Reloading 101: .223 Reloading From Start To Finish

so double back like a boss hello youtubers and welcome back to the neutered 10-millimeter reloading room today on the bench we are going to be prepping our brass for rifle reloads in this case it's two to three this would apply to almost any rifle round what we're going to do is the first thing I've done is d-prime the brass because I wet tumble and regardless whether you wet or dry tumble you're going to need to prep the brass all the way to the point where your your brass is resized and ready to start being primed so the cleaning process begins with Dee priming the brass in my case dry humbling you don't do this until later but you d prime the brass and then tumble it and what you're looking at is a case of about two hundred two to three rounds that Rd primed and ready to tumble and here we have our tumbler so we're going to go ahead just run through this process real quick I'm going to add in my soap and my water softener and then we're going to put it on tumblr for about three hours maybe three and a half hours and then we're gonna look at some brass that came out of the tumbler yesterday okay we're going to go ahead and get our brass ready to clean it's been D primed at this point and that we're going to prep the water I use a quarter teaspoon of lemon Shawn which is a water softener and also I think changes the pH as well of the water which will help in the cleaning process and then a half a teaspoon about dawn and from there we're going to go ahead and put the lid on and start tumbling so let's go ahead and get that done just get that mixed in briefly alright all we do now is put our gasket on place the lid on tighten down the lid now since this is a wet tumbler and the gasket requires a good amount of tension so I tighten these down pretty good and then we throw it on the tumbler and walk away for three hours I've tumbled brass as long as almost six hours before sir noble difference after about four there's a bit of a difference between two and four to gets the job done decently but the primer pockets are still a little dirty for the the cases are almost pristine the primer pockets look great the insides of the cases are crystal clean crystal clear I mean and extremely clean and the primer pockets are decently cleaned anything over that is basically a waste of time because you're going to clean up the primer pockets if they look dirty to you anyway so this will go on the tumbler and we're going to take a look some brass now that came out of the tumbler yesterday okay so the first step in the process after the brass has been cleaned thoroughly is to inspect it so what we're looking for here is uniform case mouth and you can do some of this inspection before you polish your brass I tend to take my time when I'm inspecting it at this point you can inspect it beforehand I've only thrown away maybe one or two or three clean cases so it's not like I'm wasting time on cleaning extra cases just to throw them away it's very minimal I get a lot of hands on the brass when I'm deep priming it and I'll see major flaws there that will cause me to throw it away so let's go ahead and just take a look at a single piece of brass here you can see just how nice and shiny this got this is from five and a half hours of tumbling look at those primer pockets are pretty good like I said the only thing you're going to really see blemish wise is right in the corners where those pins just can't reach so I'm flipping them over I'm looking into the primer hole to make sure that sometimes the stainless steel media will get jammed in the primer hole and I flip it over and look at the bottom making sure I don't see any stuck primer I'm sorry stuck stainless steel media pins in there either so if you're doing this with corn cob or walnut media you're going to want to run your you can at this point you can clean up the flash hole there's a flash hole deburring tool that you can use to deburr the inside lip of the flash focus when it's a drill don't we can see that on this piece of brass but when the flash hole is drilled is drilled from the bottom out towards the neck so from the head to the neck is how the drill drills that that flash hole and in the process there's an inner burr so if you're looking for extreme accuracy you're going to want to have a consistent mouth and in that hole in that flash hole where it comes into where the powder comes in contact with a primer so that you get a consistent charge ignition every time so at this point you could do that I don't do that these are basically blinking rounds for me but I am looking at the case head I'm looking for signs of where you start to look at the grain structure these look really good even though some of these were loaded hot I'm just picking random cases right now I'm looking for things like she's a little tiny being in the case that's that doesn't bother me I'm looking for major indentations major signs of damage here we have a prime example of the primer pockets filling up with the stainless steel media pins you can see there's two pins stuck here two pin stuck here and you can see the flash holes are still wet the Apple water in the flash hole press the case is completely dry but we obviously don't want to start reloading or anything with these with these wet primer pockets so these will continue to dry one thing I've done in the past that tends to work very well is if you put everything laid out on a cookie sheet and stick it in the oven for about an hour on the lowest setting so my oven goes down to one hundred and sixty degrees so I will normally