Ep. 076 - Let's Talk Powder

foreign [Music] Ty you might say accuracy is my business I make bullets you are listening to the Hornady podcast thanks for joining us and enjoy the show hello everybody thanks for tuning in to the Hornady podcast I'm your host Seth swarzick as always and I'm happy to sit down here with these guys my guest today senior ballastition Jaden Quinlan and project engineer miles Neville guys thanks for coming on the show yep no problem it's been a while yeah it has been too long in fact you know with this podcast kind of follows a path all over the place and there's some things we have to do and some things we want to do and between guests and people's travel schedules it just gets wild and uh hunting season is particularly busy but I'll tell you what summertime I mean we're recording this in June it's like man from April to now is a blur and it's only getting worse so yeah it has been a while since we've had a Corner episode uh with one and only Jake willin but uh this one is going to be really interesting because it's another topic that we have some expertise in because of our use of the product and it's a topic that not everybody has a really good handle on and even those in the in the advanced hobbyist space where a lot of us live know which powders we'd like to use and whatever but don't really know about let's say the history the chemistry how the burn rates controlled what to use where some of the performance parameters that would make some powders more desirable than others in certain situations and then what those situations would be there's just a lot that goes into it and you know we have some great relationships within the industry that uh that that we get to peek behind the curtain and we're going to share that as best we can uh so this episode everything you've ever wanted to know hopefully about propellant so without further Ado guys um yeah we need to probably go back in time a little bit because one thing that Jaden's done is anytime we study something ballistics or whatever it's always great to have a foundational understanding of where we came from and and what was used so uh I know powder goes in the case you pull the trigger it goes bang that's I mean that's it we're done we're done yeah okay all you need to know is in these books right here tells you what charge rate to use and the name of the powder that's all you get to know yeah just pull the trigger yeah yeah you heard it here first pull the trigger it goes back yeah uh powder's pretty cool uh from like a historical perspective it's really the the oldest part of what we use today you know that it it was the first part there wasn't primers there wasn't uh metallic cartridge cases there wasn't jacketed you know projectile designs or rifled barrels even yeah um I mean it predates all that stuff by a really long way so um I'm sure the the history folks out there can can critique it but in general um like 900-ish A.D 800 980 is when the like a Chinese Alchemist started messing with different stuff like Alchemists I guess did I don't know any Alchemists so no but it sounds like something cool yeah uh and he was mixing up uh saltpeter charcoal and sulfur and I think like quasi blew himself up or burned his house down or something with it like so I think they were trying to make like a like a life-sustaining Elixir or something oh like something you know from like a health perspective like an alchemist was you was his goal as I can recall from memory but instead he just blew stuff up which is always hey on the mess around and find out scale I mean yeah if you bring your house down but you found out some some cool stuff yeah yeah you can make things go bang absolutely um and then you know obviously that you know another or more technical term for powder is propellant because it's propelling something you know it's gases that are generated from from burning it um so that kind of led into all kinds of different stuff they were launching fireworks yeah like they they had like Arrow launchers and and then it obviously evolves into cannons you know you kind of see cannons hit the scene like from a Warfare standpoint right um and that was the early use of of powder of that era you know all the way up in through like the 1500 hundreds and then in the 1500s they started to figure out that if they changed so it was kind of just like a powder right like as we understand the word powder um but we'll talk about this a lot more here in a little bit about the shape of the powder or the geometry of it and the size of the granules and all that kind of stuff in the 1500s they started to figure out that if you for one um you know black powder uh is very hydroscopic it takes on moisture very easily and so they started to figure out that one they could change the the shape instead of just leaving it as a powder that you could kind of like mold it into like a little ball or something and and you could change the burn rate of it because you change the surface area exposure of the powder to the flame but two that you could you could make it less prone to absorbing moisture that way because the powder kind of in the middle of that ball is not exposed to the outside air yeah so it doesn't pick up moisture so it kind of made it more consistent performance was a little bit makes sense so that's like 1500s I mean this is what we're talking almost a thousand over a thousand years that this stuff has been around now if it started at 900 A.D yeah uh and then you get into 1800s which is really where where our modern time era starts and like our other podcasts we've done you see that same time era in like aerodynamics and stuff in the 1900s yeah was kind of the knee and the curve you know when we really started to figure stuff out yeah with Ballistics tables and yeah rifled barrels brass cases brass cases that's where all these start to come together but powder has been around for you know centuries up to this point that's cool it's the old dog in the in the pack but um you know you see rifling come along you start to see projectile shapes changing like we talked about on those other podcasts uh and then you essentially see the discovery of gun cotton or the use of nitrocellulose instead of that sulfur charcoal saltpeter mixture okay and that that leads into the era of smokeless propellant that we're in in now yeah so and obviously you know like there's the reloading manual with the burn rate chart in it which is you know a listing General speed listing of the burner of all those propellants and there's definitely more than one there now you know like yeah so many different powders available yeah and very Niche powders too I mean there's some propellants that really fit a very small hole uh then that's okay and we can there's room for those propellants you know there's a couple powders that I can think of that work really really well with lighter bullets in small capacity cartridges for like short range bench rest and stuff and then they don't really fit I mean you can use them in a lot of other things but they're really not optimal for it but man when you're trying to shoot small groups at moderate range out of a moderate sized cartridge they work really really really well and on the other end of the spectrum 50 BMG propellant and Pistol powder I mean it ranges across a huge spectrum and then like now or if you want to make a subsonic blackout that runs a gun right that's a yeah another powder type that's pretty much got one operated firearm and then still Propel a bullet out of the muzzle consistently at subsonic velocity that's that's a tough one and we can talk more about that later so coming into what I'm going to call the modern era of propellant um you know kind of in a transitionary period you have cordite yeah which similar chemistry from what I understand that's yeah that's nitrocellulose nitroglycerin just it's in spaghetti stick format instead of balls or short stick yeah and that would have been in like 303 British uh kind of came about from England used in the 1890s up until you know World War one time frame they're still loading at World War II really yeah a lot of 40s era 50s there stuff whatever until the 303 went away basically yeah and you could control the Burn Speed on that by the diameter of the spaghetti yeah yeah the boom spaghetti the boom spaghetti those rounds are really interesting the first time you see one pull pull the bullet out of one of those and then you pull squeezer out yeah the boom spaghetti all these powder greens are stuck together yeah it's crazy so from that transitionary period of going from you know the cordite which uh used you know the Nitro cellulose and nitroglycerin that we use today just in a much more I'm gonna call it archaic uh mechanism to control the Burn Speed then you get into the modern propellants and we've got several types so maybe the best thing to do is talk about what are the types of powders