So you want to RELOAD? LET’S DO IT!!

hey guys I'm Jerry Mitchell Ike and welcome to this gun gab edition and what we're going to start with on this series is reloading I've got a lot of guys you ask me well how do you reload what should I do how do I get started well the first thing is the reload you have to have a you have to have a cartridge case so you can either buy them new or you can collect what you have shot factory rounds of course when I shot revolver competitively most all of those revolvers brass after I fired and went right into a bag they were a moonclip so I had I had the ability to contain those and keep them relatively clean semi-automatic I is totally different and actually my first match I ever shot was with a 1911 pistol and what I found out in south Louisiana is your your rate of brass loss is going to be very high there was many there one many places you're going to shoot and one gonna fly the murder the water so when you shoot a semi-automatic pistol it's even more important that when you process you brass to reload they have to be absolutely clean several reasons for that of course you want your firearm to the last a lifetime and it's just good safety practice to have a case that's clean and when you start with it you can have it you can have a good reload from start to finish so kind of give you an idea I started reloading in 1972 so not taking back 1968 started loading shotgun shells when I was duck hunting and then I got into centerfire stuff and it's only 1772 so I've been loading now since 1972 and I've just about it done everything right or wrong since then so i'ma shorten your learning curve a little bit give you an idea of what I've evolved to today and what I look for in case preparation to make it simpler and cleaner and more more productive with your time so what I've going to now in case preparation is wet tumbling and this is kind of this is kind of new it's been out five six maybe maybe longer I'll swap to it I would say a hundred percent about three or four years ago and I really like the wet tumbling for a couple of reasons one it gets the inside of the case totally spotless and number two it cuts down on how much dust I'm exposed to while I'm processing my cases and it doesn't sound like much but when you when you draw tom and you go through the sifting process you either have to I would either do it outdoor and have a respirator on there's some dust element associated with it the water-based cleaning of course its water-based so there's no dust to worry about I just always wear gloves when I do any any kind of reloading or gun cleaning or case preparation less exposure for me the better so kind of give you an idea on the wet tumbling a lot of people make wet tumblers now morning this is one of these version of it this was made by Frankfurt Arsenal I've used these had really good luck with them and the whole idea about what tumbling is especially semi-automatic pistols a lot of the brass that I shoot for practice mate might come off the range usually after a competition the the shooting squad will police never a throw them in a buck and they leave them on the range so I get a wide variety of cases that have been stomping the ground or bent or whatever and maybe been exposed to the elements longer than what I would like so the wet tumbling with that ability to clean the inside of the case extremely well is important to me if I'm will process it into a practice round so the wet tumbling usually process time we talked a little bit about process time and in my game of course when I'm loading I want to load the the most I can in the shortest period of time so what I usually do when I start processing cases I'll spend a whole day on it and what I'm looking to do is maybe three or four or five gallon buckets of brass by the end of eight hour day that's ready to load so that's my expectation that and I don't last me a couple of months and then I'll do it again and I'll stack it and store it so but anyway and a in a tumbler like this you can do probably six eight pounds of brass and get a good quality finish in about an hour and a half to an hour same thing with the Frankfort Arsenal but the big thing I found out lately about wet tumbling is there's two kind of meteors that's associated with wet tumbling one is the little rod pipe or the wire media works extremely well usually when you do this style of media you need to decap it first so you then stick in a flash hole and what happens with the sticks into the flash hole of the tortured when you go to reload it the decap intent of course will strike the the media and you'll break your D cap and pin so most people who use this kind of media stainless-steel media in their wet tumbler will D cap before a lot of people like they're inside of their primer pockets just as clean as the rest of the case personally I don't care I've had really good success and never clean the primer pocket since 1974 so I give you an idea where I'm at on that so this is the usually what comes with most tumblers I've upgraded and I call this an upgrade this is from southern shine it's more of a particle kind of a little wedge shaped piece of stainless steel it has sharper corners on it so when you go to clean and the wet tumbler the actual cleaning time might be cut in half and it's more aggressive so a lot of the brass that I use as courses range pick up so I'm looking at a lot of different layers of oxidation and corrosion and this kind of works a little bit quicker than the the rod even want to work good so this is what I've swapped to and give you an idea of what you can do for solutions to aid in the cleaning of brass already makes one for the sonic cleaner that I use in the wet tumblers also and when you do a vibratory tumblr tumblr with corn cob they make a metal polish that works extremely well for that so in a wet tumblers you have to have a solution the Hornady Frankfurt Arsenal makes one with the little package you just throw a packet in like you do your dishwasher do a load of brass citric acid guys there's a lot of solutions you can go on the internet they'll use citric acid I've used a lot of this also and it worked really good okay so we've done the wet tumbler and went outside we got it all sorted out we drench them what I have here is an old electric oven and a couple of galvanized tray put it in here put it at about 180 200 degrees it's a short batch usually this thing is about halfway form and I'll run it for about a two and a half hour cycle come in periodically with a set of gloves and have a thermometer there to make sure then get over a hundred and eighty-two degrees and you process them that way so even idea what this is just an old oven there are a smaller commercial dehydrator Kandra of dryers with different layers you can do your