Bullets, powder

summerside sniper

summerside sniper

Regular
EE Expired
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Location
Head of St Margaret's Bay, Nova Scotia
As I said in other threads here, I am new to reloading and I am going to be reloading for:
9mm, 7.62x54R, 303 Brit, 30-06, 8mm Mauser, 223.
And I am at this time, just an average Joe type shooter. I do some local range competition, but mostly I go out to have fun, and improve my abilities.

So what I see myself needing is FMJ type/style bullets. But the question is, how do you determine what type bullets you need and then how do you find what powder you require? Do you first determine what bullet style you need, purchase said bullet at any grain that looked good at that time, and than determine the powder required? As I have NO intention to store 1 POWDER TYPE PER CALIBER, I would like to keep my powder the same between all/most of my calibers if possible. This is intented to help save cost and confusion when reloading. With this in mind, how do I go about deciding what I require?
 
You have a lot of work ahead of you if you want to work up some fairly precise loads. That's the problem with shooting so many different calibers in so many different guns.

Here's what I did on one of my guns. This is by no means the only way. A lot of things were considered, including the availability of certain powders at my local retailer.....the price of the powder....the price of the bullets....some advice from other CGNers......etc

Anyway..... I took my reloading manual and found a powder that was middle of the road in terms of grains per load and went with that. I didn't want to dump 90 grains of powder x in when I could dump in 70 grains of powder Y.......however, I didn't want to go with the fastest, meanest, leanest one out there either.....just middle of the road. I then picked the cheapest 180 grain bullets they had on the shelf. This turned into a bit of a problem when they ran out of stock, so I had to go with another manufacturer. No big deal....2 bucks more per 100.

Anyway......I went to a local retailer that had a bunch of assorted reloading manuals on the gun desk for customers to use. I wrote down the min/max loads out of all of them. This varied widely.

I then started loading 5 cartridges with the lightest load, working up in 0.5 grain steps....so 5 of 66 grains of powder.....5 of 66.5 grains.....and so on until I had reached the maximum load.

Off to the range I went. I put up a target with each powder load written on it. Shot 5......waited 10 minutes for the barrel to cool.....on to the next 5 and target.

I had 3 that were pretty similar groups. 68 grains, 68.5 and 69 grains.

Back to the reloading bench I went. I started with 68 grains and went it 0.2 grain steps this time......back to the range and shot groups of 5 all day. There was little difference, and any variances could be attributed to the 6 cups of coffee I drink every day :D

I settled on 68.5 grains of powder under a 180 grain Speer Spitzer, and I'm quite happy with it.

I hope this is the kind of answer you're looking for.
 
"...would like to keep my powder the same between all/most of my calibers if possible..." It rarely works out that way. One rifle will like one bullet/powder combination and hate another powder with the same bullet. Nor can you use rifle powder in pistols.
You don't necessarily need FMJ's either.
 
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