Snunk out to Cabela’s this morning to look into components for .223 hunting loads.

They had Barnes TSX in 53 grain, but not the 62 grain. I can work with that.

Only new brass was Remington. I’ll try it. Most of my existing .223 brass is either military or of unknown condition; it’s Georgia Arms Canned Heat and that’s already a reload. If it was just plinking rounds I may not care, but for these hunting loads it’ll be nice to start with something new.

No powders that fit my needs.

No primers that fit my needs, but it was nice to see they had something other than shotgun primers on the shelf. 🙂

Had the Barnes reloading book, picked it up.

Picked up what I could. Meantime I’ll be searching online for the rest of the components.

One interesting thing.

I saw they had 60 grain Nosler Partitions there. They also had Nosler’s reloading data book and I flipped through it. For a moment I thought about ditching all that was in my basket and going with the Nosler’s as they had just about everything in stock to work up a load. However I noticed an interesting thing in the book. They book said that if the ammo was going to be used in a semi-auto that you’d want to crimp. However, they suggested doing a taper crimp because their bullets didn’t come with a cannelure. I looked at the bullet and sure enough, smooth as silk. I looked to see if they had any .223 dies that did taper crimps, but no luck so I opted to go back to the Barnes approach. I’m glad I did… stick to my guns (no pun intended).

What was interesting? I decided to see if there was any factory hunting ammo on the shelves. Sure enough, there was some Federal P223Q on the shelf. That’s the load using the 60 grain Nosler Partition. I wanted to see how they crimped. Well get this… the bullets had cannelures! So Nosler’s book says they don’t make the bullets with cannelures, but yet here we have the bullets with them. I don’t know the reason why things are this way… maybe Nosler doesn’t sell cannelured ones as components, maybe Nosler makes cannelured versions special for Federal. I don’t know, but I found that interesting.

Anyway, I’m going to work with the Barnes TSX for now and see where it gets me.