Reloading for Precision Rifle: My Process--Start to Finish

hey guys sam here welcome back to another reloading video now this one's going to cover my workflow in other words it's going to be a demonstration of what i do to work from a fire case all the way to a loaded round to shoot now one of the things that i don't mention very often and i ought to is context so when you see me doing this video you're gonna you're gonna see me working with several different uh cartridges because it's taking that long to make the video but you know this is revolving around precision rifles so this is for mostly for jake's competition rifle so it's uh you know my standards for that particular rifle is going to be 10 shots under 20 feet per second es for muzzle velocity and a half inch accuracy so uh you know we're not shooting bench rest here and we're not shooting plinking ammo for a gas gun it's somewhere in between so this is a process that we followed all last year 100 nothing varied you know maybe a couple little things with tooling but for the most part the process is exactly the same and we fired close to 14 000 rounds next year i see this year probably gonna be close to that maybe even a little bit more even with the coronavirus thing going on right now we're still shooting so anyway what i'm going to do is i'm just going to walk you through the whole process so the first thing i'm going to do when i get home after shooting is i'm going to put my round count in my logbook so right here i have several columns here i put the date number of rounds fired and what my total round count for that barrel is next thing's gonna happen is those rounds those pieces of brass are gonna go into one of these bins that's marked how many times it's fired and what it is this this one here is a nine times fired six five forty seven brass now when i'm ready to start working on it it's gonna go into these bins like this i'm going to put a sticky note in there saying what it is so this is 6547 eight times fired brass and once it lands in this bin it's off to the races so let's just get this video started okay now that i have all my cases documented my barrel log filled out uh de-primed the cases the cases go into these bins with a little sticky note telling me what's in them they come out to the shop now the next step is going to be get them all cleaned up you know use something like this brass boss or a drill with a case brush you know neck brush in it things like that then they go into the tumbler once they get clean i'm going to take them all i'm going to either anneal them on my annealer or i'm going to lube them up and size them depending on what i want to do right now what i'm going to do is i have a 300 and some pieces of 6547 sitting here that's going to go through the kneeler another 100 pieces of 6547 that needs to be prepped clean put it in the tumbler then go through the kneeler and then uh what 300 pieces of 223 that i'm just going to drop into the tumbler and size so you know i'm not going to do every single step every single time on all of my cases i'm going to you know pick and choose what i want to do for whatever cartridge i'm working with whatever you know number of times fired brass i'm working with but anyway they come out here i go through this whole process out here they'll go back into my reloading room i'll size them and then they'll come back out here to get trimmed you know when things are really busy i'll leave the the bin that the brass that's in the tumbler is in right here inside my separator in the bucket usually it isn't that bad but you know that's a good place to store it until it's done so okay so now i have about 400 pieces of eight times fired 6547 that's annealed and ready to go and be sized uh what i do is on my stick it notes i just put the you know whatever i'm working on at the time on the sticky note so that i know where i'm at in the process now a lot of that's overkill because you know i can if i work at all this the same day i obviously know exactly where i'm at but sometimes this stuff will sit for a week or two and these are just reminders for me or if i want to tell jake hey go grab that bin of eight times fired six five forty seven that we already annealed he can look at the note and say oh this must be the one then this 223 i'm not going to nail it this is just for my trainer rifle so i'm just going to size that but anyway next step is to loop them up and run through the sizing die you know this video has been taking so long to make that you know now we're all the way into a you know jake has a different rifle check that sucker out a different chambering and i was running a six creed and we're sizing that brass today so this was kind of the missing link that i was missing in the other video now we're going to tie that all together so right now i'm making a video about full length sizing and how to how i go about doing it so what i'm going to do now in the workflow videos i'm going to show you that hey we just pulled out all this brass from the this is six creed this is on its second firing it's been fired two times so we're not doing any annealing on it or whatever but we did just pull this out of the tumbler i've lubed this with one shot and now i'm gonna size it all and that'll be the the part of the process right before trimming it so anyway that's where we're at we're in the sizing part of it i think that's funny you know here we have a a lot of things have changed since i started this video you know just about all the matches have been canceled all the way into may at least you know this is april 1st we're right in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic going on right now in the world so anyway i thought well i'll finish up that video while i'm making jake some practice ammo all right so anyway that's the sizing process and then we're going to move on to the trimming process okay so when we get done sizing the cases they get dropped back into the vibratory tumbler with corn cob media to get rid of any uh case lube that's left on the case and then they come out to the shop to get trimmed we've been using this henderson precision powered case trimmer for a little over a year or a little less than a year now i guess we've trimmed thousands of cases on this multiple calibers multiple cases thing is awesome this used to be one of