that are out there today and what the differences are maybe a little bit on how they're made and how they're made differently you know from one style to the next sure you want to go into the different types and I'll go into How It's Made yeah so you got a single base and double bass are the are the main ones single base is just nitrocellulose and then double bases nitrocellulose that's kind of doped with nitroglycerin um and so yeah nitrocellulose is usually more consistent more temperature stable but lower energy density and then when you add the nitroglycerin you get way more energy yeah energy density um but they tend to be less temperature stable uh yeah it's I think that's yeah based on your your geometry is your ball and yourself oh yeah yeah so we got spherical uh flattened spherical uh flake um and uh and then extruded and so even within like extruded a lot of times you can't really see it but there's still there's perforations yeah and there's all it's a yeah a big ploy to control surface area through the burn of the of the individual kernels right and there's there's some other propellants out there that you we as small cow Shooters don't get to use or really even see and that has some really unique shapes and where you can physically see the perforations right yeah they have huge crane structures powder kernel it's an inch in diameter and two or three inches long yeah we don't get to use any of that stuff but it is out there you just you know that's for the large Cal medium Cal big military stuff but for us like you mentioned you have the extruded and that's more of if you know if you've never seen it it's like number five pencil lead right chopped up into little pieces and then you said spherical and flattened spherical yep yep and that's all the idea is to keep the surface area so if you burn from outside to inside you shrink surface area and as you do that then your your rate of like pressure increase through the firing cycle will decrease right and the name of the game is to try to keep the that surface area the same or even grow it if you could which is which is hard and so that's why you have those perforations through the center to try to keep surface area as as the kernel is burning away to keep that surface area as high as you can interesting and the last one that we mentioned was flake that's as it sounds like a cornflake yeah only much smaller yeah and that either starts off they either roll it out and then chop flake like gold Square flake stuff you see in Europe um or round flakes which I think are basically just balls that have been completely flat yeah quickly cut Extrusion yeah look at this 100 free bullets when I buy these select Hornady reloading tools wow 500 free bullets with certain Hornady reloading presses and kits well what do they have let's get loaded there's no better time to stock your reloading badge choose from the most durable precise and convenient tools on the market and receive free bullets to get you loaded visit hornady.com for further details next time we get loaded come by and yeah interesting so an example of those propellants uh extruded powder would be like vargate you know if anybody's reloaded more in 10 minutes they've probably used vargator IMR 4064 4350 something like that those are extruded we have rifle powder yeah traditional spherical powder I think of like Winchester 748 used it often in the 223 this flattened spherical that'd be like the newer stable 6'5 yeah yeah a lot of the Revolution and then a flake powder uh ah man pistol powder is usually like an hs6 I think is a flake powder Bullseye a lot of shotgun powders yeah but yeah I don't now that I think about it hs6 I think is ball powder either way it's a flake again tight water or whatever yeah tight wad uh Red Dot Blue Dot all those shotgun powders so that's an example of each and a little maybe analogy that'll help the The Listener is the way the way powder works or the way it burns is based on three different things you could think of it as like a three-legged stool um on one leg you have geometry which we just got done um so the way geometry contributes to it you could think of like having a campfire you have a campfire and you throw a log in that's eight inches in diameter it's going to take quite a while for that eight inch diameter log to burn down from the outside in yeah right because it burns outside in you could throw a stick in there that's one inch diameter and obviously that stick's going to burn up faster the surface area is less you could take um a a piece of paper a bunch of paper and get it wet and wadded up really really tightly and let it dry that would be similar to like ball powder okay and you throw that in there and it's obviously going to take longer to burn than just the sheet of paper by itself yeah that would because it has like way more surface area right and so as a general analogy that's kind of why you see the different geometries and propellant is that's how the geometry plays into how quickly it burns okay the next the next part of that is chemistry so that's one leg of the stool is geometry another leg of the stool is chemistry so burn rate modifiers is the technical term that are used and these are just different chemicals that are put on to alter how fast it burns through that exposed surface area so an easy way to think about that would be like an m m the candy that you eat yeah so it's got that hard shell on the outside so that it doesn't melt in your hand it melts in your mouth you know that's the whole the old um propellant is very similar to that so they may put a chemical coating say on the outside of the propellant if they want the initial burn to be slow but then once it burns through that coating it will burn very rapidly when it gets that soft chocolate on the inside yeah the quote unquote soft chocolate of propellant yeah interesting and the so that's the second leg is the chemistry and then the third leg is pressure so as pressure goes up that the the propellant is burning under the burn rate goes up as well gets faster burning the more pressure that's generated yes that's why the internal ballistic cycle is so Dynamic you know it's it's it's so hard to um just predict you know arbitrarily based on some data a lot of times you just have to empirically test it to know exactly what's going to happen with that specific circumstance got it like that burn rate chart I'm sure that everybody's seen that has all the powders listed and their relative burn rates that you can definitely change where those powders Place each other depending on the cartridge and the bullet and the load yeah the the volume of inside the case which would have direct correlation on the pressure that a certain volume of powder would would generate and as it's building pressure and building pressure that can depending on the load that's there whether that's bullet weight in front of it or neck down size diameter whatever whatever you're doing you can alter the burn rate and obviously get Target to burn slower maybe than 43.50 depending on the conditions yeah that chart I mean we have the the reloading manual open to it here that chart's mainly a like a quantification of the geometry and the chemistry contribution to burn rate but the pressure is unknown because we don't know how you're going to use it so that chart is essentially two-thirds of the way to how it's actually going to happen and because it's missing that third stool leg it cannot be used as a plug and play like oh I have data for variant but I don't have vargate so I'm going to use CFE 223 because it's right beside it what's the next one down yeah whatever it is definitely not a a good move especially when us as Reloaders at home don't have any way to measure pressure and that's why you're told to start low and work your way up looking for signs of it because that pressure contribution to the three-legged stool we just described excellent so we've got uh different kinds of powder we've got single based and double based the double bass having the nitroglycerin and the single based having just nitrocellulose now we've got extruded spherical flat spherical which is those are kind of grouped together and then uh flake propellant now from a actual manufacturing standpoint how do we if if they're made from generally the same things what goes into one making it extruded and two making it flat or spherical from just the the physical machine I'm going to call it Machining but manufacturing how do you get those different grain geometries I'll use some some pretty rudimentary analogies again but it's essentially you start with which with the raw nitrocellulose which is like a wood pulp derived material yeah it like almost looks like wood flakes like bleached white wood flakes okay um you put those into um some some liquid to make them soft and then they get pushed through like essentially the Mr Potato Head like I was thinking I was