HOW TO GUIDE to Reloading Ammo for PRS | FULL SERIES

hey guys it's Craig at area419 I'm excited to join you and share with you our class on the core elements of precision rifle reloading if you're watching this on YouTube and this is the full length all everything video know that you could have seen this months before if you were part of our team area 419 patreon Channel if you're interested in that drop down in the description below and you're going to find a link to it we'd love to see you there as we get into these core elements of precision rifle reloading I want to make clear what our goal is here we want anybody watching this video with any basic understanding of what reloading is to be able to take what we're teaching here and turn their reloading practices whether they are long developed or just beginning and to something that's going to be more consistent and lead them to what may be higher performing Precision match ammunition for their rifle this is not bulk reloading 101 we're not going to figure out how to save an extra penny a piece on a 556 or a nine mil load there's a lot of content for that and that's a great way to reload but that's not what we're talking about here we're going to use premium tools high-end components and take extra steps to make sure that the ammunition that we are producing here is really really good really as as good as anybody could make now there are going to be times that we talk about a practice or an idea or a method here that you might not agree with and that's okay there's no one way to do this if you jump into a forum on on 6mmbr or on an f-class page or in a PRS page you're going to find more opinions than people on how somebody might or might not reload so these are the best practices that we've found in our own competitive shooting Journeys that produce pretty good ammo and if you've got an idea of something that can be done differently that's why we're here drop something in the comments or if you're on patreon drop it in the in the Forum there and let's discuss what has worked for you and what maybe hasn't as we walk through these elements we're going to talk about how we prep our brass that's actually two sections we're going to talk about how we Prime how we charge how we see some tips and tricks along the way on how we find critical data points and ultimately what we like to do with our ammo after we're not going to cover a few things and we're going to tell you why please understand that reloading is inherently dangerous we're going to work through a process here that is going to ultimately result in putting a loaded round of ammunition into the Chamber of a rifle pulling the trigger and sparking an explosion which drives a projectile at give or take 3000 feet per second again this can be dangerous so understand that we're not going to talk to you about setting a charge weight or finding one your powder manufacturers the best way to find that information also understand that by watching this video and doing anything that we show you you are assuming the risk that comes in reloading it's something that we know can be done very well but also always will have inherent Danger Firearms or tools but they do include risks so understand that when you get into reloading you are taking some of that risk into your own hand and guys here we go we're going to get into the core elements of precision rifle reloading from area 419 one at a time and the next thing we're going to get into we're going to talk about brass prep as we get into the core elements of precision rifle reloading the first thing we're going to do is talk about what do we do with this this is a piece of recently fired brass from I6 GT like I just picked it up from a firing line we have to start here and ultimately we're going to end with this piece of brass ready to go loaded up back to the match so what do we do first well it's dirty the first step that I like to take in the reloading process is I like to clean brass when we clean brass our preferred method of doing it is in a dry tumbler with corn cob or walnut media there's some other Medias that people may use but those are the common ones and they tend to work fairly well I also like to put just a little bit of like a flitz's Polish in with the reloading media this helps the process take a little bit less time and it leaves a nice finish on the brass that I know is not going to tarnish or cause any problems Downstream in this process you'll note I did not say we are going to wet tumble so through hard learned experience wet tumbling is something that unless you are paying a lot of attention to every single thing may not be right for you wet tumbling has two real ill side effects one those pins can be really annoying they can stick in places they can get sideways they can Bunch inside a case but the other problem and the bigger problem is if you leave your brass in a wet tumbler for an extended period of time or really just clean it a lot through several firing rings of that same process you'll tend to roll over or peen your necks and if you know what that looks like it would be around the mouth of your case you would get a little bit of a bulb that would form all the way around the mouth this comes from those pins or that media beating against the end of the case and rounding off that nice Edge that you should have on the front of a mouth if this is on