stick them in there and that's well within the temperature range that you can use brass at and not change the grain structure so your naca basically because there's no fear of annealing at that low of a temperature so I'm just going through and flipping all of these over and checking the flash holes and looking for the ones that have pins in them like this one here okay these will be separated out and then I'll punch the pins out of them and they'll collect the pins and add them back to the tumbling media so that's basically making sure your brass is clean and that you're not reloading damaged brass with this I will go ahead and wait for these to completely dry and then we're going to Lube them in the next second to give this shake up we're going to spritz it down and then the reason why I line them all up like this not because I'm anal it's because I want to I want to roll them back and forth and and distribute the oil that's in the case loop into this paper towel which there's some left over from the last time I did this and over time the paper towel will start to build up a nice oily surface and then you can just roll them straight on if you're doing a couple cases at a time but if you're doing more than say 10 or 12 or 15 or 20 cases you're going to want to go ahead and lay them out and spritz them all at the same time let's just go ahead and do that with the saturating it nice I need to go completely as I work this is you are going to roll it around and then just take an enroll now they want my roll very easily unless you go ahead and line them up like this because then they're all out of sort and this way you can kind of keep track of cable I roll that and I broke these so this will roll nicely distribute the the case loose generously and also hit all the necks while we're doing this so at this point we now have completely clean graphs we have inspected the brass for case neck issues we've inspected wrap depressed for case head issues we've looked at the bodies for major dings that might cause volume issues when it comes to expanding the case you've got a really heavy ding on the side of it you've now got less volume within the case to hold the powder so you're going to get a weird ignition you could have a very high case volume of a pressure I mean the very high case pressure because of the volume of the case is smaller than what the powder charge calls for so as you can see here the paper towel under here is soaking wet we're just going to let these sit for a few minutes and let that oil soak in and let the alcohol evaporate and then we're going to go straight to resizing okay so at this point what we've done is we've got our bin of brass that we're going to be resizing with a full length resizing guy took the diet part and cleaned out all these contact surfaces with a little bit of rubbing alcohol and then spritz some case Lube in there so it's just a matter of running the press and remove the stainless steel bead here that needs to go back all right this better stick it in and run it up get some good pressure on it pull it out and you're not going to do any measurements just yet you'll all your brass resize before you sit down and measure it so we're just transferring it from one bucket to the other resize transfer okay here's an example of a minor case deformation at the mouth you see it's squared off and on the outside it looks like it slightly starting to kink in the case there so you can see that on on the frame there nice little flat spot where my finger is something like that's a very minor that'll press right out perfectly round and expand it so what we're looking for to demonstrate here's another one this one's a little bit more deformed you see how flat that is again minor you look at it you think oh I can't use that case and you throw it out if it can be resized to perfectly round and not fold over the lip and no creases you're good to go okay so here are some examples of brass that have excessive excessive issues with the case so here is a case where if you look at the lip it is actually crushed downward even if you could get that the pull out you'd have a dip in that area you'd be weakness in the case and you'd have uneven release of the mouth to bullet contact and the bullet would come out and would be very unpredictable and would be I would care to say highly inaccurate when it's shot so that one goes on the scrap bin here we have one with a shoulder ding that's pretty pronounced small little dimples the shoulder I will reload anything you know this bigger bigger that crease there and this crease here are just excessive in my eyes probably could reloaded just fine but the shoulder is a pretty important part of the way that it pushes the force out on the back of the bullet so uneven force again could lead to inaccuracy and last but not least another shoulder dinging really good example of a shoulder ding and here's an example of one that you know you might scoff at but again case mouth is pretty squared off this is easily pressed out I'm going to go ahead and do that very easily pressed out and you have a nice uniform circular mouth now there's a few flakes obviously all these will be cleaned up before they're loaded plus I haven't measured for trim so now since it's been resized we need to check to see if mcat back the case has stretched over the max loud value which is one point seven six zero according to the specifications for two to three so we're looking for anything above one point seven five five I'm trimming I trim everything above one seven five five and this one is looks to be right at the cusp of needing