gonna say if you didn't use a Plato analogy I was going to be upset yeah so those unfamiliar with like what an extrusion diet would be or whatever is it's a big flat plate or like uh you know like for hunters if you process your own meat like a grinding grinding wheel same thing that's an extrusion plate that the meat is being pushed through and then on the other side of that is a rotating knife blade right same thing with powder so it really they they all start out that same way so say you were going to make a flake powder you would just make the knife rotate super fast so that it's just cutting off like little thin slices of that stuff that's being extruded through the end okay if it's an extruded powder like uh like Varget like you said um that knife blade would be slowed down so you're allowing you know a certain length of that stuff to to squeeze out of there before you chop it with ball powder it's essentially the same as the Extrusion it comes out as a little cylinder it actually starts as extruded powder and then it essentially gets ran through uh you could think of it as like a car radiator it's a bunch of pipes that go back and forth or whatever and that just beats that cylinder into a ball because it's very soft at that point okay and so that turns it into a ball um after that you know those geometries are controlled right that's that's the initial part of the process to to control the burn rate and then they'll go through chemical treatment processes where they add the the burn rate modifiers to it okay and there's different types that are used with different types of powder it's not all the same stuff um there's there's surface Coatings there's Coatings that are put that are that are put down into the actual grains of the nitrocellulose like down inside the powder that's what results in like Progressive burning which we might talk about we definitely will um so the the chemical stuff happens to the powder and then any final Dimensions will essentially be sorted so it'll either be modified so you were talking about like a like a flattened ball powder so to do that you would just take that ball and essentially run it through like two rolling pins that are very close together yeah and you just you know you slightly the kind of pancake them you could think of it as that's also done as a as a control point for the geometry of the burn rate um and then after that the powder will go through it's you know it'll usually go through like a sorting a size sorting operation just because you're gonna have variability in that you know so yeah it goes through and gets rid of anything that's too big or too small um and and then it essentially gets dried out and it's manufactured propellant I mean in a very rudimentary description that's how it works and one thing that I think is fascinating uh that I would say most people don't quite understand is how incredibly sensitive gun propellant can be to moisture and how much single percentage changes in moisture content can dramatically affect the burn rate yeah that's huge and each powder has its own kind of tendency to want a certain amount of moisture there's like a normal amount of moisture it wants to hold okay and yeah you go you start changing that by fractions of a percentage and it changes things quite a bit so we'll get into powder storage later but that's one thing that's very important and one thing that should be top of mind you know in your reloading practice is proper storage because yeah you'd hate to get some Winchester 748 and go to load a whole bunch of 223 rounds for your AR and find out that it's you know you stored it improperly change the moisture content now you're taking apart again that's really cool to see the manufacturing process we've all three actually been to you know when you were back working with me we went down as soon as you started with me that was like one of the things like Hey we're going to go there so you can see this and learn this operation I want to go back a second time because I've been working uh in the engineering department for like all of three weeks and I had a pretty good handle on you know I was a advanced hobbyist as far as reloading is concerned and propellant knowledge but man to see facilities that produce this stuff it was I I need to go back just because you know the typical water from a fire hose that was yeah it was pretty intense yeah what was it like for you I mean you hadn't seen that before yeah it's uh chemical Engineers playground oh for sure yeah yeah um yeah it was it was pretty impressive to see um yeah just all all the pipes yeah how much Plumbing is involved in that um yeah it and then kind of amazing to me that they have the ability to control the chemical processes as well as they do the way that it's handled yeah yeah that it's the Laboratories that are at those at those manufacturing facilities are insane I mean yeah that's uh like the high-end chemical breakdown equipment that they have because because you really have to have it very very precise you know what each little piece of that is in in the propellant and so after they manufacture it they essentially chemically break it back down to ensure that what is actually in it is the specs it's supposed to yeah that's it's pretty wild what's crazy to me or was crazy to me or at least impactful completely tangential to gunpowder was that if you open up the can of propellant you're reloading and you have that smell and you go to the facility and the whole campus smells like that yeah you open the car door and I was like oh I know that smell uh that's funny so kind of transitioning now from how it's made before we get into maybe performance metrics and and case fill and all that kind of stuff I want to talk a little bit or have you guys talk a little bit about the fact that yes gunpowder can be dangerous but it is stable and talk about how it burns because I think there's some misunderstanding you know as a as an entry level hobbyist that it's explosive or that you know it's somehow gonna you know if you yeah if it caught on fire it's gonna blow things up or whatever so just talk a little bit about how it actually Burns and what those characteristics are like you know just like Jaden said that third leg pressure so if you if you don't build pressure then the the burn rate stays low yep um and so like if you I'm sure that you can go to on YouTube and find plenty of it but if you pour powder out on the tabletop on the ground whatever light it you'll get a flame you know it'll it'll burn and then that's it if you contain it that's when it builds pressure and that's when you get you know the the higher burn velocity that makes a boom that makes a bang for you okay um so and there's a word for that yeah it was definitely great that's the word yeah so powder definitely great it's not the the burn velocity isn't high enough to to be in ex like a high explosive to yeah okay interesting I just wanted to put that out yeah because once once you put pressure under it like that that powder velocity when you uncork out of a out of a rifle barrel is like five thousand foot per second at that point right so um but yeah just open air burn is is super slow burn rate compared to actual like explosives yep so flammable extremely flammable not explosive I remember seeing like a super I don't even know if we're supposed to talk about this but a super old video like reloading video that Joyce did it just hit our YouTube we did a Premiere you can watch it on YouTube it's in the public now Hornet it has yeah it was on a DVD and oh before you get there I'm gonna say it was for instructional purposes only by the founder of the company in a era long ago yeah and things were just different when men when men were men and we you know yeah yeah we didn't have to wear hard hats everywhere uh but to your point like go find a video of somebody burning propellant with Joyce Hornady did that on this reloading video like pours out some IMR powder and touches that thing off and you get to watch it burn which is no better way to show somebody and he also does it with black powder yeah just to show the difference yeah which black powder much more volatile oh yeah than than a smokeless propellant that we use today and you see that same thing as we were talking like in that burn rate chart a pistol powder is going to burn faster open air than H50 BMG right right and you can see that and then it's obviously then more sensitive to being contained and so yeah that's why guys that end up screwing up and loading pistol powder into a bottleneck magnum rifle cartridge yeah have a bad day I think the worst example I've ever seen of that is hodgdens h110 mistakeness Hodgkin's h1000 yeah in a 330 yeah we just had that conversation the other day with some of the visitors that came by they were at Firearms manufacturer and a very reputable one and make really good stuff and they had a guy that bought one