolt lift was easy the brass looks exactly like the previous ones velocity was 2887. well let's just shoot another one that shot was also 2887 and the brass looks good screw it let's keep going 2 900 feet per second kiss my butt we'll just single feed these last two 2902 on that one and that's it that one was 28.90 and i think that's where we stop shooting that last load just seems downright irresponsible yep our average velocity is 28.93 7.6 feet per second standard deviation 16 extreme spread oh wow that group is better than i thought it was 0.83 inches that second third and fourth shot really retro man like just looking at these or that first in this last group they were wanting to they were wanting to they were wanting to shoot just lost some and that happens i guess so that's enough for now let's get back to the bench okay let's start out with a look at the brass and there's really not going to be a whole lot to see so this is our this is the third charge we shot and all you're going to see is what we already talked about a little bit of primer cratering just kind of my standard primer crater that i see on all of my 300 winchester magnum brass edges of our primer still nice and rounded no other weird markings or shiny spots on the case head and nothing to speak of on the body shoulder or neck so nothing scary here with brass so when i first came off the range i was pretty disappointed with the accuracy we saw but now as i'm editing the video and having another look there was some pretty promising stuff there especially that first group you know that that first shot went way low and to the right and then the next four just stacked right in there that's a very good sign the second group was a bit of a mess it didn't really seem to be trying to group but the third group wasn't that bad and you know it ended up .83 inches that's not bad shooting so i'm feeling good i'm feeling confident i feel like we've got some work to do still with h1000 i think that's what we'll end up doing i don't want to jump to the next powder and start powder hopping until we kind of nail down this h1000 stuff our standard deviation sucked when compared to the factory ammo and that's what's got me worried the most i think what caused that couple things number one i think we should have gone with two thousandths of neck tension instead of three i think that could help so we kind of we saw what three thousands did in this video next video let's switch bushings and let's go to two thousands of neck tension and see how that does the next thing is annealing you know an annealing can be key on really getting those excellent velocity statistics so maybe that was part of it maybe maybe a combination of or maybe i'll figure out some tests between now and then but maybe we'll compare annealed versus not annealed or you know try the different neck tensions side by sides you know something like that i'm not sure but that's the plan for the next video and it's going to be coming really soon like really soon this video was supposed to be out several days ago but if you notice the video problems i had right about the middle of it i i thought i had lost that video file and i was kind of scratching my head trying to get it you know trying to get it recovered and then trying to figure out how i would re film that part like my videos are so serialized you know that it's it's followed me along in the process that whenever i have a technical problem that screws up my footage it's a it's a major problem you know i just i can't go back and re-film things very easily so luckily i was able to recover it and move forward but i got ended up getting delayed a couple a couple of a couple of days of finishing this video up so barring any goofy problems like that next video should be up really soon because i'm going to start working on it immediately check my notes here anything else to talk about i don't think so velocities were insane you know i think for the next video we'll probably just use the first load we started with today the 74.9 grain load and use that for our tests of neck tension and annealing in the next video i'll be interested to see how closely the numbers repeat you know maybe it's just you know powder lot numbers this stuff was loaded in 2011 right the the lot number is 2011 the brass has 2011 head stamps that was almost 10 years ago so who who knows who knows so i think that's where we leave this one folks thanks for joining me i'll see you next time

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 38,523

Rating: 4.9709516 out of 5

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Id: YFX5mFDdZ4g

Length: 87min 41sec (5261 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 05 2020