Thursday, February 12, 2009

Preps Preps Preps!

Got to keep prepping. It's a mantra when I finally get home and get some dinner in my belly. Every day, and I mean EVERY DAY, I do at least 2-3 tasks for prepping.Last night I cleaned the house, but I also organized all my batteries. I had more than I thought, but down the road I'll buy another pack of AA's and AAA's and some more D's. I also went and cleaned ~400 .45ACP brass, and prepared the .308 brass I shot on Sunday.

So military brass has a problem that needs to be addressed before you can reload it. First off, it needs to be boxer primed. Then you shouldn't use your standard deprimer to deprime the brass. I have heard you can, but the deprimer is a few bucks and that's cheaper than the pin in your sizer! The reason is the primer pocket has a crimp. Once you get it deprimed you need to remove this crimp with a tool. I got one for $3 that will chamfer the inside and outside of the case mouth and remove this crimp from the primer pocket. I wouldn't want to do it to more than 50 cases though. Tough on the hands.

I need to get me some finer media for my case tumbler. It gets stuck in the primer hole, and I need to use a bent paper clip to poke it out. Very time consuming!

I also educate myself as best I can when home as well. I hit all the web sites that are banned from work, and try to read something when it's time for bed. Soon it's garden time. I'm going to try to get the cabbage seed planted tonight.

I'm supposed to go out drinking Friday night, so not much prepping going on tomorrow night. So I need to get 75 or so skeet loads done tonight. I already have 25 LRN rounds for the .45, I'd like to test my new grips. I also want to shoot the M1A, I need to start working up a load for the 500+ 168grain bullets I ordered the other day. Working up a load is a time consuming process, as the hottest load is not the necessarily the best. I want the smallest group with the most energy.

The M1A is not a sniper rifle. I wonder if it's a 2 or a 3 MOA rifle, and I'll figure this out along the way as I work up the load. Un comparison my bolt action is a 1/2 MOA rifle. MOA is short for Minute of Angle, or 1/60th of 1 degree. 1MOA is about 1 inch at 100 yards. 2 inches at 200 yards, and so on.

I learned of a primer that might cut my bolt action to a 1/4 MOA rifle. CCI makes a primer specifically for bench shooting. These primers are NOT for a semi-auto rifle because of slam-fire. But in my bolt action they should be amazing. The problem is they are $50 for 1000, about twice as expensive as regular large rifle primers. Actually that's not bad as I thought. I'm buying a brick just to see.

I should do a quick rundown on how I load a rifle and pistol round for the blog. Expect to see this soon.

Well that's enough rambling for now. I wish I had a keen insight into the political or economic situation this country is in, but I've come up empty today. I should check to see how much $ we are still sending overseas in aid. Don't you think this money would be helpful to our economy? then again it depends if we are sending cash or goods. sending goods is good, writing a check is bad.

Keep prepping everyone, warm weather and higher crime rates are coming.

2 comments:

irishdutchuncle said...

sending goods is good, if they were produced with american labor and materials, so american families get the checks. sooner or later the value of the checks we send overseas, has to come back in exchange for something some american has to sell. since the supply is now so huge more will need to come back in order to pay the inflated future prices. it only keeps working as long as it continues to circulate. better to spend what you have on preps today, than at tomorrows inflated price.

Bitmap said...

When you get to where you can consistently shoot <3MOA with a rifle in the field you will be some kind of a rifle shot.

My recommendation is to budget some money for a GOOD rifle class.

Better yet, two good classes. One a general purpose rifle class with some emphasis on field shooting and improvised positions and rests, the other a "tactical" or "urban" or "defensive" (or whatever you want to call it) rifle class where you spend almost all your time from contact distance out to maybe 50 yards.

My other advice is to get a small base sizer die for the .308. That's what RCBS calls their version. It will size the case down towards the minimum dimensions to help with feeding and reduce the chance of slamfires. Then add a Hornady carbide expander ball assembly. The Hornady expander ball uses the inexpensive RCBS decapping pins. You can get 50 of them for about $14 at Midwayusa, so even if you break a few it's no big deal. Decapping pins are one of those things that you should have spares for because they do break.

Another thing you might experiment with is a crimp die. The Lee Factory Crimp Die works surprisingly well. I haven't had any trouble with bullets being forced down into the case when being chambered in semi-auto rifles.

If I have more than one rifle in a caliber I don't go for the smallest group or hottest load or whatever for each one. I try to find a load that is safe, reliable, and accurate enough in both. With this approach I don't have to worry about if the box of ammo I have is for rifle A or B because I know it will work in both.

If you can shoot 4" groups at 200 yards you have plenty of accuracy. If you want a challenge then try to do that from sitting and braced kneeling, or even from prone without a bag or bipod to rest on.

Good luck.