Reloading

How much is reloading 9mm costing me?

/ hsoi / 10 Comments

Earlier this week I resolved to reload 100 rounds of 9mm every morning. I figure 100 rounds doesn’t take me more than 30 minutes (from setup to cleanup). I can spare 30 minutes a day, and over time I’ll get what I need. 500 rounds so far.

Trouble is, I’m realizing that while I’m fairly well set for most components right now, brass is in short supply. I have a few avenues, but I’m probably going to need to buy some. I figured while I was shopping around for the best price I should see how much reloading one round of 9mm costs me.

If I have to buy some once-fired brass, it works out to about $0.033 per case.

My Precision Delta bullets, since I bought in bulk a while ago, are about $0.064 per bullet.

Buying Titegroup powder in 8 lbs jugs, at 4.5 grains per load it’s about $0.0018 per throw.

And the primer is about $0.027 each.

That totals up to $0.125 per round, or $6.29 per 50.

Over at ammoman.com, prices vary a bit depending what you buy and what level of bulk you get, but easily the cost per round there is double what it’s costing me.  Over at the ammoengine this morning, the cheapest is Tula from CheaperThanDirt at $0.19 round. Once you move into the realm of brass-cased ammo, nothing is cheaper than twice what it’s costing me.

Certainly prices of factory ammo can vary. Certainly the cost of my components can vary, but buying in massive bulk quantities (I know I’ll eventually go through it) and looking for the best deals help. Plus, if we remove the cost of the brass (I can often harvest for free), that helps too. Bottom line is, the exact numbers may vary slightly, but there’s no question there’s significant cost savings.

So of course what’s the key difference? Time invested. I can spare 30 minutes a day. Just have to ensure I stay dedicated to it.

Reloading bleg

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

I’ve been slack at getting myself to the reloading bench.

In large part it’s been because I’ve been busy with other things and thus when I think about getting out there I’m just not motivated. Furthermore, it’s getting quite hot outside and I just don’t feel like taking a schvitz to reload.

So I’m going to attempt something. Every morning, wake up, tend to morning things (e.g. get dressed, eat breakfast, etc.), then get out and reload 100 rounds of 9mm. That should take me about 30 minutes in total. Not a huge time investment, and if I do it every day I’ll build up a good supply, even as I burn through some of it in my own practice. If I can get a few thousand stockpiled, then I’ll see about switching out the press setup and perhaps go back to my .223 efforts.

I’ve shifted away from using the Berry’s bullets towards using the Precision Delta bullets. While I like the full plating on the Berry’s, their local availability, and being the least expensive of what’s available locally, I’m having problems with them. That is, I’ll go to seat the bullet and something messes up during the seating… typically the bullet seats wrong and “shaves” part of its side off, but whatever happens it equates to a wasted load. I may be able to pull the bullet and recover the powder, but the bullet is certainly wasted and maybe the case and thus maybe the primer. Apart from the wasted components, it also throws off your groove as you’re working. *sigh*  It’s happened more than enough with the Berry’s that I’m starting to not want to use them. Besides, when you buy Precision Delta bullets, they’re a lot less expensive than the Berry’s, plus when you buy in bulk it’s even cheaper. So far all the Precision Delta’s I’ve loaded have worked out great, at least in the loading process. So far, so good.

I really want to keep up this routine of wake up, do morning things, then reload 100 rounds. What I really need at this point are some good .30 cal ammo cans to store the reloads. The best place to buy them is “John’s Guns” out in Bastrop, but it’s not a place I can easily get to, and whenever I am out that way all too often I drive by outside of business hours. 😦   I’ve struggled to find a good place to buy such things within Austin, at a reasonable price.

If it fits, it ships

/ hsoi / 8 Comments

The US Postal Service has their flat rate Priority Mail service. You get a box for a flat rate, and if your stuff fits into that box it ships in that box for that flat rate.

I always wondered about that.

If I had a clump of feathers that fit in there, it’d cost the same as a clump of lead that fit in there. While the volume may be the same, the weight certainly is not. I wonder how much USPS’s price determinations take such things into account.

The Postman just stopped by my house. He needed help with my delivery because well… it weighed a lot.

I really wonder about that “clump of lead” part… because what I received was my shipment of 9mm 115 grain FMJ bullets from Precision Delta. 🙂  Lead indeed.

Never used PD bullets before, but without question they were inexpensive, especially when ordered in bulk. They seem to be well regarded and reviewed so hey… why not? Part of reloading is for the cost-savings. My 9mm recipe seemed to fair the same regardless of bullet used, so we should be good to go here.

We’ll see how it goes.

Long term reloading plans

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

Now that I know my 9mm reload recipe is solid, the goal is to reload until I’m sick of it. 🙂

I’m going to reload 9mm until I run out of some component. If I can get a few thousand of them in the larder, that’d be great. Heck, I think 10K on ice would be a nice surplus but we’ll see where that ends up. Point is, I just want to get a lot loaded so I can shoot and not have to worry about obtaining or making ammo. Because….