of their 338 lapuas and was reloading and picked h110 instead h1000 you know had them both sitting there just made that mistake and he loaded I I think our friends you know like like a hundred oh boy and the action survived um the I think he he was like 84 grains he had in there yeah it wasn't good it it so it was that yeah this has like an internal breach ring um and I think the barrel and that breach ring were cracked or toast but the receiver was filled so he didn't like get shrapnel and the bolt I think the bolt had lugs well the one that I saw uh you could you should probably Google it right now it's 338 Lapua Kaboom uh now that one yeah yeah yeah more often that that guy got extremely lucky I'll just say that yeah the one they're held together because most of the time you well and as a reloader be very deliberate in what you're doing good storage clean reloading bench uh that goes without saying so maybe that's a good time to bring up like well why is there different burn rates like what's what's the purpose of that um if you think back to that third leg of the stool which is pressure um one of the things that controls or influences pressure is the volume at which something is burning within right so the the propellant is being taken from a solid state and it's chemically being transitioned via burning into a gas State and the rate at which it does that causes an increase in pressure so it's producing gases very quickly the the amount of pressure that's produced by those gases is a function of the volume that it's burning within okay so you know if you take if you take 10 psi in a volume one and then you take that and you put it in volume 10 the PSI is going to drop right because you've increased the volume so the reason why you see so many different options in different burn rates is because all of the different cartridges bullet weight combinations that are out there all have different volumes okay and a lot of the volume that you see so the cartridge case volume plays into it obviously because that's the volume of the cylinder the propellant is burning in but another piece of volume that most people don't consider is the volume of the bore yeah or they're all calibrating because as soon as you've generated enough pressure that the bullet is starting to move out of the cartridge case the volume is changing now it's not a static state of volume it's Dynamic it's it's in a constant state of change as the bullet starts to move volume is increasing pressure is dropping yeah so the reason that you have so much variability and so many different options in the burn rate chart is essentially all those different cartridge cases and then all those different bore volumes and the mix of all of those across the spectrum of what we use in in Small Arms means that you have to have a ton of different options you can't just have three burn rates of powder pistol speed rifle speed shotgun speed or whatever it may be you know you have to have that that option to tune the tune the propellant burn rate being used to the cartridge case volume and bore volume relationship and dynamic relationship that they're going to have as the bullet moves down the barrel yep right on and a good example of that would be if you look at like a 22 cal or a 243 uh larger case volume so let's say a 243 Winchester super short mag and a nine millimeter Luger you've got on the 243 wssm you have this huge fat case that needs to be full of propellant in a tiny bore volume and on the nine millimeter side you have a huge bore volume essentially almost as the same diameter as the case and you have to have that match of pressure to actually Propel the bullet to get the optimal velocity without going over pressure and yeah that's a so you see that weird balance where like uh 308 and vargate is a good combination and then you see vargate pop up again in some 375 Ruger yeah well like even the straight wall cases oh sure you know like you go back to because the volume is is increasing so fast you need that faster burn rate to keep up with it yeah that's like it's like a treadmill on a treadmill that that volume is really the main driver too A lot of people with the knowledge that they have at their disposal mainly in these reloading manuals um what you see changing in a reloading manual is bullet weight right you'll be within a certain cartridge within the loading manual and you'll see there's this data set for this class of bullet weight and then it you know as it changes around so a lot of people from that think that bullet weight is the main driver it is a driver but what is a a more influential driver is the volume and an easy example you could look at if you want to and you can use our data you can use other manufacturers data hodgdon's website with their their Reloading Data Center makes it pretty easy but go look at um cartridges of the same family that are different uh bore diameters so let's say like the 308 family you have 338 Federal which is a 308 Winchester necked up to 338 yeah the 308 Winchester which is a 30 cal and then the 260 Remington which is neck down to six six five so the the cartridge case bodies on all three of those are essentially identical mine you know a little bit of shoulder differences but call it identical and bullet weights are going to vary widely right from 338 to 30 to 6.5 from 120 up to 200 yeah plus yeah yeah so if you go in there and you look at the heaviest bullets in each each of those cartridges so let's say you know two 220 to 250 green 338 uh 200 to 230 grain 30 cal and then say 140 to 150 class six five you would expect that if you pick just a static powder and you loaded it in all three of those cartridges that as you went down in bullet weight you would have to increase your charge rate but actually the opposite happens if you go look at that data and you pick one powder that's available in each of those three cartridges and you look at the charge rates of that powder you end up having to drop your charge weight when you go from the 250 grain 338 down to the to you know 225 grain 30 cal you drop charge weight well how is that you know your bullet slider it's because it's controlled by that bore volume so another way to think about it is your example of the of the 223 wssm versus the nine millimeter if we if we fix the amount of bullet movement so that it's the same let's just say the bullet moves one inch the amount of volume increase behind that 223 as it travels one inch compared to the volume increase behind the nine millimeter as that bullet travels one inch it's night and day different huge difference so you can start to see why you have to have such a fast burning powder in the nine millimeter because one inch of movement in that creates a big volume increase your powder has to be burning faster than the volume is increasing otherwise the the pressure drops interesting you can that same example too is a good one is when you find the same cartridge parent parent cartridge or whatever and then you can find overlap and bullet weight where they have the same bullet weight and every time the smaller bore has less powder of the same powder you think you know like oh I'm shooting a 107 and a you know a 110 or something or whatever combination I don't know six five you'll get 100 you can get 100 grain and 100 grade and a six and a six five yeah and uh you'll see that with the same powder the six will always have a lower charge weight interesting so to to talk now about some of the performance metrics uh of just powder in general and what we've seen and how that relates to the end user uh when I think of performance metrics I think of accuracy uh case fill ratio and temperature stability those I'm generally concerned about those three things as an end user as a hand loader what are some of the intricacies of balancing the performance parameters as a was ammo manufacturer but also as a reloader and what are those parameters that you guys are looking for well case fill um maybe start there because that's step one you know accuracy comes later velocity comes later um you would you want the cartridge case to be as full as possible with propellant I say as full as possible because you can go too far you can have too much propellant in there you can be smashing that propellant as you see the bullet into it it's possible that you could be fracturing propellant grains when you do that I I haven't seen it um but it you know it's probably possible if you fracture propellant grains you've you've exposed more surface area and burn rate is going to increase um so that would be bad uh yeah you're talking like when you're 103 100 and 405 percent over what they what is called Max case fill yeah but generally I mean propellants fairly I guess you would say compressible right so as you as you pour the propellant in the case it's just randomly orienting itself inside of there and when you go smash the bullet on top of it if there's