our least favorite parts of the whole process you know we've tried a lot of different methods over the years of trimming cases and this was our first go at using a trimmer that that cuts the length the inside and the outside chamfers at the same time and it's very fast very efficient now you know this part of the process is actually one of the easiest ones so anyway we're going to trim the cases and then we'll take them back into the reloading room we'll clean the necks out to make sure there's no case lube on the inside of the necks and then we'll prime them powder them put bullets in them [Music] [Music] so [Music] so all right so after we prime the cases before we put them into the loading blocks you know as i'm priming i'm putting them case mouth down into this block and what i'm going to do is i'm going to mark the ends of the cases so that we can identify which ones are jakes that matches so all we do is just take a sharpie in his case he uses all orange cases so everything that's marked orange we know came out of jake's rifle i use a green one real simple easy way to mark the cases now they make all kinds of fancy tools to do this but this works and you can go buy this wherever you want anyway that's how we do it we just marked the cases and the reason we do that is so that we can identify the case at a match you know so when it comes off of a stage you can look at and say oh those orange ones there are mine pretty simple okay so now that i've got everything cleaned and sized and trimmed uh the last step in that process is going to be priming the cases i do that with my bench primer here this rcbs unit and then i start loading them in loading blocks like that and what i have are 50 round loading blocks from sinclair that i can put these cases in and stage them and then what i do is i just use post-it notes to tell me what's in the blocks usually i remember it but you know it's good insurance i always stick it right here when i'm getting ready to throw powder so i know exactly what i'm doing what case i'm working with and then if i'm using a load that we use a lot of which is this one right now i have a big sticky note right here that tells me the charge the charge weight the powder and the bullet seating depth so it's real easy it's just you know flat out cruise control once those cases are in those loading blocks you know you just come in here and you look at those and you go yeah all you have to do is throw powder and i'm off to the races so you know that's an important consideration for volume right now because jake has fired 714 rounds to a six gt in three weeks so a little over 700 rounds in three weeks and it's not you know he's in school full time right now he's 15 years old so this being the what middle of february he had yesterday off for president's day but he didn't even shoot on that day so you know these are three day shoots three days usually during the week when he can shoot and he's going through 700 rounds in three weeks so when summer comes along and he's not in school that round counts just going to go up you know be more like 1200 to 1500 rounds in a month so you know it's important to be able to come in here and just look at this these loading blocks look at that turn these on and go to town now you probably notice i have three charge master lights here when we started out we're only running one we added another one last summer so we're running two and then he got the third one for christmas this year so we've been running three for about two months now uh fabulous it's awesome awesome time saver but anyway i just light them up like this i take a 50 round block they go charge them throw powder into the block and then once i get 50 of these full of powder i'm going to move over to the press and i'm going to start seating bullets all right so this block of 50 is loaded now so i'm going to move over next to the press start seating bullets and as after i put that there i'm just going to pull this next block over put the funnel in it and i'll just start the the scales back up again so as i'm standing over there seating bullets when i hear the the buzzers go off on the charge masters i'll just stop come over pour the three charges move the funnel over let them all start running on their own again and i'll go back over and see bullets so i don't seat you know one bullet every time it throws a powder charge i go in 50 round blocks it's just easier for me to do that now jake he likes to mess around and do all kinds of goofy stuff and you know stick bullets on the top of them and all that but i found it easier just throw the block over there put bullets in it while all these are charging now one other thing i'll say about powder is when i'm running the three charge masters like that i'm only running one kind of powder in them so i don't try to you know do two charge masters running var get one running h4350 or anything like that if i have all three of them running one kind of powder and normally the jug would sit right here next to them so i see what i'm working with now today i'm playing around with some reloader 16 and a lion thought it would be a cool idea to put eight pounds of powder in a 16 pound container so it doesn't fit very well there so i just put it on the floor right at my feet so i know what i have in the powder dispensers all right one last thing i'm going to do before i start throwing bullets in that is i'm going to look down and every one of them make sure that there's powder in cheap easy insurance as i move those over there i'm just going to pull this block forward fire them up again now when i start seating bullets usually with my seating die even if i know that the last bullet i put in there was the same one i'm working with today and the same depth i always back them off ten twenty thousands just to make sure i don't go too deep on the first one since i know i've been seating these bullets for the last 20 minutes i know i don't have to do anything at all but again the note that i left over there shows my seating depth for the rdfs that we're working with today so all i have to do is duplicate that load real easy so i'll load these 50 up and then i'll start putting them in these boxes and put them away now inside the box you know i have different loads this one is the one we're working with that's another one that we're working