I let the dogs out and I was petting one when the other one went over the hill. The one that stayed with me must have heard something because he took off, too.
I went to the garage to reload while waiting on them to come home.
I've got a bunch of .223 brass resized, trimmed, primed and ready to load. I loaded 300 the other day and 300 yesterday with BLC2 and 55 grain Hornday FMJBT. I like that powder. It seems to give me comparable accuracy to my long time favorite IMR4198 load and it's so much quicker to charge cases because it actually meters through the uniflow while the IMR4198 really should be weighed (each and every charge). The BLC2 was one of those lucky things that happen sometimes. I was using some old powder and dog gone if it didn't give me good groups with the 55 grain bullets. I'd tried it many years ago with 45 grain bullets in the M700 varmint rifle and it lost out to the IMR4198 (as did everything else). The 5 random weight checks per 50 showed me only 1 charge 0.2 grain low and the rest either on at 0.1 tenths grain low. Now went over the 27.0 grains charge I was looking for.
My youngest son's favorite .223 powder is H335, so I was loading up some for him today. The good group load in his rifle with these bullets if 25.3 grains of powder. I did the back and forth between the uniflow and the scale till I got the powder measure adjusted. I put 50 cases in my shell holders (I use the empty plastic pistol ammo holders that most ammo manufacturers put inside their boxes these days) and had three of the 50 round holders ready to charge. I loaded 150 rounds and not a single one of the 5 random weight checks per 50 were off, not in the least. That surprised me. One because it had never happened before and two, because the H335 was really making the rotor hard to turn off and on.
Comment here - I weight checked 30 charges of H335 during this session and everyone was dead on. I've never used a powder that consistent before. I'm going to load some up and try them in my rifles and see how the groups do compared to the BLC2 and IMR4198 to see if I need to buy more H335.
I filled another three shell holders up with 50 cases each and loaded up another 50 rounds. Weight checks were the same, all 5 were dead on. I charged another 50 cases and starting seating bullets. Part of the way through I ran into a loose case neck. The bullet seated way to easy. I pulled it out of the press and pushed it against the bench and the bullet pushed into the case mouth. DARN! PITB!
I got the kinetic bullet puller off the upper shelf, inserted the round and smacked the bullet out, dumped the powder and bullet into a funnel held over an empty case and then seated the bullet in that case and it was good.
Then, a couple cases later it happened again. I set that one aside. Then it happened 8 more times. On some of them the bullet would drop down into the case. On the ones the bullet had only pushed part of the way into the case I could push the bullet in further with my finger but I couldn't pull it out of the case mouth. Tried several times.
I ended up knocking the bullets out of them with the bullet puller, dumping the powder I didn't lose (H335 jumps out of the cracks in the bullet puller collet and goes all over the floor) back in the powder measure (missed a bullet that went into the powder measure) and resizing all those cases (10 of them total), putting primers back in them, charged them with powder (sure enough, the bullet worked it's way into the rotor and locked it up so I had to dump the powder measure back into the can and then missed the darn bullet again and it went in the can). I got bullets and seated bullets in all of them and checked every one with a push test even though they felt right when seating the bullets. All were good to go.
I then charged the last 50 with powder and seated the bullets and everyone weight check was dead on and every case had been properly resized, so no issues with the last 50.
Percentages and chance??
Six lots of 50 cases, from the same tub of primed brass. Four 50 case lots with no issues. Fifth 50 case lot has 10 of 50 cases that won't hold the bullet in the case neck (cases not resized). Sixth 50 case lot has no issues. I'm reaching my hand into a tub of primed brass multiple times to pull three hundred pieces of brass out of it and only in the fifth lot of 50 brass do I manage to grab improperly sized cases. Unreal.
And, the only explanation I can find, in my sometimes feeble mind, for this is that new tool I bought last year to deprime cases. I tested it on .38 special, .45 acp, 9mm and .223 brass. I must have run across the empty .223 brass and not realizing it wasn't resized (just because it didn't have primers in it) tossed them into the resized tub of .223 Winchester brass.
Oh, the dogs came back while I was loading up that last 50 round batch. I put them in the pen with doggy biscuit treat for not coming back to me when I called them and for going to the woods. They were gone about 1.5 hrs. and the older one had run so hard trying to keep up with the pup that he acted like he was going to get sick/throw up. He got a drink of water and found a shady spot to stretch out in and cool off. The pup got a drink and hit the food pans to top off his tank.