the outside or on the inside you can run into pressure issues fairly quickly I speak from experience too as a guy who left brass in a wet tumbler for too long got distracted was here at the shop came back to it and found a lot of brass that was either going to require a ton of work for me or it was just going to go in the trash can so wet tumbling is something that a lot of people might like because your brass comes out super bright super shiny but in our opinion if you're a reloader that wants to be able to spend their time more efficiently and worry about a few less things we like dry tumbling of our brass once that brass is clean we think an important next step and we'd suggest you do it every time if you have something like an anneales or an annealing made perfect that doesn't really simply and consistently is a kneel your brass the reason that you would anneal brass is it is going to soften that brass to a consistent hardness or softness every single time the nature of brass is as you work that brass and that is the expansion and contraction specifically of that neck when you fire and resize as you work that brass brass will do what's called work hardening that means that your brass becomes harder and over time more brittle simply by using it over and over annealing relieves that stress and is going to give you longer lasting brass necks and is also going to give you more consistent neck tension time over time you may not think you need to do this every time you probably don't but doing it every time as a matter of practice is going to get you a more consistent process and more consistent results Downstream so here we are at the annealer we want to soften the necks of this brass there's a lot of information you can get about the benefits of annealing from somebody like annealing made perfect I know what the code is on the amp Mark 2 do the Aztec code based on having gone through and sacrificed a piece of brass to understand that I've got the correct pilot in I've got a shell holder on their little unit let's need some brass it's pretty simple when you're doing your kneeling make sure that you are using a container as a dump container that is metallic if you use a plastic container you're going to figure out very quickly that annealing works through getting your brass really hot really fast and if you put that piece of brass in a uh in a non-metallic or non-heat proof container it's not going to last very long now that our brass is clean and it's annealed it's ready to be sized all right our piece of brass is clean and it's been annealed now it's time to size it the reason we have to size our brass is after you fire it and that explosion happens inside the brass and it expands to meet your chamber it doesn't shrink all the way back down it shrinks just enough that you can extract it cleanly go to the next round if you ever try to re-chamber a freshly fired piece of brass it's going to be pretty sticky you may be able to get it to close but it's not going to feel the way that you want it to you're also going to be left with virtually no neck tension so if I were to take a projectile and push it into this case right now I would get little to no resistance at all obviously this is not ready to reload as we go through the sizing process understand that this is all built around the idea of full length sizing there's also something you'll hear about called neck sizing this size is only the neck of the case to where you get that neck tension back and you can hold a projectile and it doesn't worry about the growth of the case specifically the shoulder relative to the chamber there was a time a little bit longer ago you'll typically not find this being done so often now where only sizing the neck led to longer life in brass with advancements in brass with advancements in the way that we're managing it the way that we're sizing it the way that we're annealing it and caring for it we think that you are going to get more consistency time to time with a full length size the tough part about neck sizing is you might be able to next size a piece of brass a couple times but eventually that shoulder is going to grow enough that it's not going to be nice or smooth or easy to chamber inside your rifle and at that point you'll need a full length size or bump your shoulder back if you're only doing that every so often that means that each time that you fire your brass is going to be a little bit different it's going to be appropriately sized and then a little bit longer and a little bit longer until you size again and then it's going to go back again this is inconsistency that we don't like to introduce the process we prefer a full length sizing if you need to find somebody else to convince you go ask that Eric Cortina guy he's uh he's pretty worked up about about it now that we've established we're talking full length sizing we're going to head to the reloading bench we're going to get some brass we're going to set up our sizing die we're going to size some brass and we'll talk you through that process from there now that we're ready to get to the bench and do some sizing let's first talk about how we lubricate our cases I like to use Hornady one shot there's great products from alpha there's Imperial sizing wax there are a lot of different ways to do it I'm just going to share how I've done it for quite some time I will take my