brass and there also this is kind of like on an upscaled hand loader level so I'll show you know tumbler I made years ago being a scrounger like I am this is an old washing machine motor and give you an idea how old that motor is they don't make like they don't make washing machine motors like this so I'll scrounge this off of an old washing machine well it's in brackets on it had some own 1 inch angle on laying around found a gearbox off a lawnmower so all this that you see right here with scrap material that I built into a into a dry um blurr back well back in 1970s so it's been mark go to to do dry Tomblin I can do about a half 5-gallon bucket at a time with the dry media and the polishing compound and let it run for an hour or so and then sift it out we've got a screen that goes on the front here let it tumble out for about I don't know five minutes and then you can take your brass and go get some so guys this is what I'll show you here this is probably 25 48 buckets of 5-gallon buckets of process cases that will run to a wet tumbler and they're all waiting to get a little love and powder and primers and get on the range so going into the other wet processes of doing brass you can do it in a sonic cleaner Hornady makes a sonic cleaner it's a little bit smaller capacity but if you were someone like a PRS guy or precision you know any kind of precision rifle or bullseye shooter where your case load is not all that many at one time the sonic cleaned it does really good I've have some I have brass here that's been processed in different ways so later on in the video I'll show you the results so what I did I ran the sonic cleaner for an hour with that with the Hornady solution and then I ran it an hour in the vibratory with the corncob and the polishing media came out really good it's good for smaller batches like I said before I shoot a lot so I want to process as much as I can in the short period of time so that's what I'm looking for and cleaning so when I say a vibratory cleaner it would look like this this is a Hornady product they sell the corncob in the polishing media so I've used these forever when I first started shooting this was about the only thing available back in the 70s was the set up like this and I've used it with great results since then as I shoot more of my need for higher rates of production have driven me more to the wet tumbler though I really like the wet tumbler but I was really surprised also tell you the truth on how well it sounded cleaner worked to getting it inside of the rifle cases or pistol case cleaned in a short period of time so that's another that's another option to the guys that don't load a whole lot of ammo in a year maybe ten thousand rounds a year I could get away with something like this I was looking through my reloading stash here I think I've loaded twenty twenty three thousand rounds already this year so you can see the different level of usage means a lot to how you process your cases so so there you have it guys you've got a bunch of different options the whole thing about it is it's going to take a little bit of trial and error to establish what your routine is going to be but the need for a clean case is the first step in reloading so either you pick up brass on the range or another another thing you want to remember pistol brass varies greatly in the the chambers that they're fired in so you pick up brass that's been fired and a polymer frame gun usually the usually a polymer frames pistol the the chamber size is extremely large so if you're going to try to take this brass and process it in which conventional reloading dies and try to shoot it in a revolver with moon Clips you're probably going to have trouble so what I always tried to do with my moon clip guns was to start off with either brand new cases or cases that would be fired only in that firearm saying was the factory round and I shot it in my 625 I would isolate those cases and it only was to be fired in that 625 so when I sized it I had to control over it and it was it made for a better overall performance I didn't try to mix a lot of head stamps or a lot of different manufacturers especially when you go to a Moon clip gun the way the clips Interac the case you have usually would account what a competitor would do with the revolver with the moon with the moon clip you'll have a clip made exactly for that manufacturer case so when I shot I have my cases were made to see BC our brass at the time so those rounds went right through that revolver and they were isolated and I cleaned them then went right back for that revolver so made for a more consistent performance something you want to think about when you use range brass they've been fired everybody else's guns and you don't know how much time or how many rounds they've been fired so okay so this is the if you come down here and take a look I'll give you some idea of what the brass look like that's they've been processed in different ways okay so what we have here just range pick up brass it's been sorted out by caliber system 40 caliber and you can see it's pretty grungy it's been shot there's iliyan different guns this is what it looks like on the inside of course the exterior before we started any processing any cleaning processes here so these cases will run through the heart of the wet tumbler with their solution and the southern media southern shine media and you see the inside the cases I was an hour on our tumbling with about a pound of media - a pound and a half a brass so excellent job there these cases were run through the quantity sonic cleaner for an hour then I ran him through the vibratory clean it with their solutions for about an hour you see they came out really good too and these 308 cases will run through the sonic clean also for an hour and an hour through the vibratory cleaner with the horny products and this is how they came out but for me the inside of the case is really what I'm trying to get clean you don't want to introduce any kind of debris or dirt or sand or any kind of grit into the bore your rifle so but what cleaning you get a more complete clean and it's what I'm going to so this is where I'm at today guys so I haven't reloaded but maybe a million and a half rounds through my career and this is where I'm at so I'm always looking to improve but I'm really satisfied where I'm at at this time so go out and always be safe and get some

Channel: Jerry Miculek - Pro Shooter

Views: 239,001

Rating: 4.960916 out of 5

Keywords: Jerry, Miculek, speed, shooting, fast, quick, draw, reload, reloading, world, record, smith, wesson, ruger, colt, gun, guns, firearms, firearm, tactical, assault, ar15, ar, 15, ak47, m16, m4, rifle, shotgun, pistol, handgun

Id: CQ2CjzW0Dww

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020