with so i know i can just put them in there i already have notes uh you know i used to i used to get pretty anal about putting different dates in the boxes and all that but you know we literally loaded this ammo and shot it on monday and this is a tuesday afternoon so you know not much has changed obviously but last night we went through the whole cycle again cleaning brass sizing brass documenting everything in the barrel log and here we are again throwing powders so i'm at a rare crossroads right now where i have some brasses three times fire some that's four times fired and i have to mix them up just because we need you know enough ammo to practice and get our zeros on friday and then jake is shooting an rtc match saturday and sunday so we basically have to load up everything we have now and he'll cycle through both of them so that's another thing that i didn't point out uh one of the things i like to do i'm not going to pull one of those cases full of powder i'll pull one of these empty ones we mark the bottom of our cases and we usually put just a line of sharpie you know they sell all kinds of fancy things to market cases we just stand them upside down or actually you know head side up after we're done priming and then just you know run a line across it with a sharpie now jake uses orange i use green some of the cases i use black so what we did on this one was i know all my three times fired brass for jake's gun i'm gonna put one line on because that's how they're already marked the four times fired brass i put two lines on there so when we get off this match what i'll do is i'll make sure that we fire all of our four times fired so that it's all done and then what we'll do is we'll cycle through the three tons fired again in practice so that it'll get caught up to the four times fired but anyway that's how we do it a lot of questions about whether or not i still like this mech marksman love it thing is awesome i wish i had one on every bench now i usually seat three to five bullets in the amount of time it takes for those three to fire up hmm [Music] that's pretty much all there is to it now one other thing that's kind of pertinent to what i'm doing right now is the seating what i do with any new bullet new load new case anything i'm working with is a i document how consistent is the seating depth in other words if i'm using this reading competition seating die with the stem that came in it and everything and i want to run 115 rdfs with 2 000's neck tension on hornady 6 gt brass with 34.5 grains reloader 16 can i see to the exact depth with every single throw no matter what in other words if if i want to go 1.865 on the seating depth on that will it load a whole block at 1.865 without fiddling with it without having to change this at all you know for one or two here or if not exact how close is it so is it plus or minus a thou plus or minus two thousandths and it starts to give me a pretty good idea on uh you know how well number one how well does that bullet sit inside the stem that's in the seating die uh is my neck tension too much you know do i need to back off my neck tension a little bit is my powder charge compressed you know things like that and what that allows me to do is not worry about having my caliper sitting here with my comparator and checking every single one of them now during load development i do check every single one of them that's how i come up with that documentation so in the notes in my book i write you know 100 at whatever the seating death was so when i come back through i can measure the first one because i always back that off i can set that die exactly where i want it and then once i get there measure like one or two or three or five even and then put it down don't even think about it load up the whole block uh works pretty well a lot of that has to do with how consistent you know the nose profile is how consistent the neck tension is how how well that nose fits inside the stem but you know it's not rocket science you just document it and see what you can do with whatever you're working with and then go to town but having a bullet and a seating stem and a neck tension that works so that you don't have to worry about it it's awesome for high volume stuff like this [Music] [Music] okay so we're working with 115 grain nozzle rdfs in j6 gt uh specifically just so that it can match up ballistically with jake or with nick for the rtc team matches so what i like to do with any bullet i'm using instead of trying to pull them out of the box and all that stuff i just grab a handful and put them in this tray right next to the press makes it real easy to grab like i was saying before jake likes to you know stick a bullet in each one of them like that and then pick the whole thing up and put it in there i don't like that at all so i just grab each one stroke it the same way so it goes to the stop pull it out [Music] okay so when i'm done loading i just put them enamel boxes or put them in these ammo sleeves for shooting matches up in the lid of the box i have what the load is right here this is pretty much all my note taking at this point if i have a load developed and shooting well on the rifle i don't worry about writing in my main load book anymore in other words every time i load ammo i don't go right in there loaded 276 rounds of gt it doesn't make any sense it's too repetitive for me so i just run with what's on the lid of the box unless i have to change something and then i'll change it here and i'll make a note in my book that i change something but that's it for note taking right now now these sleeves are pretty cool i don't think i've ever showed you guys these these are am precision they're designed to shoot matches they hold 40 in a sleeve and we typically carry three of them with us so you know we could take up to 120 rounds in this little soft case uh takes up a lot less room in the pack than a thick ammo box and fits in a lot more places so these work out pretty well but anyway that's it that's the whole workflow now it's time to go shoot them and start the process all over again [Music] um [Music] huh [Music] [Music] empire [Music] you

Channel: Panhandle Precision

Views: 357,122

Keywords: long range, hunting, precision rifle

Id: FKWpmShM4yY

Length: 24min 3sec (1443 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2020