Starting to load 40s&w
- Thread starter 39hunter39
- Start date
So this may be a dumb question. But I'm very new to reloading. I have a horandy reloading book. Is the data all the same no matter what type of bullet. For example it says 180 gr. Xtp use hs-6. 6.2gr to 7.2gr. Would that be the same if I use a 180gr campro? I'm guessing it doesn't matter the brand and it goes but weight. Just wasnt sure if it mattered on brand of bullet. Again really new to reloading and dont want to make a mistake. Thanks
The biggest variable in reloading for a given cartridge is the bullet weight. A secondary factor is the bullet construction.... An XTP with a big hollow cavity at the front will likely have a longer bearing surface than a FMJ of the same weight, resulting in higher pressure with the same load. CamPro bullets are, for the most part, copper plated lead. Cast lead bullets are another variable, along with the bullet hardness. If you were to find a solid copper bullet for a 40 S&W (Barnes?), they would require yet another set of load data.
Iron Sighted
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This is my plan as well, still have a pile of 180gr though, guess I'd better starting shooting more....
BattleRife
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Yes-ish. That's the reason why you start at the starting loads, and work up as indications allow.
All 180 grain bullets will have about the same starting point. You work up, and bullets with more surface area, or more friction on the jacket/plating/lead surface, will reach max pressure first.
So the book data is the same, but once you have worked up to the max loads in your own guns, you shouldn't necessarily swap bullets.
I have been helping my brother-in-law reload for his 40 cal and here are some comments.
I agree Titegroup as a good powder, but I would not start with it as a new reloader, because of the ease of double loading. To explain how that happens. Titegroup takes up very little space in the brass so when people cannot see the powder high up in the brass they tend to think they have forgotten to load it so they give a second charge. Most other powders do not have this problem as they take up more volume in the case and will normally over flow if double charged, making it easy to see you have made a mistake. Titegroup takes up a lot less space so you can double charge it and still not overflow in a lot of cases.
If you are new to loading I would consider weighing your bullets after you are done. This is a quick way to find bullets you might have forgotten to load the powder in, or double charged. You can weigh 100 bullets in a minute or two and because most charges are going to be in the 5 grain region you will either see a high number or low number. ie proper charge for 180gr bullet finished will be around 243 grains (depending on powder used, bullet weight etc). If you see one at 248 you have probably double charged it. IF you see a bullet at 237 grains you have probably forgotten to charge it. A bullet with no powder will still fire the bullet. It will normally make it 2-3 inches down the barrel. It will not expand like a normal bullet so you can remove the barrel from the gun and use a wooden or plastic dowel to punch it back out, the direction it came in from. Even a old wood pencil will be good enough to take the old bullet out. Just check to ensure the barrel is clear after you remove the bullet to ensure nothing was left behind in the grooves if the bullet looks broken up for some reason.
I usually build my bullets on a Hornady progressive press but do my crimping on a cheap lee single stage press. I think you can get perfectly good little Lee presses for $75 at times. Just wait for the sales. Here is what I use for my final crimping. https://leeprecision.com/reconditioned-breech-lock-challenger-press.html You will find that Henry at BudgetShooterSupply.ca has most of the LEE products and will ship to you so you have it within a week. It is fine to buy a used press off www.townpost, www.kijiji or GunNutz. Presses of any type seldom wear at all if looked after.
Not all loading books are the same, although that comment is true to a degree. For the 40 cal, I have a Swift, Hornady, Nosler and Lyman reloading books. I also normally go to the powder manufacturers web page (Alliant) and look at what they say for loading grains. I am using Bullseye powder for my brother in laws bullets. Accurate powders suggests 5.5 grn for Bullseye and a 180gr round nose bullet. Swift, Hornady and Lyman suggest numbers in the 4.9 - 5.7 range for this powder. Nosler is a big stand out in this case as they suggest ranges from 3.8 - 4.8 as a maximum. The others are significantly higher than what Nosler suggests. I do not know why there is such a big difference when it is the same bullet, same powder, and same seating depth. I have contacted Nosler twice with no reply. However there seems to be many people out there using this "light??" load and happy with it.
The lighter bullets do indeed seem to result in more accurate loads. I have not looked into why as it is not my gun. I just go with what works for the brother in law: 155gn seems best although 135, 165, 180 and others are okay. None are bad that I know of.