trimmed so the blood put them in my trimmer is set up to trim anything above one point seven five two so anything above one five five needs trimming anything below one five five all that slide so this is no need to trim and this is trim so it's just a matter of getting your brass organized now in to how you plan on processing it after it's been lubed and resized okay figured just let you guys watch while I do a few cases oK we've already resized our brass and now it is time to deburr and camp beer there's very sharp edges on the outside of the lip that the focus there let's see that very nice burr on the outside edge and on the inside edge this will jam if you feed it into the mat if you if it's fed into the chamber and could be very very devastating if for example it doesn't allow the case to expand it could blow the case apart so the case neck needs to be nice and clean on the outside that's why we defer camp hearing is is the use is to take that burr off slightly and it also helps in seating the bullet you don't want to overdo it on either one just a quick touch on each tool and there you go as long as you can run your fingernail across that lip and not feeling these burrs you're good it's those little hair of a shiny line on the inside is all that you need to see okay so our next step is to prime the brass and since it's been resized and trimmed the last thing to do is prime the brass and then we can actually start loading so what I like to do is pre prime all my brass and since I have it in batches of 100 it makes it really easy with these primers so I those that don't know priming is very straightforward very simple solution and they need to be picked up face up so what you need to do is double flip them so put them in the primer tray flip it over make sure none of them have worked their way upside down there's this one right here just give it a shake and it should flip there we go put the cover on flip it again and now it's just a matter of picking them up okay once all 100 are picked up I like to do is take my indicator pin which is a long guide rod here and I poke it down in to dislodge that last primer and then I leave it in so that when I put it up into my primer tube and pull this the whole shebang falls down and that's it now we have our indicator rod okay let's go ahead and start feeding it as you can see when every pull of the handle it loads a new primer so we have a new primer now and then you just push up so it's pull down push up pull down push up and it goes fairly fast especially if you've got everything lined up and ready to go let's just go ahead and start picking the cases feel any binding on your upstroke to hit the primer into the pocket you're going to stop and assess the situation if you've cleaned everything well the Winchester and CC eye primer seat very well I can't speak for any other so the only primers I've ever used are the CCI offering and small pistol and small rifle and the Winchester in both as well the Winchester seems to go in very smoothly and for this will be done we'll have a hundred rounds ready to load now if my count was correct this will get the last primer and there is a primer there and the slides not come back because it was stuck in with this little guide rod the indicator rod also stops the shuttle from moving back and forth so I'm now done priming so the idea here is that I now have a fresh supply of plenty of and at this point I don't really care whether they're in batches of 100 because they're primed and ready to go the only reason I care about the batches of 100 is because that's what the primers come in batches of 100 I just wanted to go over something with the most of the powder drops that are this type which is a drum powder drop any powder drop that has to interfering parts you can see how this rotates and it would end up shearing any type of powder that isn't a small flake work and compact into that little area so as it rotates it's picking up powder into that cavity and then at the bottom at the very end it's like a shear so anything sticking out like for example if you had like I don't know let's just say little twigs little tiny twigs down in there it would probably go into right there and then it would bind what I'm finding is that certain powders like var get will bind and it will cause the press to bind up and it will smush the mouth on your case which will basically ruin the round completely what we have here is some standard fair common powders on the right here is a fairly large flake it's a winchester 231 very common pistol powder next is the BL c2 you can see it's no longer a flake it's a little tiny severe at at some point the spheres look a little smashed like the little tiny pancakes but they are much more granular than say these large flakes so this meters decently this meter is extremely well and then here we have the VAR get now the VAR get is an extruded wire type of powder that's chopped into little tiny cylinders so it's a cylindrical powder so this will not meet or very well in a drum type meter because that shearing action will bind up in these little pellets as opposed to these little balls fears these these will free flow nice and easy and give way and the large flake tends to do the same keep in mind that when you're getting ready to start doing your powder drops something like bar get is probably going to be one you're going to want to do it manually or with a trickle charger as opposed to you know the BL c2 or the 231 using the powder drop and BLC to powder I've measured out twenty five point two i've previously shot twenty five point five and the