not enough room left for the bullet to sit in there and it's it's actually pushing down on the powder generally it just you know they find a home closer together yeah um generally you don't have the fracturing of propellant grains that way you can have the fracturing of propellant grains when you get into temperatures so certain powders when they get very very cold which so we you know we test all of our ammunition at very hot temperatures and very cold temperatures to make sure it's going to work as we intend in those environments certain propellants when you get very very cold when the primer goes off then that essentially the shock of that primer coming into the propellant bed it can cause fracturing of grains or propellant when they're very cold and brittle okay more surface areas yeah you can get pressure that goes way way up which is usually not how tip typically you don't see higher pressure in Colder Weather but it can happen I've yes I've done some temperature tests you know several years ago and was like man that doesn't you never see this but it was because of that grain fracturing yeah so you're probably more prone to seeing that in like flake powders that you're going to use in hand gun or shot shell stuff just because they're so small right they're kind of like little little inner plates yeah good way to think of it yeah it's not break one of those pretty easy yeah um so case fill on the on the high side you know that may be the stuff you want to avoid but the reason you want the cartridge case completely full is because you're presenting a consistent amount and position of the propellant to the primer so when the primer goes off and that you know flaming hot particulate matter is coming through the flash hole and hitting the back end of the propellant bed if there's a bunch of room in your cartridge case the position of the propellant itself can can vary within the case it might be up you know gathered by the bullet it might be all the way down by the primer it might be evenly distributed depending a lot of times on the position of your firearm and this plays in big when shooting up hill and downhill and a lot we've seen it over and over again where uh either a a cartridge uh or or just a guy develops a load and he's like this thing's great but everything he's done is on flat ground and then when he goes and starts shooting up hill or downhill his extreme spread and standard deviation just Goes Bananas yeah it's like what how did this happen the case fill is a is a big part of that I think a great example we've probably talked about it before when we did the 300 PRC podcast but a really notable example of that was the 300 Norma we did a bunch of uh shooting and testing with that and yeah that was especially when it became Sammy approved and the pressure limit was kind of uh I don't know the pro appropriate word for that with the Sami pressure limit for 300 Norma was uh abbreviated and so you had to drop your charge weights a little bit drop your charge with less powder in there and then yeah uphill and downhill shooting big velocity spreads and when you're trying to hit something far away velocity spreads are Paramount yeah yeah that was that was actually a Sammy introduction it never did end up getting approved oh really um it's it's not listed on the approved Cartridge list but we'll leave those details to themselves yeah so case fill very important you need an appropriate Burn Speed for your cartridge and then if you can get it you know consistently and uniformly full uh that's a problem I guess with a lot of Magnums is if you look through that chart as you start getting into the slower and slower burn ranks you get fewer and fewer options and so making Magnum cartridges it's a little bit of a trick of fitting the capacity to available powders matching it yeah so then now there's some other performance parameters outside of Caseville one more note on Caseville you can also have negative consequences of going um too far down on Caseville so you'll see like in a reloading manual there's Min charges that are listed we don't just go all the way to Zero from your charge rate and the reason for that is if you don't put enough propellant in there you can have delayed ignition or hang fires occur and that can be very very dangerous because what happens there is uh primer goes off the the the propellant bed is generally shoved forward towards the bullet um burning starts but it's not not real positive pressure is generated enough that bullet starts to move pressure drops because bullet moves and volume increases and then bullet comes to a stop while powder is still kind of barely burning and now there's a ton of resistance because the bullet wasn't a state of motion it's easier to keep it in motion than it is to start it from a stop yeah especially when it is trying to engage in the rifling yeah so it jumps forward essentially to the resistance of the rifling stops because there's not enough pressure to continue pushing it into the rifling powder is still like smoldering I guess you could say um and once bullet stops volume is now fixed powder is continuing to burn pressure is increasing and increasing and increasing and increasing and you get a high pressure spike because of all that engraving resistance there so going too low on charge weights can be dangerous and you can see that I've I've not personally experienced but I've uh in my tech days uh helped a few people diagnose what came out to be this problem I see it more with smaller bore diameters slower propellants and low charge weights so like 243 Winchester with h-4831 you go too low with that combination which is 4831 is a great powder for 243 especially with the heavy bullets but if you if you start too low or if you're you know playing with the bottom then you have kind of a soft primer that was that could be a problem and and not all powders are equal on how they ignite either sure back to that talk about the m m concept and the chemistry if the powder you're using has a lot of deterrent on the outside of it burn rate modifiers compared to another powder that doesn't that other powder May light easier maybe less prone to those problems but there's no way to know that right so uh reference a trustworthy reloading manual or Reloading Data Center from somewhere reliable and make sure you've paired up the appropriate Burn Speed with your cartridge and then again it's it's beneficial from a internal ballistics consistency standpoint to run a rather full cartridge case Okay so from moving into the next performance criteria you know we talked about Caseville I'm looking at accuracy and temperature stability and any others that you guys might have in mind temp temp stability that's that's pretty simple you freeze the ammo heat the ammo and shoot it and see what see where it walks yeah um and a lot of people again that's not a a fixed value it's not like oh if I if I take vargate and it's always going to be 0.3 foot per second per degree it's not yeah it depends on the volume depends on the on the case capacity the bore volume how much resistance the bullet is giving it you can take the same cartridge put two different weighted bullets in it and Varget is not going to have the same or any powder what for that matter it's not going to have the same temperature sensitivity necessarily on on both ends of that Spectrum got it and so obviously you don't want any temperature sensitivity but it is present almost all the time yeah it's a chemical reaction Heat plays plays a plays a factor so what's that look like between extruded propellant and they're not suited uh single based propellant and double bass propellant double bass propellant tends to be worse yeah so essentially you're getting the reason that there's a double bass in the nitroglycerin is added in is because it adds chemical energy to the to the the internal ballistics burning cycle and so that allows you to get higher velocity something that most of us like you know flatter shooting less wind all those benefits uh but the trade-off of that is that it is more sensitive to the temperature at which it starts to burn at so the temperature of your ammunition when you when you fire it um a lot of times like you were saying you know uh a given powder is not going to burn the same way across different cartridges it'll it'll perform in General within a certain way like vargate is generally pretty good stuff yes it's going to vary slightly depending on the specifics um when you get into some of the very high velocity options generally that comes with much higher temperature sensitivity meaning in general with rifle stuff as you go to the hotter temperatures your pressure and velocity will go up and we go to colder temperatures it will go down that's not always the case a lot of times with handgun propellant that's that's really the highest nitroglycerin levels there are generally the double bass powders for