I want to get back to working on a .223 Remington load. Yeah, the whole hunting load hasn’t been working out so I put it on the backburner. What I’d like to do is start off with just a cheap plinking load. Just help me find a load that works, work to perfect my skill at making rifle loads, and so on. And yes, if I can eventually work up a great load like foo.c’s zombie load, that’d be cool.

Of course, down the line once I get good at making a .223 rifle load, then it will be time to make a .308 Winchester load. That should be fun. 🙂

9mm load recipe – plinking/target load – performance data

/ hsoi / 5 Comments

So I have my basic 9mm load recipe for a plinking/target load.

Briefly: Berrys 9mm 115 grain plated RN DS bullet, Remington 1.5 small pistol primer, mixed used brass cases, COAL 1.135″, 4.5 grains Titegroup powder. Reloaded on my Hornady Lock-n-Load AP.

I actually had some other bullets and figured why not try out the recipe with those bullets as well. I also made it with Hornady’s 115 grain 9mm FMJ RN bullets, and with some Speer 115 grain 9mm TMJ bullets. Just basic bullets.

I ran them through a chronograph. It was fairly humid today, and temps were probably was in the 50’s when I did the chrono. This was done out at the A-Zone Range. Thanx to Karl Rehn for letting me use his PACT Timer/Chrono setup with the fancy new screens.

Most shots were done out of a Springfield XD-9 with a 4″ barrel. 10 shot strings.  The chrono was about 10′ away from the muzzle. I won’t give all the statistics because frankly I’m not interested in typing up all that data. 🙂

The Data

Federal American Eagle, 9mm 124 grain

This was the only factory ammo I had on me, and I wanted to shoot it to have some sort of baseline comparison. The one bummer is it has 124 grain bullets vs. the 115 grain bullets. Also, I believe I only shot 5 rounds in this particular string, so the numbers aren’t exactly apples-to-apples comparison.

Average Speed: 1128.4 fps
Standard Deviation: 5.9

Berry’s bullets

Average Speed: 1144.6 fps
Standard Deviation: 12.4

Hornady bullets

Average Speed: 1138.3 fps
Standard Deviation: 16.7

Speer bullets

Average Speed: 1158.6 fps
Standard Deviation: 14.8

Berry’s bullets, but out of a 5″ XD-9

Average Speed: 1208.2 fps
Standard Deviation: 13.2

Federal American Eagle, out of a 5″ XD-9

Average Speed: 1162.2 fps
Standard Deviation: 12.5

Data Analysis

My load performs about the same as the factory load, which means that my load would probably be a little underpowered compared to a factory load with a 115 grain bullet. When shooting my reload, that’s about how it feels. It feels very close to factory ammo, just a hair less.

Given the speeds that I’m seeing, this load is certainly about maximum for the Berry’s plated bullets as they’re not supposed to go over 1200 fps. Sure I could perhaps bump up the powder by a tenth of a grain or two to push the Berry’s to their edge, but that’d only be if I was going to shoot this ammo out of a specific gun (like the 4″). Since I want a general purpose load, I’m going to leave things where they are else any more would certainly push things over the limit in the 5″ gun.

I was happy to see the standard deviations were pretty low. The coefficient of variation is just a hair over 1%, with the Hornady bullets being the worst at 1.47%, which is most acceptable to me.

This load would be suitable for IPSC competition, as it does make the minimum power factor. It flirts with the minimum, but the easy way around that? Use the 5″ gun to get a bit more velocity. Using the 5″ gun would be better anyways since it’ll manage the recoil a bit better plus longer sight radius and so on.

I was also surprised to see that overall the Berry’s bullets performed best. Certainly they’re the cheapest bullets of the lot and that they did so well? Great!

Other Performance

I used my reloads to take an advanced shooting class. I never had a problem in terms of failures to feed, eject, or what have you. Everything ran like a champ and I never once had to even think about the fact I was running my reloads instead of factory ammo. The quality was good.

Accuracy was quite nice too. In the class we were shooting from 3 yards out to 25 yards, including groups at 25 yards. The bullets always went where I told them to go… even if I messed up and told them to go somewhere I didn’t intend (e.g. yanked the trigger). In fact, after the class Karl shot my totally stock factory XD-9 5″ from 25 yards for groups using my reloads and things were pretty tight. I forget the exact group size… maybe 2-3″? Not too shabby, especially with a factory trigger and sights.

Conclusion

I’m keeping this load recipe. It seems to run well for me.

Of course over time, some other things will probably change, like trying different primers because well.. that’s what was available for purchase at the time. And I’m sure as soon as I run out of all the bullets I have I’m going to try Precision Delta. I suspect the recipe will run just fine… certainly the raw data will change, but performance will be more or less the same.

