Too many reloading manuals is a bad thing

[Marksman]

+1 on adding Ken Waters Pet Loads to your reloading library. Back in the late '70's when he was still answering readers letters, I corresponded with Ken on several occassions. He is a wealth of reloading information and knows vintage rifles better than any of the gun scribes. I find a load that shoots well and then don't do much more experimenting, why mess with success. I try to apply the "kiss" principle to my reloading, find a powder that works well with several different calibers. I load for four rifle and four hangun cartridges and I have managed to reduce my powder inventory to six different powders.

 

[Skip Sackett]

+1 on adding Ken Waters Pet Loads to your reloading library. Back in the late '70's when he was still answering readers letters, I corresponded with Ken on several occassions. He is a wealth of reloading information and knows vintage rifles better than any of the gun scribes. I find a load that shoots well and then don't do much more experimenting, why mess with success. I try to apply the "kiss" principle to my reloading, find a powder that works well with several different calibers. I load for four rifle and four hangun cartridges and I have managed to reduce my powder inventory to six different powders.

What did you settle on for your 44Mag rifle loads?

 

[rodell]

+1 on adding Ken Waters Pet Loads to your reloading library. Back in the late '70's when he was still answering readers letters, I corresponded with Ken on several occassions. He is a wealth of reloading information and knows vintage rifles better than any of the gun scribes. I find a load that shoots well and then don't do much more experimenting, why mess with success. I try to apply the "kiss" principle to my reloading, find a powder that works well with several different calibers. I load for four rifle and four hangun cartridges and I have managed to reduce my powder inventory to six different powders.

I ordered a copy from Amazon today.

 

[mack1]

Food for thought on the subject of pressure signs. How do judge pressure in a 38sp or 45acp by the time you see a flat primer you are well over the pressure limit. When loading modern bottlenecked rifle rounds pressure signs are useful but in many pistol rounds they are dangerous. I like the chrony but still must be careful some guns are slower than others and barrel condition can change during a shooting session if loading to the max this is a problem. I gather data from many books and compare.

 

[Jellybean]

I think this confusion is what is promoting the on-line load sharing sites. For those people without a chronograph (or a range that allows you to set them up) it really is a guessing game.

No, the online load sharing sites are promoted by people who are too cheap, lazy or ignorant to purchase any load manuals, and by those that do buy them but only read the data and not the wealth of information that they contain. If the authors of the loading manuals took the data from those online load sharing sites and ran them through the same equipment and under the same conditions as they did their printed data, their would still be a wide disparity of "facts". There are too many variables in handloading to expect exact numbers from different sources.

The chronograph is only good for one thing and that is to compare/confirm velocities from loads that you are shooting out of your guns. Comparing what you get from your guns to what is printed in a manual and making any kind of conclusions, adjustments, or changes is foolish. And that is the nicest way I can put it. Pull out all the manuals you have with pressure data and compare their pressures and charge weights. They don't agree any more than the velocity data does so why would anyone think a choronograph is a safe and reliable way to gauge pressures?

 

[Skip Sackett]

The chronograph is only good for one thing and that is to compare/confirm velocities from loads that you are shooting out of your guns. Comparing what you get from your guns to what is printed in a manual and making any kind of conclusions, adjustments, or changes is foolish. And that is the nicest way I can put it.

This is a good way to put it. I choose to make some assumptions . Call it stupid, call it ignorant, call it crazy; that's fine. It's what I choose to do and it has worked thus far.

There are some assumptions that need to be made in every avenue of life, reloading/handloading is no different. I do compare my data to published data and use velocity as the "guide". Here is why. I know that their test equipment is "worst case scenario". Tightest chamber, smallest bore and such. At least that is the "norm" for most of the testing done in our litigious society.

Remember, we are all grown ups, responsible for our own actions and not the controllers of others. Just get ready should those "chickens come home to roost!"

 

[Paul5388]

Life was a lot more simple when we usually only had access to one manual. We loaded and assumed we were getting something similar to what they got. We didn't blow up guns and we managed to shoot some pretty accurate loads.

Some will say, "things and components have changed over time", but in my experience, that isn't the case. For example, I still have some old DuPont IMR 4350 loads in 7mm Mag and even though the shape of IMR 4350 changed when it became IMR IMR 4350, the same load was within 10 fps of the old load. That load was generated from Speer #7 and even though we use Sierra and Hornady bullets, the load is still good.

 

[BruceM]

"Life was a lot more simple when we usually only had access to one manual. "

Ya think?

These days there are those who contend that you can't cast bullets which won't lead the bore unless you have both a chronograph and a hardness tester.



Bruce

 

[Engineer1911]

Another observation

In 1985 I had a M-52. I shot only military 38 spl brass in it. If I loaded commercial brass, the case split after 3 reloads. I bought 1 box of Remington 148 Grain HBWC. That ammo ejected empty brass from my M-52 about 18" - 22". My reloads ejected empty brass about 12" - 16". I concluded that I had a safe, mild load for my M-52.

Now what was my load? Published data with 148 gr WC bullets and Red Dot or Green Dot powder was readily available from more than one source. A powder burn rate chart put Winchester AA 452 pwder between Red Dot and Green Dot. There was no published load data for Win AA 452 in a 38 special. I made a couple of graphs, did some magic math and decided X.3 grains of Win AA 452 would work. Fired 2 rounds in the garage. Brass ejected mildly. I ended up shooting 10 pounds of Win AA 452 powder out of that M 52. After I did it for 4 years, Winchester published data for Win AA 452 and AA 473 shotgun powder as pistol loads. Common sense does work.

 

[Missionary]

Good morning
And too few can be rather dangerous...

 

[Jellybean]

.... Common sense does work.

There are techniques that can be used to find "unpublished" information, although not all of them are suited for inexperienced handloaders, and if you have enough loading manuals there is a good chance to find out how it's done.

But then on the negative side, I was just reading an article in a manual from 1992 where the author stated a chrongraph is useful for telling if your loads are overpressure or not. While it may give an indication there is a problem, it does not give pressure data and should not be relied upon to make any adjustments based on the information it does give. But this author made a couple of statements that some people do seem to think is "common sense", but they are not true. One was that a given pressure in a certain cartridge/bullet combination and firearm will always yield the same velocity. The other was that the same charge of the same powder in the same cartridge will always give the same pressure. These are easy to dispel if you have a couple loading manuals laying around.

 

[buck460XVR]

Too many reloading manuals is a bad thing

.....no, it's not.