rifle have a lower nitroglycerin content than than the pistol stuff does but those sometimes they'll go the opposite direction sometimes you'll see the pressure and velocity go up at cold and down at warm temperatures it really just depends yeah yeah I'd say this whole discussion is very Case by case dependent sure then there are some general there's some generalities but yeah unfortunately like if you don't have a pressure test barrel and yeah hard to but as a general rule I would say that extruded propellants that are single base generally produce the best temperature sensitivity that's probably a fair statement I mean some of the newer technology double bass powders are just as good oh well or better but I would say you know generally speaking of the propellants available in the last 30 to 50 years yeah the the single base has generally been looked to as the most stable across temperatures yep so if you're a reloader out there looking for temperature stability as a as a performance criteria for say long range shooting competitive shooting hunting what what have you extruded single base propellants are top of the Heap now there are some exceptions like always man I'll tell you what uh reloader 16 and reloader 26 and reloader 23 I don't know what alliance is doing that they've got that figured out those are double bass propellants and the temperature stability is in my testing I'm guessing you guys can second that this has been phenomenal accuracy is great and then the new uh stable powders from Winchester got stable age D and that Slow Burn Speed stable 6.5 right there in the middle and then on the faster end you've got stable match which is kind of similar to burn speed of like bargate so 308 223 that kind of thing yeah those are spherical propellants that are double bass that are quite temperature stable as well yeah and so those those mats or exceed in some cases what we see out of the traditional temp stable extension powders yeah they're a great options today's episode is brought to you by Hornady security rapid safes using patented RFID technology you get the quickest most Dependable access to your firearm when you need it the most check out the full Rapid Safe line at hornadysecurity.com so now transitioning over to that last and fabled and surrounded by dogma and sample size testing accuracy so is there any generalities that we can talk about from propellants that would help our listener to say okay if accuracy is your Chief concern um is there anything that you should be looking for specifically in a propellant because obviously we want all propellants to be hyper accurate and that's not always the case and I don't know why but yeah well those same ones we've been talking about those Alliance that Alliance series The hodgin Extreme line those tend to be just from what I've seen and tested more more prone to produce really good accuracy results Barrel to Barrel to Barrel to Barrel so on the average if you had 100 guns and you picked 100 propellants on the average single based extruded powders or the new stuff from Alliant uh and new stuff from Winchester those stable lines yeah there are certainly places where a ball powder is completely capable of the same like insane level of precision um but they are the the older stuff that's not as temp stable is more affected by temps then you'll see that precision kind of come in and out with temperature oh really yeah especially hot when you get it hot it tends to open up um but then these these newer like the stable HD stable match those either work or they don't kind of from an accuracy yeah they they tend to be better they tend to be more tamed than previous like ball powder like uh double bass ball powder stuff yeah the classics h335 right right so they're they're awesome because if they work for you you're throwing them right out of a powder measure you're yeah they meet you're amazing right yeah it's awesome um it's a win-win if they work um but we're definitely worth testing um but on the whole I would say yeah a lot of that old the same the same stuff everybody's been using yeah they're using it for a reason for accuracy yeah the the historically accurate propellants are just accurate yeah and then there's some too some of the old IMR stick powders that maybe aren't as temp stable as some of the newer stuff that you can still get incredible oh yeah IMR 4064 with 100 you know 168 grain match bullet through eight Winchester you don't need anything else those powders have been around for a long time I mean back to that history piece Dupont you know in the early 1900s kind of started that that IMR stuff and yeah it's pretty cool how many of those are still around you know improved military rifle yep yep yeah bit of worries and other pretty good pretty good powder um as well as Norma if you can get it the Norma series of propellants are pretty good uh Shooters World we've added some of those into the yeah into the book and it came out of nowhere and not came out of nowhere but as far as on the hobby reloading side of things um you know that they're not that old of a company and yeah Shooters World Precision uh is readily available at least in our area and I've seen a lot of people swap to that when vargates become hard to find and and have not sacrificed performance at all and in some cases have gotten more performance out of it yeah yeah that's a yeah that's a big ball of wax as far as what's going to work I think there's you can find a lot of applications and a lot of specific scenarios where where one powder will work and then will not work yeah you know and it's yeah generally though I think like like I said we've seen really good luck with Barrel to Barrel to Barrel just getting the gun and gun being very stable with as far as acceptable accuracy out of those like hodgin extreme line alliance the reloader Series yeah bit of Rory is another one that yeah that got a strong following yeah well if you look at the short range bench rest oh this is several years ago but looked at short range benchrest Nationals or World Championship or whatever it was uh every single person shot the devorian 133 every single one of them that was in the top 20 shot bit of Orion 133. that's saying something right uh so from an accuracy standpoint another I guess performance criteria if you wanted to make it a four-legged stool would be velocity you know sometimes speed is if if your level of precision required is you know if you're if you're looking for one minute versus a half of a minute of accuracy you can get that one minute of accuracy at 200 feet per second faster that's that's a benefit to you and like you've kind of alluded to and addressed specifically when you add nitroglycerin to the mix bring nitroglycerin to the party you're going to get more speed right and that's kind of a big balance between the burn deterrence and the nitroglycerin and and everything that that the powder manufacturer puts in there and that you're you're it's it's a just a big Balancing Act if you want to build pressure you're capped at a limit right 62 000 65 000 PSI depending on what it is or maybe less 50 to 55 whatever depending on the cartridge but you're capped at that limit but if you look at the pressure versus time curve that we get out of our pressure barrels there's a metric down that it prints out at the bottom that is area under that curve and so the more energy density you can get into the powder at the right burn rate you will get that burn to hang out longer before it goes down and that creates more area under the curve it's more basically time at pressure which generally very closely correlates to having more beautiful velocity so if the bullet's getting pushed on with 62 000 pounds of pressure and it achieves x velocity if you can increase the time that the bullets being pushed on at 62 000 pounds you're going to increase the velocity right exactly awesome so walk us through a little bit if we can because we've got propellants on the market and we've got ammo lines out there Hodgen super performance hodgin level Revolution uh and then we've got ammo lines that we call Super performance and level Revolution that achieve and in some cases 150 200 I've seen 250 foot faster than a normal single base powder uh with no increase in chamber pressure and Miles you know talked us through the wave tops here but from a chemistry standpoint how does that occur sure so it goes back to the whole volume pressure relationship we talked about earlier now what happens when you look at that pressure time curve that miles is talking about um it starts out and you see pressure building building building building building it kind of peeks out at the top generally and then it falls off rather rapidly and and continues to drop until the bullet exits the muzzle and the pressure normalizes to ambient what that tells you is is a is essentially a story of of how the volume in bore was happening from a Time