I’m happy!

Now I need to crank out as much of it as a can… couple thousand rounds, at least.

Updated: I made some modifications to the load and that additional data can be found here.

Reloading speed

/ hsoi

Not that any of you probably care but…. seems I can reload about 200-300 rounds an hour.

I wanted to load about 500 rounds of 9mm and it only took me a couple hours to do. Not to shabby. It’s good to know the pace I can move tho, for future work planning.

One thing I can say. Most of my loads were using the Berry’s 115 grain plated RN DS bullets. However, I opted to load 100 of the Hornady 115 grain FMJ RN. As well, I had a box of Speer 115 grain TMJ RN’s from when I bought all the reloading gear off dockbot/exodus. I figure what the hey, might as well load those up too. So the recipe remained the same, save the bullet I used. I’m going to see if I can chrono them and see if any differences are to be found.

Hey Mr. UPS Man

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

Look what the UPS man brought to me:

1000 Hornady 9mm 115 grain FMJ RN bullets. This is Hornady’s “free gift” from purchasing their Lock-n-Load AP. Whoo!

16.5 lbs. of bullets.

I did some caliper measuring and comparison to the Berry’s 115 grain RN DS bullets. The Hornady are a hair more rounded and the Berry’s a hair more “pointed” shaped, but all really seems negligible. I’m going to use my 9mm plinking load recipe and load 100 of these for a trial run.

Speaking of which, I know I’ve been talking about needing to load 2000 rounds for a class in October, and that hasn’t changed. However, next weekend I’ll be taking AT-6 Pistol Workout and I think loading 500 rounds for that class would be a good testing ground. I’ll take 500 rounds of factory with me as well, just in case, and a backup gun, just in case. The 100 with the Hornady will be a part of that run.

.223 reloads, next chapter?

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

So my .223 reloads weren’t working out, and I had decided to put it on the shelf. A combination of frustration at the whole thing, feeling like I wasted a lot of time and money, not sure where to go next, and I need to focus on 9mm reloading right now.

I spoke with experienced reloaders and there’s a zillion things that could be causing the accuracy problems.

Frankly, I just don’t have the money or gumption to keep trying to chase this down. But I’m not willing to admit defeat. I’m just not sure where to go next, but I am willing to put it on the backburner and let things simmer a bit.

I’ve picked up some Federal P223S, which is the 55 grain Barnes TSX load. Federal says that’s good for deer. My take? I’ve got an itch to go hog hunting. As soon as the weather stops sucking so bad, I’m going to try to go hog hunting and I’ll take the AR and the P223S and see how it does. If it doesn’t perform, well… then I can stop trying to reload it for this purpose because if the bullet and load won’t work well…. what’s the point? I’m sure it will work tho.

I’m thinking a couple things:

1. Cor-Bon makes a load with the 62 grain TSX. Order a couple boxes of that. See how it performs in and of itself. As well, look at how they load it and see if I can learn anything from it. For instance, whatever their overall length is, try replicating that.

2. Before I load any more expensive TSX bullets, buy cheap FMJ bullets and do some work with .223 loads to see if I can even just make a decent .223 plinking load. I’d also load these on the Hornady Lock-n-Load progressive press… wonder what sort of difference that would make versus. the single stage press.

I don’t know. Just lots of speculation and thinking, and I’m sure I’ll do more before I load .223 again. Need to focus on 9mm right now.

I need help – my .223 Rem reloads aren’t working

/ hsoi / 10 Comments

I don’t get it, or maybe I should have seen it coming.

Working with my .223 Remington reloads, trying to come up with a good round for hunting. Last thing I did was the ladder test. Based upon what I saw, I thought I had a decent window to go with, so I loaded up 30 rounds. The trick was varying the powder in 0.1 grain increments. I’d shoot 5 shoot groups at 100 yards, and whatever grouped best I would use. For all the load details, click on the aforementioned links.

Today I finally got to try things out. I sent a few rounds of Georgia Arms Canned Heat downrange to get the barrel heated up, then off I went. I don’t have time right now to take pictures of each target, but suffice it to say the grouping was abysmal. The best grouping I had was maybe the 25.1 grain group, which made a sort of rectangle 2.5″ high and a little less than 1.0″ wide. 25.5 grains had almost a 6″ vertical spread! And it wasn’t just one flier that ruined the group… you’d see the holes fairly decently spread about.

I don’t get it.

So I thought OK…. maybe it’s me. I’m not the best rifle shooter in the world. I was doing my best to use all the proper fundamentals, especially breath and trigger control. I took my time. But it’s always possible I messed things up. I set the rifle down and went into the range’s store and bought a box of Hornady TAP FPD .223 Rem 75 grain. Yes it’s not 100% the same load, but my intention was to pick a round that I knew was known for high accuracy and that I knew worked in this gun. I wasn’t even using the best shooting form and still managed just over a 1″ group. So, could it be me? Perhaps. Could it be the gun? Perhaps. But I’m thinking it’s the load.