brass and put it in a used MTM box or like the the nice black plastic boxes that Alpha brass comes in and I sit at mouth up in the box and then with that box I take one shot I usually put in another larger container so that I can move it not make a mess I take that one shot and I shoot in downward from about a 45 degree angle apply rotate that box 90 degrees hit again go all the way around so that all the way around that case I have applied lubrication inside the neck outside the neck and on the shoulder from there I'll take all that brass I'll dump it back into that larger container hit it with a little more spray shake it and make sure I've got a nice coating around the outside of that case so with lubricated cases let's get into setting up our die I'm using one of our M series sizing dies in six GT obviously so with that die Loosely in I'm going to run the ram up I got just a little touch I'm just run that die in about another 3 8 or so turn until I feel like there's nice pressure there and with pressure in I'm going to lock down that die now that I've locked that with the ring I'm going to go ahead and snug it up now I'm going to take the top portion of my die run it down want that nice and tight again snug the outside of the body is set now we're going to set our our micrometer top so I make sure that's out nice and far and until I've got upward pressure on the die and I'm going to crank down my micrometer until it stops this is probably going to size my brass from fired about eight thousandths and making a good guess there I'm gonna go ahead and back that off about four thousandths that'll probably be a little more size than I want but it gives us an opportunity to adjust once I've got the die set up in a rough size I'm going to take my caliper here with a comparator tool on it and start to get measurements of how long these pieces of brass are to the datum line on the shoulder so I'll take my first piece of brass put it in spin and I'm going to zero my caliper on that piece of brass I'm going to grab a couple more and check them zero it out and the next one will be zeroed as well and that'll give us a good starting point for where our brass is this is our fired brass length this is what we could expect any piece of brass fired in that firing cycle to come out at now we're gonna size all right now we go in with that same caliper set the same way we get a measurement looks like I'm not quite getting enough sizing here this is roughly the same size so I'm going to walk this in let's say three thousandths at a time see if that one got us there so with three thousands to walk in we've got two thousandths of shoulder bump so it was a thousandth off to begin with we're gonna size a couple more pieces confirm that length and that's how we size brass so the brass is now sized We're Off the Bench we know that we bumped our shoulders back about two thousandths and we're where we want to be from a dimensional size of the brass except sometimes you need to trim brass this isn't something you necessarily need to do all the time depending on the cartridge that you are reloading there is a specified trim length and a max length these are different lengths obviously because it accounts for some sort of growth of the case over time if you're using something with a very sharp shoulder like a six Dasher it's going to grow on that neck substantially less than if you're using something with a pretty long neck or a shallow taper on that on that shoulder let's say a 243 that's the nature of brass flow so this may not be something that applies to you often but occasionally you may need to you may need to trim your necks this is also relevant if you're a person that likes to chamfer and or deburr your cases every time for us we like to use a draw trimmer it does all three of these things at one time we're not going to go into a lot of depth about how we set up that trimmer rather we just want to show you what that process looks like when it's determined that you need it some people might want to kiss it through the trimmer every single time we don't we kind of make a judgment call of when the brass needs it but here's what that process looks like I've got the drawd set up here I know in this 6gt I'm not really going to get any overall length trim but what I will get is a little bit of chamfer on the inside of the neck and if I've got some sort of issue on the outside of the neck I'll get a little bit of deburr again this is a drug this is this is a great trimmer it's one of the industry standards Henderson also makes a really good product you can also do this with a hand trimmer it's just going to take quite a bit of time if you're not into overall length trimming if you don't think that's something that's going to be a heavy requirement if you've got a piece of brass like that you can use some of the all-in-one prep stations that have the inside chamfer outside deburr and maybe the case link thing there's like a Frankfurt Arsenal product or something like that but this is one we've had on the bench for quite some time and really like it so let's trim a couple pieces of brass it's a fast easy process you can just feel that cutting tool start to kiss the inside of the neck and I can see it here with a little bit of Sheen again it's not doing very much we're just making sure there's not some imperfection in the brass that's going to cause