standpoint so as the pressure is rising what that means is that the propellant is being changed from a solid state into a gas State at a faster rate then the volume is increasing behind the bullet because pressure is going up so pressure is going up when pressure Peaks out what you have is the the peak ratio you could call it of gas generation to volume generation the gases you at that point you've reached the max the powder can no longer produce more gas than the volume is increasing bullet is still in a state of motion traveling down the barrel so volume is still increasing once pressure starts to drop off and that curve is on the back side what you're seeing then is that the the pressure generation of the propellant is less than the rate of expansion of volume behind the bullet that's why the pressure is dropping okay and then obviously when the bullet uncorks from the muzzle pressure completely drops um so how do you get more velocity with not exceeding that Max Pressure what you do is it's a thing called progressivity and you control this within the propellant itself uh whether it's chemically or geometry wise with the burn rate modifiers but as the pressure curve is approaching Peak pressure just like we talked about before when it hits that Peak area you design the powder in a way where it now matches and holds that pressure so that point where you have a match between gas generation and pressure generation and volume generation behind the bullet you match and you hold those two at the same rate and that means you're pushing on the bullet for a longer period of time with the maximum amount of pressure but you never went higher pressure you so another way to think of it is traditional powder is going to hit 60 000 pounds for throwing random yeah random number random numbers for one second okay it experiences sixty thousand pounds for one second that correlates to it producing 2500 foot per second if we can hold that bull if we can hold that 60 000 pounds for three seconds the velocity is going to go up because it was pushed for a longer period of time and so that's what you see with the super performance and say the lever Evolution style propellants is that they have that built in that you can almost think of it as smart propellant you know it's it's it's tuned specifically to do that instead of just like burn generate pressure done like that's the complexity of the cycle it's much more than that the Gobstopper layers oh yeah of the Everlasting camera of the chemical composition of it is time so that you delay the burn so that as it's building pressure it's you know not going crazy to spike it and then once you get to the next layer then it's burning faster to maintain sustain that pressure it's got like a little reserve tank you could think of it yeah so it hits that Max Pressure bullets moving as fast as it's moved yet so volume is increasing very quickly and if it doesn't start burning faster at that point then the volume just increases pressure drops so there's like a little booster tank you know when it hits max pressure and it's like burn faster right here because bullet is really moving fast and that's what gives you the extra awesome doesn't create higher pressure and those spherical propellants that we mentioned super performance and level Revolution specifically those are are very Progressive propellants but there are others out there cfe223 most of those spherical propellants that you're going to find from accurate powders and stuff like that they're going to you know every powder has some level of progressivity it's just the ones that are hyper Progressive I guess you could call them that really give you that that added benefit of hot nasty speed and then the downside to that is if you have a 12 inch barrel oh yeah right because you're maintaining that pressure higher pressure longer down the barrel so if you have a gas Port somewhere in there right yeah well you're creating it's probably creating more gas volume right so if you're a gas operated firearm probably not the best option for you to look at those or if you have a super short barrel you'll get some impressive muzzle flash yeah yeah yeah yeah I've seen some pretty impressive muzzle flash videotaped at a phone a couple times through the window of of the pnv barrel uh so from a performance criteria standpoint I think all that's super helpful for The Listener and now uh kind of transitioning for just the hobbyist not us for ammo because we have our ways of doing it but we mentioned storage um how critical that can be for the propellant and your loaded ammunition what do you guys got for recommendations there keep it dry yeah keep your powder dry there's a reason that's a old saying you know yeah yeah because it was the thing is long-term exposure to moisture will degrade the powder and that will chemically alter it and then all bets are off as to how it's going to perform uh generally that means burn rate goes higher yeah usually not the other way yeah pressure goes higher but then within the usable range right the the more moisture that's in it the slower it burns it's kind of an inhibitor is that correct and then if you if you're like in Arizona and you keep it in your garage at five percent humidity at 120 degrees you'll cook all the water out of it and then you'll get really impressive burn rate increase yeah yeah and that's that's another thing a great point to bring up is that when you look at these manuals you know these are established essentially based on climate controlled conditions if you're in Arizona and you you're even if your powder isn't climate controlled it's likely at a very low humidity level any anyway unless you have a humidifier running and the opposite is true say in the south southeastern part of the United States where humidity is very high down by the coasts or something you can take the exact same canister of powder and take that thing to Arizona and let it sit for a week and load up a fixed charge weight and then take that thing to Florida let it sit for a week and load up that same thing and you will get different performance from those depending on the propellant sure and and those of it are they change to varying degrees some propellants are extremely susceptible to it and others not so much and so it just depends but that's something to keep in mind especially you know if you're let's say you're in the in the southwestern part of the United States the more arid climates and you're using a reloading manual and you're seeing pressure signs or you're seeing velocities that equate to the max pressure in the book and you're still a grain under Max that could be that could be a reason why yeah and I've even heard of people like um that will buy eight pound kegs of powder and pour it all out into a container and let it normalize for a day or two I mean obviously not in humid yeah nasty conditions but like in their reloading room inside their house and they'll let it sit and then they'll put it back into the Container they won't buy a sealed jug and then load right out of it because they think and it's probably true to some extent especially the further on the extreme ends of the spectrum that you are that yeah that sealed canister if you load right away and then you let it sit for a month and then go back and load again it your performance may change interesting and we've talked a lot about humidity let's talk about what temperature can do for propellant storage because I mean it's pretty robust for for uh for the most part Bo and you start putting it through big changes of temperature and then over and over and over and over again that can create some problems as well absolutely depending on the propellant um generally temperature swings are harder on the storage of ammunition or double bass propellants um nitroglycerin and nitrocellulose aren't are not necessarily best friends and so they may want to go away from each other chemically and when you have a a separation of those two and they're supposed to be together at a certain ratio and they decide to go independent and you have kind of pure nitroglycerin and pure nitrous cellulose over here that's not a good thing um but temperature Cycles are really bad for that so how you store your ammunition or your propellant is important keeping it in a climate controlled is obviously the best you know somewhere around 70 degree ambient temperature fantastic you propellant lasts very long time I mean there's probably many listeners out there that have bought you know Surplus World War II or Korea you know Korean uh 30.6 ammo and it's fine you know we we've pressure tested some old some old Lake City Ammo and you know 40 50 year old stuff and it's okay you know yeah however we've also had guys in the lab that have loaded certain propellants certain manufacturers have propellants that are prone to this I I won't say names that's not fair without them being here to represent