I am in the same boat as the OP
Quote Originally Posted by nowarningshot View Post
Sounds to me like you really should be loading only under the direct supervision of a experienced mentor. No insult intended, we all start somewhere.
Hoping to soon, before I load anything.
Put simply. Every powder has different intended uses. Pistol and shotgun powders are very fast, used in a rifle, they could result in a catastrophic failure. As a general rule, the larger the rifle cartridge, projectile, barrel length.....the slower the powder. Just a general rule as my Rigby uses medium powders, whereas, the 338 lapua, it's offspring which uses the Rigby parent case uses some of the slowest powders.
This is an important piece of info I have not managed to stumble across until now, or rather, have seen it but not explained so simply! Good to know! I guess it goes with starting with a chart from a book versus recipes from the internet. The very strong common piece of advice here seems to be to start with a book!
Look up a powder burn chart....check out the burn rates of the recommended powders in your online or manual source.
Good info but as a newbie, what to do with the vast amount of data. The explanation above of "pistol powder in a rifle..." is great to know!
This should give you a general idea of the range, fast to slow, and potential substitutes. Substituting some powders may simply lead to poor performance and accuracy; whereas, others can result in unsafe pressures.
Welcome to the rabbit hole, stay safe.
This is a very large rabbit hold apparently ...
Just trying to learn some of the ins and outs of why I might buy one powder vs another. Don't even have any reloading equipment here (like I mentioned, only ever done it at my grandfather's
I have managed to receive the equipment, but now the next purchase is the powder.
Jimmy, check out this thread too...a lot of good info there to a similar question I had posted. Probably similar responders too.....Thanks for the patience all who answer similar questions from us new guys!
https://www.canadiangunnutz.com/forum/showthread.php/2096081-First-powder
I have been working through the manual the ABS's of Reloading and so far, looked at the Speer manual section on .223 Remington. I will need to compare the powder list to the local supplier stock and see if they have something listed. Otherwise, guess I am ordering.
Good luck Jimmy!
Many handloaders are self taught, but the learning curve is much longer, and than it is for those who are helped along the way by an knowledgeable hand. Much can be learned from books, magazines, and on line, even for those of us who have been at this for a long time. If you think there's nothing left to learn, you haven't given the subject much thought. One of the problems of learning to reload from media, is that each author comes at the subject from the point of view of his own area of expertise, which in print is often from target shooting. There's nothing wrong with this in itself, and the importance of paying attention to detail this approach demands cannot be overstated. The downside though is that it might cause the novice to spend time and money on things that are of no benefit to him. One of the subjects we frequently encounter is endlessly testing the seating depth of our bullets. Well, if you intend to feed your ammunition from a magazine, its the magazine length, rather than the chamber dimensions, that represents the maximum overall length of your cartridge. Lets suppose you own an early Weatherby rifle with a 4 caliber free bore, you won't be able to seat a short bullet out far enough to contact the lands, and if you do manage it with a long bullet, the cartridge will be too long to load from the magazine.
The savvy handloader minimally resizes his brass to ensure its not over stressed, which enhances case life. But what happens if your ammo has to be fed through more than one rifle? Bumping the shoulder .002" is great when the piece of brass is fired in just one rifle, but what if you are loading that cartridge for use in more than one rifle? If you've got a tub of unsegregated brass, that hasn't been marked it in some way to identify which rifle it was fired in, you have to resize all of it to feed in the tightest chamber. Likewise, if you have a bolt action and a semi-auto chambered alike, the brass has to be resized so it will cycle reliably through the autoloader, so the dimensions will be almost certainly be smaller than the brass that would normally be fired in the bolt gun, when both a hunting rifles. Here is where the attention to detail becomes important. If you know that your brass is resized to the minimum dimensions, but is fired in a rifle which has generous chamber dimensions, you will need to be cognizant of the signs that warn of case head separation.
So here is my advise on how to progress. Purchase the basic tools you need to begin loading your own ammunition; if you can manage it, get one of the multitool kits provided by various manufacturers. Typically this gives you a press, a set of dies, a scale, powder measure, powder trickler, a priming tool, a lube pad, and possibly some lube. If you follow the instructions that come with your tools, and you use published data from reputable sources, you should be able to make ammunition that proves to be pleasingly accurate when fired from the bench. What you might be less pleased about, is the length of time its taken to make those reloads. When you have a bit more money to spend on loading tools, identify where the bottlenecks are in your loading process, and buy the tool you need to mitigate a particular bottle neck. Perhaps you'll get a cartridge case stuck in a resizing die because you didn't apply enough lube to it. That's the problem with lube pads, you get too much or not enough lube. Now you have to buy a stuck case remover, or make you own, but unless you have one, you can't use that die anymore until the case if pulled. Then you can get some Imperial Sizing Wax, and the problem is unlikely to reoccur since this stuff is very slippery, and you lube each brass case individually.
After several reloads, you might find that your primer pockets have expanded, and you don't feel the resistance of seating the primer you were expecting. You might end up de-capping that particular case, then feel that there was indeed a bit of resistance to de-capping, so the primer pocket must still be okay, so you re-prime the case. Think how much time could have been saved, to say nothing of your piece of mind, if you simply had an inexpensive primer pocket gauge that confirmed the primer pocket was tight enough to retain the primer without leaking, or conversely, if you swaged the primer crimps out of a military brass, that the pocket is large enough to safely seat the primer in.
If you begin loading with a Lee Loader, many of us have, you can make excellent ammunition . . . slowly. You probably won't want to make a 100 rounds at a single setting, not after the first time anyway. You might decide your next purchase should be an arbor press, or perhaps you decide to just jump in with both feet and buy a loading press. Going in another direction, if you are relying on the single spoon style powder measure that came with the Lee Loader, you might want get a powder scale that will allow you to load a wider range of ammunition. Once you have a scale, you might decide to get a powder measure to speed up the weighing of chargers. Once you have a powder measure you might decide its more expedient to use spoon measures to put charges of course extruded powder on the scale, so you buy a Lee Powder Measure Kit, that contains a variety of spoon measures. You will probably decide that tapping home primers with the steel rod is not only slow, but produces inconsistent results, therefore a bench or hand priming tool is essential.
Once you have a loading press and begin loading with it, it will probably occur to you, particularly if you load cast bullets, that a second press, or better yet a turret press, that allows you to quickly resize then expand the case mouths before proceeding to the next step. If you are loading pistol ammunition, and began with a standard resizing die, you might opt to choose a carbide resizing die to speed up that process. If you find that some of your handloads are resistant to chambering in your pistol, a Lee Factory Crimp Die, crimps and resizes the loaded round, resolving the problem. Keep in mind that a properly loaded pistol cartridge has a slight hour glass shape, wider at the base because the cartridge diameter cannot be reduced at the web, and the mouth of the case is expanded to accept the diameter of the bullet.
These are a few, but by no means all of the steps I've proceeded though over the last 50 years of reloading. If I knew at the start what I know now, I'd have missed out on an interesting journey, but a novice doesn't need to go to quite that much trouble now with the internet to help.
