Not about deer...

Last month I got a great idea... since it's illegal in WA to use full metal jacket (FMJ) ammo I needed to find something that was affordable enough to practice with but also suitable for hunting. The 203gr Silver Bear ammo isn't expensive but it's 203 grain- the closest I have for practice is 182gr Bulgarian milsurp.

Enter Midway USA. I had talked about reloading earlier this year when I was really, really into guns and their gadgets. With that in mind I ordered a basic Lee loading press (the 40th anniversary pack that included the reloading manual), a bullet puller, the loading dies for 7.62x54R and 300 Speer 150gr soft point spitzer point Japanese 303 (.311) bullets. Phew! That's a lot of jargon.

I read the manual while waiting for a ferry on the night before opening day of late season. That's a LOT of info, but frankly it's mostly how great the Lee company is and the history of their products. It's also fairly intimidating- you can see where the company is coming from.
I put the press in the closet with my hunting stuff- I won't be doing any 'yote hunting this year so I don't need any soft points. Plus I need to figure out which of my Mosins is most accurate.

Speaking of which, I went with the .311 bullets because when I slugged the bores of my rifles, only the Finn's were at .310. The worst was the M44 at .314. So I thought I'd split the difference and go up .001" to help fill that gap. When I took the new Finn to the range it was as inaccurate as any of the others until about shot 10. I think they need some fouling to fill in the grooves to help with stabilizing the pressures in the barrel. The Bulgy milsurp is actually .3105 so I wasn't doing myself that much of a favor (but every little bit helps, I suppose).

This morning I decided that I needed to do something. I'm tired of reading, video games make me feel like I'm wasting too much time (plus they make me loopy when I go to do something else), there's nothing on TV but I'm out of propane so I can't forge anything (it's been snowing and I think there's at least 6" of snow out there- Artemis (my car) wouldn't make it to the gas station and back). Reloading it is.

The only issue I had was that I needed a crescent wrench to lock the dies in place and even then there was a little movement. The Forster collet bullet puller pulled the bullets like a charm. It needed less than a 1/4 turn to lock onto the bullet and then to release it. The Lee bullet loading die inserted the bullets like a charm and the instructions with the Lee dies gave me good info about the minimum bullet lengths. I measured against the Bulgy for comparison- five of them had a 0.0035" variance. Mine had about 0.0015" variance.

I didn't load my own powder or seat my own primers because I don't have any brass that's reloadable. I could make a hydraulic piston to press out the Berdan primers but then I can't find Berdan primers to replace them. But overall I'm pretty proud of the steps I took and I hope to go to the range before the end of the year to give them a test.