The deeper you seat the bullet "down as measured in how far it goes into the brass case (reduced volume for the powder), the higher the pressure spikes. Always follow a recipes length when seated. Different bullet design will result in different lengths of the bullet being pushed into the case which can increase the pressure spike..One previous post pointed this out for hollow point bullets (where most of the weight is in the back end) and where more of the bullet gets seated into the case mouth, in order to not exceed the recommended maximum length (1.135").
After shooting some of your lighter loads, and as you increase the amount of powder, I always look at the spent primers in the case to see if I can tell if the primer is over flattened in the back of the case pointing to high pressures pushing the primer onto the bolt face. Look at some primers out of factory loads and compare them time to time with your own reloads. See if your primers are getting flattened to a wider width.
Different powders will give different feel to the recoil. While this is true within any single powder as you use more and more, some powders like bullseye may have more of a sharp crack to the recoil where other powders may have softer more prolonged Whoomph (is that a word??) recoil. Different shooters are comfortable with different types of recoil.
In general, the larger the bullet (grains in weight) the smaller the powder load. This is because the larger bullets are pushed further inside the case resulting in higher ignition pressures and lower powder charges are needed to maintain the same maximum bullet length but also not exceed recommended pressure limits. As a result, heavier bullets will have lower velocities overall.
The 40 cal, seats in the gun chamber when the leading edge of the brass case mates to a ridge cut into the barrel. It does not mate with the back end of the case mating with the barrel. As a result, some of the rear of the case is hanging out of the rear of the barrel and is unsupported. Glock's are supposedly the worst for this. Over many shootings, the walls of the case about 4mm up from the back end may start to bulge and will eventually cause problems with feeding in handguns when the bulge stops the bullets from going in far enough into the barrel. This may happen when cases fired in one gun are then used in another gun which has a tighter entrance to the barrel. You can use tools like the LEE Bulge Buster to straighten the case walls. If you are using the same gun all the time you may not see this problem.
There are two general types of crimp. Taper Crimp and roll crimp. Roll crimps are generally used for revolvers and high recoil guns like 357. The 40 cal uses a Taper Crimp (if any crimp is needed) which essentially just maintains the straight wall of the brass case. Because the 40 cal spaces off the front leading edge of the case, you MUST use a taper crimp if you crimp at all. Usually a light to moderate crimp is used on the 40 cal but as a new reloader you should probably check to see how far a factory load lets the bullet feed into the barrel. IF your reloads are going further into the barrel than a factory load you are over crimping the bullet. There should always be a front edge for a finger nail to catch on so the brass case can catch on the edge inside the barrel. A roll crimp rolls the front of the brass into the bullet to make for a more secure grab on the bullet. However this means the front edge of the brass case is rolled inward and is not there to mate with the ridge inside the barrel. if you roll crimp, you will almost certainly make teh bullet feed too far into the barrel (as the edge does not catch the barrel ridge) and you may be forcing the lead/bullet to push into the rifling lands. This can cause severe pressure spikes with dreadful results.
If you have roll crimped your 40 cal bullets, I would use a cheap inertial bullet extractor to pull the bullets out. Then reform the cases and reload the bullets with a proper taper crimp. The bullet extractor I like the best is the Lyman one because of better construction. I had to reload a lot of bullets after my brother in law failed to powder charge a lot of bullets when he was using my gear. Weighing the bullets found half of them with no charge. A cheap inertial bullet extractor tends to blow apart after only a small number of extractions. Some people use grunt power and smash the extractor into a concrete face for extraction with a single hit. I tend to use multiple weaker hits to extract the bullet and have the device live longer. Here is the one I like the best after going through a couple of cheaper ones. I have yet to kill this one. You should be able to find it 20% cheaper than this link https://www.amazon.ca/Lyman-Magnum-Inertia-Bullet-Puller/dp/B0037N6IXA
Always check the region from the bulge back to the extractor groove to see if the case is starting to separate. Throw away any cases you see this in.
Straight wall cases will rarely need length trimming during the first 10+ reloads of the case unless you are using excessively charged powder loads.
Different primers cause powders to ignite in slightly different ways. It may be worth trying the same powder load with different primers to see if you have better accuracy or better recoil in your recipes. I tend to use Federal Gold match (brown box) as my first choice, Federal blue box regular primers as my second choice and CCI as my third choice, Sellier and Bellot 4th. That is NOT because the CCI/SB are bad primers. I just try to stick to the same primers I used when developing the load because of the different way a different primer may cause the recipe to go off. Modern primers are better at igniting powders than older primers. As a result a good load using older primers might not perform well with modern primers. SB primers might come closer to older primers if you want to still use an old recipe. Small rifle primers will "fit" into a 40 cal case but should not normally be used because they contain slightly more primer mix and may cause higher pressure spikes as the gunpowder burns off faster than with a pistol primer. Yes, in a pinch they can be used with slightly less powder but stay safe and stick with what was intended in the bullet case.