a problem when we seat that bullet now that we've got our trimming done before we go to priming I want to add a really important step here now this is something that I will intuitively do at different points throughout the process and I suggest you do them at all points that you can in the process but I'm going to take an extra visual inspection of the cases before we Prime these cases we want to make sure there's nothing in them there's no obstruction and there's no massive failure in the case typically this can look like something simple I'm looking down in the cases making sure there's no tumbling Media or anything down in there or there's nothing that's gotten caught in the process it's a simple step I suggest you do it several times throughout the process really anytime you're handling the case be aware of what's around you feel for imperfections look print for imperfections and make sure there's not something compromised in that brass all right star brass is clean it's annealed it's sized it's trimmed and it's ready to be treated like it's a new piece of brass if you've been watching this all along and you're sitting here with a box of new brass wondering how does this apply to me well it hasn't so far but after you fire that piece of brass you're going to need those so anyway we've got this piece of brass it's ready to go let's talk about the things that we do after how do we prime it how do we get it ready for seeding how do we talk about charging we got a lot more to go all right so we've got our fully prepped piece of brass it's been cleaned and kneeled sized trimmed and it's ready to be reloaded the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to Prime this case priming cases is something that can be as more or less complicated as you'd like it to be but the core of this is the primer is your ignition Source in this piece of brass it's what your firing pin strikes it's what creates that first pop that ignites your powder there are two ways to do this one is the easy handheld way and the other one is a little more intricate and it's going to involve something that sits on your bench I've reloaded a lot of ammo with a hand primer and I really also like to reload and I like the convenience of a primal rights unit there are pros and cons to both basically you are spending money to split hairs and there's nothing wrong with that so we're gonna go to the bench we're going to talk through some priming we're going to do a little bit of priming and then we're going to talk about what comes after I've primed a lot of cases on an RCBS Universal the hand squeeze it's a great way to do it it's an expensive way to do it a really nice way to do it though and once it's convenient it does a really good consistent job and it's got some adjustability is the Primal rights Cedar so as we see I've got primers some 205 M's in the tube and we're ready to Prime not a lot of great not a great deal of difficulty to it we put a case in you prime it got a primer I like to now put them in the loading block that I'm going to use when I charge those cases and we work through put another primer in make sure it's there seat visual inspection into the case so we've got primers in our in our cases we are ready to move over to the charging area so again we took that brass off the range we cleaned it we annealed it we Decap and sized trimmed we have now primed we've been visually expecting inspecting along the way it's time to go to powder so guys until we get to the next one something we're not going to do here is talk to you about charge weight powder is something that you can really get yourself into trouble with if you use way too much you can run into issues if you don't use enough you can run into issues fortunately every powder manufacturer that you're going to be getting powder from should and if they don't ask them publish a starting load for the powder that you'd like to use and the cartridge that you'd like to use it in a lot of you may think well that's silly I'm not using a starting load hey internet what's my Max load don't do that that's silly so as you get into this use the starting loads that come recommended from the powder manufacturer you can obviously work up from there again they're starting loads and we'll talk in a different video about how to identify pressure signs how to water test some do those some some of those other things we're not going to do them here so let's head to the reloading bench we're going to throw some charges and we're going to get these things charged up and ready for projectiles all right guys we're here to charge I've already got my auto trickler set up it's already throwing charges for me a lot of the Nuance in charging really comes in low development and deciding what that charge is going to be we're not getting into that in this video we'll likely do something on chart on low development at a later time that's not what we're doing here what I'm going to talk about are some tools and some practices that make this reduce error and reduce mess so I've got the cases that we're going to charge in one of our loading blocks I've got my area 419 funnel with a six millimeter head on it since this is GT and obviously I think this is a auto trickler V3 that we have kitted out could be a V2 the difference is we're pretty minimal as I pull charges something I like to do is always have my funnel on