I learned another reloading lesson a couple days ago.
About a year ago I had some sierra 100g BT spitzer bullets for my 243 that I decided I wasn't all that impressed with their accuracy. So I loaded up 50 of them in some FC brass that I was going to toss after I shot them. I was just going to use these for praire dogs or gun site in.
The load was approaching max at 40g of RL-16. I had loaded these before I replace the barrel on my remington 700 243 win. I had a gunsmith put a new Shaw barrel on after these rounds were loaded. Problem is I set the headspace for -.002 for the old Remington chamber and thought nothing of it.
I had shot about 30 of them in this new Shaw barrel and they seemed to shoot decent, except I always noticed it was slightly difficult to close the bolt. I had experimented with neck sizing before and just assumed these were tight because of that.
Well a couple days ago, my first round at the range was one of these in my new Shaw barrel, I pulled the trigger and it was definitely a good kick and a puff of powder smoke came back through the bolt. It was difficult to open the bolt, but when I did I noticed the primer fell out and there was an ejector mark on the base. I was kind of shocked, so I knew better than to fire any more of these.
I took them home and checked them out, they had the right amount of powder, the COAL had plenty of space in my Shaw barrel, but then I measured the headspacing with a comparator and found out all these rounds the shoulder was about .003 to .005 too far forward, compared with a fire formed round that I use all the time to measure for my Shaw barrel.
Only thing I can think of was when I closed the bolts on these rounds, I was putting a whole lot of neck tension on them, by jamming them too far forward into the chamber and one of them really didn't like that and it let me know by these results. I disassembled all of them.
From now on, when I load up a box of rounds just for shooting and scope site in, I'm going to write on the box which barrel they were sized for!!
I guess I was lucky but stupid.
About a year ago I had some sierra 100g BT spitzer bullets for my 243 that I decided I wasn't all that impressed with their accuracy. So I loaded up 50 of them in some FC brass that I was going to toss after I shot them. I was just going to use these for praire dogs or gun site in.
The load was approaching max at 40g of RL-16. I had loaded these before I replace the barrel on my remington 700 243 win. I had a gunsmith put a new Shaw barrel on after these rounds were loaded. Problem is I set the headspace for -.002 for the old Remington chamber and thought nothing of it.
I had shot about 30 of them in this new Shaw barrel and they seemed to shoot decent, except I always noticed it was slightly difficult to close the bolt. I had experimented with neck sizing before and just assumed these were tight because of that.
Well a couple days ago, my first round at the range was one of these in my new Shaw barrel, I pulled the trigger and it was definitely a good kick and a puff of powder smoke came back through the bolt. It was difficult to open the bolt, but when I did I noticed the primer fell out and there was an ejector mark on the base. I was kind of shocked, so I knew better than to fire any more of these.
I took them home and checked them out, they had the right amount of powder, the COAL had plenty of space in my Shaw barrel, but then I measured the headspacing with a comparator and found out all these rounds the shoulder was about .003 to .005 too far forward, compared with a fire formed round that I use all the time to measure for my Shaw barrel.
Only thing I can think of was when I closed the bolts on these rounds, I was putting a whole lot of neck tension on them, by jamming them too far forward into the chamber and one of them really didn't like that and it let me know by these results. I disassembled all of them.
From now on, when I load up a box of rounds just for shooting and scope site in, I'm going to write on the box which barrel they were sized for!!
I guess I was lucky but stupid.