pressure signs are looking pretty heavy and i've shot twenty four point five and the pressure signs are looking pretty light so i am shooting for twenty five point two here hopefully that'll be nice middle-of-the-road and as you can see I don't have my powder drop on because I have very little BL c2 left so we're just going to go ahead and finish it off with what's here and make as many rounds as as this will allow we're going to go ahead and run this powder drop until it's completely out of powder just about and right now we're shooting for twenty five point two I've gotten a consistent five throws in a row so I'm very confident in the fact that this will throw a consistent charge each time to be on the safe side it's always good for the first couple of rounds to check so literally after powder drop it's a matter of putting a bullet into the case mouth guiding it up into the seating died there and then when it comes out it would drop into the bin however since these are the first couple of rounds I'm going to measure them with my caliper and you can see these are actually on the low side at 45 we're going to go ahead and open that up a bit and let it run a little bit longer I like to have them around five five so you can see we've got four rounds here these are all empty stages and I'm just dropping powder in station four and seeing the bulletin station five the tension on these is great I don't need to I've done some prior testing I don't need to do any crimping on these rounds for accuracy though it does tend to help to crimp rifle rounds if you've got a good consistent mouth crimp but I don't have a crimping die so I bypass that step I do a press check my first couple of rounds so that round you just saw me measure I would normally take and fact let's go ahead and do that and take this round and you saw the measure let's go ahead and measure it one more time on film on camera here all right you see we're at two point two four five two point two four five you just take the round and press it against any really hard surface and press in as hard as you can you're testing for neck tension you want to test that back see if that changed it did not we are about the same four four four five somewhere in that range so this has excellent neck tension and everything that I've been reloading has been like this I haven't had to crimp so right now it's just a matter of run it up it drops the powder I like to put the bullet in on the way down so that it when it clicks it doesn't spill out this powder is very light and that little click at the very end when the baseplate here finds its index and clicks will tend to shake the case just enough it's in a vibration up through the case that powder will pop out of the case mouth so I like to put the bullet in on the way down from powder charge that way it caps it off and it can't do any damages for spilling powder out so we're going to go ahead and now powder drop here and well let's see if there now you're going to possibly see some powder spill out there it did not we're going to go ahead and measure this round member we adjusted the dye we're getting close 5:1 so we're going to open up a smidge more that's it that should be good now with a new case in okay let's go ahead take a look at how much powder is in here and you can see why it's not spilling out if we can see this the powder is actually below the shoulder it's about right where my thumbnail is so it's not filled all the way up to here if you fill it too high obviously any shaking would cause it to spill out of the mouth so the index clicking is not going to spill any out I don't have to put the bullet on the way down and I can speed this process up a little bit to 5/5 almost like I said it's just a minor touch and this is really no they all going to shoot just fine this is just me being very picky about I like the bullet to be as close to the lands that's possible so that it will shoot more accurately if the bullet is closer to the land sometimes they like to sit them in the land sometimes I like to sit just slightly off the lands so these rounds are long enough that this will place the bullet fairly close to the lands and it's got less gap to jump therefore it should be more accurate hey guys just a quick tip here I finished loading everything up and I realized I needed to to label everything so what I want to do is change this label gear what you end up with is a fantastic way of keeping track of what is in your magazines these will stick straight to the magazine the great thing about them is they unstick just as easy as they stick so they they stay where they're stuck but they come off very easy so the only hard part really is getting the backing to separate from the sticker and I won't say that it can be restock many times but you can pull it off of something and place it on something else I've done that with my little bins that I put my my clean brass in when I separated by headstamp so I tend to stick it right on the bottom of the magazine right across that with that straight line and I can pick up any magazine turn it to my left okay and see exactly what's in that magazine and now I know that there's 25.2 grains of BLC too under a 75 hollow-point boattail just a quick little tip on when you're finished reloading your rounds what to do with them

Channel: neutered10mm

Views: 1,469,438

Rating: 4.8294005 out of 5

Keywords: Reloading, .223, Start, To, Finish, Resizing, Case, Trimming, Debur, Prime, Powder, Measure, Bullet, Seating, Tumbling

Id: Mkz0pZO0bFQ

Length: 26min 52sec (1612 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 07 2012