an empty case that means after I throw a charge powders in that's recharging now I'm going to make sure that I've visually inspected that case there's one charge of powder in it and then I'm moving my funnel that way once the funnel is moved and this is recharged again I know that I'm pouring one charge per case and again I'm gonna move that to the next one and I know I have an empty one to pour into while double charging can be a huge problem in the pistol World in the rifle world it's pretty difficult to double charge since a single charge is going to be 90 95 100 case fill anyway but a double charge does cause a huge mess on the bench if you get two charges in there's a lot left in your funnel you pick it up there's powder everywhere so as we move through a charge I replace the cup into the powdered dispenser I move the funnel make sure everything's okay I'll go through all this and eventually move it over to the seating portion but that's really what we have going on on the charging side take your time visual inspection and don't make a mess alright so our cases are charged they've got powder in them they're ready for projectiles now we need to know how deep we want to seat our bullets well there's a lot of tools for this you'll hear a lot of methodology for doing this I'm going to share with you how I've done it for years and it takes no tools and it's super repeatable and it's not going to cost you anything so let's head over to the vice I'm going to take apart a bolt and I'm going to work you through the process of finding your lands this is a method that I think the first time I saw it done was in a YouTube video done by wheeler engineering common way to do it it takes a little bit of expertise but is actually pretty limited on the tools required to do it so I've got my my match rifles right here but I've got the bolt out of it we've got to take the ejector plunger out of the bolt so that we don't get any false readings we're going to do that really quickly I'm going to show you that process in in some brevity and then we're going to get into some some trial and error basically walking back the seating depth of the bullet until we find a seating depth that is just a kiss on the lens as I try to take this take this bolt apart I'm going to first take the fire control group out depending on which action you have how that fire control group comes apart can be different this is off of a Defiance little deviant got that out now I'm going to hold my Bolt so that I can drift out the pin that has the ejector plunger as I start to come through note that I move my hand to the other side because if you spend enough time disassembling items under load on a rifle you know that as soon as you forget to do that everything becomes a projectile so I've got my ejector plunger out that Spring's still in there I'm going to reach in with the with the punch pull that spring anytime you do this it's a great time to grease and clean your ejector plunger the spring it's just good care and maintenance so now that I have my bolt fully disassembled I've got the extractor cloth still in because that's going to become useful as we go through this process some guys may tell you to pull it out that's kind of a preferential thing it's plausible that you could get a little bit of a different feel but I've always left it in rifle in the vice and held now I'm going to take an unprimed case and the projectile that I'm going to use I'm going to go to the press and I'm going to seat it at a depth that I know is too long but we want that we want our initial seating in this test to be too long all right now with this case I'm going to put it into the bolt into the grab it with the extractor claw put it in and I know when I get to right here I've got a little bit of a touch see how this bolt doesn't want to fall down if I were to take the case out put the bolt in As I push it in it just falls down like that so anything that keeps the bolt from moving in that manner is resistance that's caused by the projectile kissing the lands so what I'm going to do is five thousands at a time go back and forth to the to the Press I'm going to seat this bullet just a little bit deeper and a little bit deeper and a little bit deeper until we get to the point of thinking that we're we're really close you'll be able to feel that difference all right okay so right here is a field that's important I just went down that ten thousands as I got the bolt in it wanted to start falling and with very little pressure I'm able to move it down again it's not seating cleanly but we're really close so now I'm going to walk back and I'm just going to do like three thousands okay so as I got this case to a length that I that I like I know that when I insert I'm going to get the size and feel feel no engagement of the rifling as we move up and down now of course this isn't in full free fall because there's a case in there and that that little bit of ability for the case itself to interact with a chamber wall is there but when I'm here I'm feeling no pull of that projectile back out of the lens so what I can know is that at my current seating depth this is what I would consider a kiss or a one-off seating depth so I'm I'm roughly one thousandths off the lands so knowing this is a 108 ELD I know that a good space to start my seating depth testing would be at like 50 000 I'm gonna head