I use the higher Gold Match primers in most cases because they are only about $10.00 per 1000 more than a regular primer (1 cent a bullet more). Gold match primers will not result in more accurate loads in general. They may result in more consistent firing of the powder and possibly less fliers. That is the second reason I buy them over the normal primers.
Sorry for the War and Peace length post.
I agree Titegroup as a good powder, but I would not start with it as a new reloader, because of the ease of double loading. To explain how that happens. Titegroup takes up very little space in the brass so when people cannot see the powder high up in the brass they tend to think they have forgotten to load it so they give a second charge. Most other powders do not have this problem as they take up more volume in the case and will normally over flow if double charged, making it easy to see you have made a mistake. Titegroup takes up a lot less space so you can double charge it and still not overflow in a lot of cases.
If you are new to loading I would consider weighing your bullets after you are done. This is a quick way to find bullets you might have forgotten to load the powder in, or double charged. You can weigh 100 bullets in a minute or two and because most charges are going to be in the 5 grain region you will either see a high number or low number. ie proper charge for 180gr bullet finished will be around 243 grains (depending on powder used, bullet weight etc). If you see one at 248 you have probably double charged it. IF you see a bullet at 237 grains you have probably forgotten to charge it. A bullet with no powder will still fire the bullet. It will normally make it 2-3 inches down the barrel. It will not expand like a normal bullet so you can remove the barrel from the gun and use a wooden or plastic dowel to punch it back out, the direction it came in from. Even a old wood pencil will be good enough to take the old bullet out. Just check to ensure the barrel is clear after you remove the bullet to ensure nothing was left behind in the grooves if the bullet looks broken up for some reason.
I usually build my bullets on a Hornady progressive press but do my crimping on a cheap lee single stage press. I think you can get perfectly good little Lee presses for $75 at times. Just wait for the sales. Here is what I use for my final crimping. https://leeprecision.com/reconditioned-breech-lock-challenger-press.html You will find that Henry at BudgetShooterSupply.ca has most of the LEE products and will ship to you so you have it within a week. It is fine to buy a used press off www.townpost, www.kijiji or GunNutz. Presses of any type seldom wear at all if looked after.
Not all loading books are the same, although that comment is true to a degree. For the 40 cal, I have a Swift, Hornady, Nosler and Lyman reloading books. I also normally go to the powder manufacturers web page (Alliant) and look at what they say for loading grains. I am using Bullseye powder for my brother in laws bullets. Accurate powders suggests 5.5 grn for Bullseye and a 180gr round nose bullet. Swift, Hornady and Lyman suggest numbers in the 4.9 - 5.7 range for this powder. Nosler is a big stand out in this case as they suggest ranges from 3.8 - 4.8 as a maximum. The others are significantly higher than what Nosler suggests. I do not know why there is such a big difference when it is the same bullet, same powder, and same seating depth. I have contacted Nosler twice with no reply. However there seems to be many people out there using this "light??" load and happy with it.
The lighter bullets do indeed seem to result in more accurate loads. I have not looked into why as it is not my gun. I just go with what works for the brother in law: 155gn seems best although 135, 165, 180 and others are okay. None are bad that I know of.
The deeper you seat the bullet "down as measured in how far it goes into the brass case (reduced volume for the powder), the higher the pressure spikes. Always follow a recipes length when seated. Different bullet design will result in different lengths of the bullet being pushed into the case which can increase the pressure spike..One previous post pointed this out for hollow point bullets (where most of the weight is in the back end) and where more of the bullet gets seated into the case mouth, in order to not exceed the recommended maximum length (1.135").
After shooting some of your lighter loads, and as you increase the amount of powder, I always look at the spent primers in the case to see if I can tell if the primer is over flattened in the back of the case pointing to high pressures pushing the primer onto the bolt face. Look at some primers out of factory loads and compare them time to time with your own reloads. See if your primers are getting flattened to a wider width.