I should have guessed it because during the ladder test there wasn’t that perfect ladder, like I was lead to believe there would be. Even then there was too much spread and “randomness” as to where the bullets hit paper. However, I shrugged it off because with only 3-shot groups, I’d have 2 shots reasonably close and the 3rd off somewhere and figured that was me. Now, I don’t think so.

So I don’t know what to do at this point. I don’t know what to change to try to salvage this load. This is where I’m asking for help.

Meantime, I think I’m going to buy a few boxes of factory ammo, either Federal’s P223S or Corbon’s version with the 62 grain bullet. Zero the rifle for that factory load. Then at least I’ll have the rifle ready to go for a hunting trip and not have to wait on my reloads before I take her hunting. I also think working on those .223 load may have to wait since I need to crank out a large quantity of 9mm reloads. But who knows… this is going to nag at me. 🙂

If you’re an experienced reloader and have any tips or suggestions as to what I can do, please let me know.

9mm load recipe – plinking/target load – Berry’s bullets, Titegroup powder

/ hsoi / 13 Comments

Those 9mm reloads I did? I tried them out today.

Bullet: Berry’s plated 9mm 115 grain RN DS

Primer: Remington 1.5 Small Pistol

Cases: Whatever used 9mm cases I have

COAL: 1.135″

Powder: Titegroup 4.5 grains

The only case prep was cleaning the cases (dry vibratory case tumbler), then of course a resize and decap. No trimming, no primer pocket cleaning, nothing like that. I used a taper crimp and I know varying case lengths can affect the crimp, but I’m just looking to make a basic plinking/target load that I can shoot in quantity.

I ran about 40 rounds through two of my XD-9’s. Worked just fine. I tried them side-by-side with some Federal American Eagle factory loads and I couldn’t tell a difference in accuracy, how the ammo fed, how the gun felt, how the brass ejected, how the spent brass looked. I’m sure there’s a difference somewhere, but I couldn’t notice. I’m sure if I pulled out a chrono I’d see something. Yes, I’ll chrono things eventually.

Anyway, the above seems to work like a charm, or at least Good Enough™. The 2000 rounds that I need to reload prior to Tom Givens’ next visit in October? I’m going to get started on it now. 🙂

Updated: Here’s the performance data.

Updated 2: As you could see in the performance data, this same load recipe was tried out with bullets other than the Berry’s. I have used Hornady 115 grain 9mm FMJ RN, and Speer 115 grain 9mm TMJ.  Recently (I’m writing this on 15 June 2010, but this was alluded to in the performance data entry) I’ve moving away from using the Berry’s and instead using 115 grain 9mm FMJ’s from Precision Delta. A couple of reasons. First, the Berry’s would have some troubles during reload… I’d go to seat the bullet and the bullet wouldn’t seat right, shaving the side of the bullet or seating in a manner other than straight and centered. It caused too many wasted bullets. Plus, while the Berry’s is the cheapest of what I can find locally, the Precision Delta is overall FAR less expensive; and when buying the Precision Delta in large bulk quantities, the price differential is even greater. As of this writing I’ve yet to run the Precision Delta through the chronograph, but in general shooting the feel and results are about the same. I’ll eventually do more specific testing.

Updated 3: I’ve been able to run the Precision Delta’s over a chronograph, as well as changing primers. All of that data is here.

As expected, not a lot of performance change. Consequently, my general 9mm plinking recipe will now be:

Bullet: Precision Delta 9mm 115 grain FMJ ball copper jacket (but all the 9mm 115 grain FMJ/TMJ’s I’ve tried have worked with similar results).

Primer: Remington 1.5 Small Pistol (I’ve also tried Winchester, Federal, and Wolf small pistol primers and they’ve all worked with about similar results).

Cases: Whatever used 9mm cases I have

COAL: 1.135″

Powder: Titegroup 4.5 grains

Updated 4: It’s been almost 2 years since I came up with this recipe, and it’s still working well for me. The specific bullet, the specific primer, as you can see (if you trace through all the postings with the load data and chrono results) doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of difference so I go with what’s cheap or available.

I wanted to add that this ammo has been run through numerous guns without any known hiccups. Sure it worked in my XD’s, but over the past year or two I’ve had to loan some ammo, a magazine full here or there, to students in classes. I didn’t keep track of all the guns, but we see the gamut in classes and I’m unaware of any hiccups. And of course, it’s run through all my guns and I’ve had nary a hiccup. I’d say this is turning out to be a nicely proven load.

Of course, if you opt to use it, YMMV. Insert disclaimer here.