back to the bench I'm going to add 50 thousandths of seating depth to my seating die and we're going to see some projectiles so what I'm doing from that point where the bullet just kissed the rifling is I'm is I have already screwed in the micrometer head 50 thousandths this means that when we ignite this round that bullet will travel 50 thousandths of an inch before it engages the rifling seating depth tests and things like that are something you can get into I just know with this bullet about 50 000 is going to give me a pretty good result most of the time so it's a good starting point for me so our die is set we have thrown our powder it's already in the cases we're ready to go now seating bolts is the simple part what I like to do before I get into it is set projectiles in the top of the ready-to-seat cases and then I just work my way through a line I can feel comfortable that the bullets are going to seat the same way every time and once we're to this point guys it's all easy sailing I'll pull them one at a time often starting from the back seat that bullet it's ready to go so catch us in the next one we're going to go through some Aftercare how we get this ammunition ready for a match and some other generic things that we thought about along the way because guys this has been a fairly long video series we certainly forgot something all right so we got our ammo and it's ready to go we started with a dirty used case from a match we went through the whole process and now this this piece of ammo it's ready to go again but something that I would suggest you do is think about what happens now that we have these loaded loaded rounds first thing I like to do with them is I like to make a mark on my brass inside the extractor Groove I've known people that color-coded brass based on how many firings it had on it I just want to Market something that's not the same as any of my buddies that I'm going to shoot with so that if we're all shooting GT or we're all shooting Dash or whatever we're all shooting it's easy for us to identify whose brass belongs to who good way to do this there are several tools that are out there gray Ops makes it cool and you'll find various 3D printed ones lots of different ways to do it in general I like to mark my brass inside the extractor Groove uh that keeps there from being any product or ink or goo that gets inside my chamber and sticks out it's also good at this point before you put this into something like an ammo box or maybe an ammo novel from koltak grab a microfiber cloth and just wipe them after the sizing process there may be a little bit of lubricant that's left over if you haven't cleaned it off or didn't wipe it after that process even though we told you to maybe you do that again it's another thing to do to take care of it ammo should also last you a little while I mean the idea of galvanic corrosion sticking your neck to your projectile it's real it's possible we don't know that it's something that you need to be worried about most of us anyway are doing this sort of reloading the night before we leave for a match so a lot of a lot of fresh ammos the best ammo people out there but in general take care of your ammo you worked really hard to make this a really nice piece of ammunition store it in a hard box or a designed soft product you'll occasionally see somebody walking around with all their ammo loose in a bag those people are mad men mostly named Robert Brantley obviously he's had results from it makes me a little queasy but again Do Your Own Thing take care of your ammo a little little piece of advice if you're flying with ammo put in a hard box I know people that have had ammo taken away by TSA because they had it in some sort of binder or novel or bag if you're flying with it either put it in a hard box or maybe a used Factory ammo container make sure you care for it well so guys we've walked you through everything we do in taking brass from fresh fired to ready to go again what would you have done differently or what's a tip or a trick that we didn't outline that maybe you'd like to know more about something you saw us do something you do at home we want this to be a discussion we want this to be a forum we think these are the core principles of reloading but we know we haven't hit it all we never can we never will and as much as we aspire to that's not the reality of reloading and I really think that's why so many of us love it we appreciate you tuning into this being a part of what we're doing here if you're watching this on patreon as part of Team area 419 we very much appreciate this and and if you're seeing this on YouTube drop them in the comments below but really you should probably be on that patreon page check it out in the link in the descriptions thanks for being with us we hope you've learned something foreign [Music]

Channel: Area 419

Views: 57,285

Keywords: Area 419, Jon Area 419, CNC Shop, PRS, Precision Rifle Shooting, Rifle Parts, how to reload, learn to reload, reloading bench, reloading gear, ammo reload, reloading, reloading on a single stage press, reloading on area 419 zero, area 419 zero press, zero press reloading, zero press, zero press area 419, reloading 6mm, reload 6mm, 6.5 creedmoor, 6mm ammo, mandrel sizing die, sizing die, mandrel bushing

Id: 9ibipmRPjFg

Length: 30min 33sec (1833 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023