Different powders will give different feel to the recoil. While this is true within any single powder as you use more and more, some powders like bullseye may have more of a sharp crack to the recoil where other powders may have softer more prolonged Whoomph (is that a word??) recoil. Different shooters are comfortable with different types of recoil.
In general, the larger the bullet (grains in weight) the smaller the powder load. This is because the larger bullets are pushed further inside the case resulting in higher ignition pressures and lower powder charges are needed to maintain the same maximum bullet length but also not exceed recommended pressure limits. As a result, heavier bullets will have lower velocities overall.
The 40 cal, seats in the gun chamber when the leading edge of the brass case mates to a ridge cut into the barrel. It does not mate with the back end of the case mating with the barrel. As a result, some of the rear of the case is hanging out of the rear of the barrel and is unsupported. Glock's are supposedly the worst for this. Over many shootings, the walls of the case about 4mm up from the back end may start to bulge and will eventually cause problems with feeding in handguns when the bulge stops the bullets from going in far enough into the barrel. This may happen when cases fired in one gun are then used in another gun which has a tighter entrance to the barrel. You can use tools like the LEE Bulge Buster to straighten the case walls. If you are using the same gun all the time you may not see this problem.
There are two general types of crimp. Taper Crimp and roll crimp. Roll crimps are generally used for revolvers and high recoil guns like 357. The 40 cal uses a Taper Crimp (if any crimp is needed) which essentially just maintains the straight wall of the brass case. Because the 40 cal spaces off the front leading edge of the case, you MUST use a taper crimp if you crimp at all. Usually a light to moderate crimp is used on the 40 cal but as a new reloader you should probably check to see how far a factory load lets the bullet feed into the barrel. IF your reloads are going further into the barrel than a factory load you are over crimping the bullet. There should always be a front edge for a finger nail to catch on so the brass case can catch on the edge inside the barrel. A roll crimp rolls the front of the brass into the bullet to make for a more secure grab on the bullet. However this means the front edge of the brass case is rolled inward and is not there to mate with the ridge inside the barrel. if you roll crimp, you will almost certainly make teh bullet feed too far into the barrel (as the edge does not catch the barrel ridge) and you may be forcing the lead/bullet to push into the rifling lands. This can cause severe pressure spikes with dreadful results.
If you have roll crimped your 40 cal bullets, I would use a cheap inertial bullet extractor to pull the bullets out. Then reform the cases and reload the bullets with a proper taper crimp. The bullet extractor I like the best is the Lyman one because of better construction. I had to reload a lot of bullets after my brother in law failed to powder charge a lot of bullets when he was using my gear. Weighing the bullets found half of them with no charge. A cheap inertial bullet extractor tends to blow apart after only a small number of extractions. Some people use grunt power and smash the extractor into a concrete face for extraction with a single hit. I tend to use multiple weaker hits to extract the bullet and have the device live longer. Here is the one I like the best after going through a couple of cheaper ones. I have yet to kill this one. You should be able to find it 20% cheaper than this link https://www.amazon.ca/Lyman-Magnum-Inertia-Bullet-Puller/dp/B0037N6IXA
Always check the region from the bulge back to the extractor groove to see if the case is starting to separate. Throw away any cases you see this in.
Straight wall cases will rarely need length trimming during the first 10+ reloads of the case unless you are using excessively charged powder loads.
Different primers cause powders to ignite in slightly different ways. It may be worth trying the same powder load with different primers to see if you have better accuracy or better recoil in your recipes. I tend to use Federal Gold match (brown box) as my first choice, Federal blue box regular primers as my second choice and CCI as my third choice, Sellier and Bellot 4th. That is NOT because the CCI/SB are bad primers. I just try to stick to the same primers I used when developing the load because of the different way a different primer may cause the recipe to go off. Modern primers are better at igniting powders than older primers. As a result a good load using older primers might not perform well with modern primers. SB primers might come closer to older primers if you want to still use an old recipe. Small rifle primers will "fit" into a 40 cal case but should not normally be used because they contain slightly more primer mix and may cause higher pressure spikes as the gunpowder burns off faster than with a pistol primer. Yes, in a pinch they can be used with slightly less powder but stay safe and stick with what was intended in the bullet case.
I use the higher Gold Match primers in most cases because they are only about $10.00 per 1000 more than a regular primer (1 cent a bullet more). Gold match primers will not result in more accurate loads in general. They may result in more consistent firing of the powder and possibly less fliers. That is the second reason I buy them over the normal primers.
Sorry for the War and Peace length post.
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