themselves but uh loaded it was planning on going and shooting it that weekend had it in kind of you know the little MTM load box thing that you want to have it uh got home something came up didn't get to go shooting ammo sits in a climate controlled spare room of the house for you know five six seven years he sees it one day he's like oh man I never did shoot that I remember loading it and what I was going to do you know kind of brought back a memory brings it back into the lab he's like ah maybe I'll just check it out make sure everything's okay pulls the Box open there's blue corrosion on the outside of the cartridge case this thing was stored at kind of controlled conditions for you know less than a decade somewhere between half and less than a decade and uh we pulled a couple bullets out and that powder was decomposing and would have been a very bad idea to shooting a firearm yeah so and that's because it was the heat cycle had either baked it well that specific propellant has a tendency for premature decomposition okay but propellant in general as you as you cycle through hot cold hot cold hot cold that that's hard on Powder it tries to break it down chemically so even held in a perfect climate controlled environment like this was it can still happen to you yeah not all propellants are equal but other propellants are fine I mean I have some I have some 556 in my basement that that I loaded in the lab right when I first started you know so this is 12 years ago and I brought it in last year and thought I'm just going to pressure test it again because I had all the documentation of what I loaded it with for lots and everything and I brought it in and shot it through the pressure and velocity barrel and it performed exactly the same as it did before and that's sitting in an ammo can in a climate controlled basement so there's you know two different propellants but one had premature decomposition the other one didn't what what exact or exacerbates that is temperature swings though so this is a big deal for those that concealed carry those that keep a firearm in their vehicle for whatever reason um law enforcement you know that's a big part of law enforcement's job is how long has that ammo been sitting through hot and cold cycles and and here in the Midwest and the you know the the northern portion of the states or any climates where you can see you know hot temperatures in the summer and then very cold temperatures in the winter in those daily cycles that could be 50 to 80 degree swings that's pretty hard on your ammunition you should cycle that stuff out yeah the other thing especially like we've seen with uh patrol cars is you leave ammo in a car for five years and you run around going over all those bombs yeah well there's that burn deterrent and everything that's on the outside of the powder and you'll eventually rub that away and it will increase pressure interesting and one other thing I had thought of I remember doing some pressure testing uh for temperature stability and got busy or the alarm went off and I didn't you know check my phone or whatever and I let the rounds bake in the oven overnight and where it should have you know increased maybe five or six thousand pounds of pressure it increased like 14 000 pounds of pressure so I retested it and had it let it sit for four or five hours so that was just I'm assuming baked some of the deterrents off or I don't know what happened yeah so when you say bake probably important for us to clarify your your we have an oven that we use to to test the ammo at hotter temperatures and we're talking temperatures of like 120 140 degrees sometimes we'll go a little bit north of that so don't go home and set your oven to the minimum of 180 and throw some eggs no this was 120 degree test yeah um yeah you're certainly uh you're certainly baking off moisture if it's in there long enough and and that goes back to that same thing we're talking about with humidity um and you know in the arid climate versus the tropical climate so that's part of it and then obviously it's warm you know the just the raw temperature contribution to the burn rate too yeah certainly can happen yeah so I retested it at a four hour or five hour whatever and it was it fell right into that five or six thousand pound range yeah that's something so like if you load an arid climate and then you go for an extended period of time to a more humid climate if you don't seal primers and case mouths that humidity will eventually it will get in yeah a lot of people think well it's completely sealed up you know that primer is a press fit into the primer pocket and the bullets are pressed it into the case like how how is more humid air getting in there or less humid air or whatever it it will it'll find its way in uh generally the the primer occurs first it's easier for it to get in and around which makes sense there you know there's a lot less surface contact between a primer cup and a primer pocket then there's a bullet and case neck but yeah if you if you waterproof the ammunition then you're good you put a sealant around the primer and then the case mouth you're good but yeah if you don't it's a matter of time before some sort of uh acclimation will occur Yeah well yeah I think uh anybody that's got large sums or or volumes of ammunition is probably taking some methods to to store it and uh yeah just let this be another reminder if you've got ammo at home store it properly because it can create some problems but fellas I've learned a lot about propellant uh just in this last hour of visiting with you guys uh and having been to a powder production facility and you know it's almost like those memories are perishable they're not perishable you just need somebody to rejuvenate them and some of the stuff I just plain forgot about and I think this is going to benefit our listener in just adding more uh rungs in their ladder of understanding what's exactly happening when they buy ammunition or when they reload ammunition at home is there anything else in the world of propellant and gunpowder that we either didn't talk about in depth enough or didn't mention at all that you guys want our listeners to know it's too early in the morning to ask me that sort of thing okay uh any anybody need to give a shout out to while you got uh you got the line here um well just advice to listeners um you know go get a good reputable loading manual cross reference it with other people's manuals but but go try it like it's so much fun as a handloader or a reloader to go see what they do because they're not all the same right it's it's not all the you know like you go to the store and it's the same food that's got 10 different brandings on it or whatever yeah propellant is not that like they're all different so go go try them it's a lot of fun that's I think the essence of handloading in a nutshell for most of us is like yeah there's some wild cats and some obsolete cartridges that you have to load for but generally it's that's like Tinker around and try this stuff try that stuff and you know it just fuels the passion even more because generally everything I've shot would suffice for what I'm doing but I oh I better try that new stuff I gotta well it's fun too when you find those little nuggets that just I don't know yeah you know yeah find the find the combination that just totally wods them up that's fun right on well I don't have anything else to add certainly I could ramble for a long time but I don't have anything that would benefit our listener in the world of propellant I have a random shout out that I promised a friend I would do because absolutely nothing to do with what we just talked about and we'll make zero sense but uh Simple Jack if you're out there I hope that Glock came back together all right well there it is uh guys thanks for coming on the show thanks for visiting with me and sharing your guys's knowledge on propellant uh and I think I said uh I've said it a couple times I think our listener is really going to benefit from just a more complex understanding of what's actually happening in the components that are being used absolutely yeah all right everybody hopefully you enjoyed this discussion on propellant there's a lot going on there if you're not a hand loader you should consider getting into it it's a great hobby tons of options with different propellants and then if you're a factory ammo shooter just know that these guys and the other ballisticians in our company go through Great Lengths to ensure that we choose the best propellant for each and every Lot number each and every SKU that we produce we'd appreciate if you'd like comment subscribe email us with any suggestions or questions at podcast hornady.com and we'll catch you on the next one

Channel: Hornady Manufacturing

Views: 98,651

Keywords: Hornady

Id: 9vy5ttWZovk

Length: 70min 25sec (4225 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2023