First Gas Gun Loads

[markm]

Do you guys do any type of crimping for AR loads?

My process is a little labor intensive and might be a drag for someone looking to crank out raw numbers. But with out my crimp, as I've posted before, my group sizes roughly doubled in size from 3/4 to 1-1/2 MOA.

[Send it...]

Do you guys do any type of crimping for AR loads?

All of them are crimped. Shoot better for me with the crimp.

[markm]

It depends on the process in total. I think it's sinister, here, who does not crimp, but has an annealing step for his load and he gets good ammo that way. There's no absolute guarantee that a crimp will help.

[shadowrider]

Loading on a Redding T-7. (A turret press.) I only have two presses, The T-7 and a Square Deal B. The Square Deal for pistol, the T-7 for both bolt and ARs. Powder for rifles is handled by a RCBS Chargemaster.

I chose the T-7 because I want to de-cap, then clean rifle brass, and putting brass into a progressive press, running one operation, then taking it out and running another operation, then putting it back into the press defeats the purpose of a progressive press. So I chose a turret press.

I think about a 650 once in a while, but quite frankly after a career in construction the idea of purchasing, unboxing, assembling, studying, troubleshooting and adjusting yet-another-piece-of-finicky-equipment lost all its appeal before the turn of the century. Now it sounds to me like a chore to avoid unless I have no other choice.

I am mildly concerned that the AR is going to want more ammunition than the bolt guns, but we'll see. Maybe I'll just finish up at the range and go to lunch early on AR days.

Well a turret is slightly better than a true single stage. But as much as processing is a P.I.T.A. I doubt you'll be doing a lot of rounds unless you are retired and have lots of time.

I have a 650 with the Dillon trimmer, a T7 turret, a RCBS Casemate, and all the goodies. A 650 with a trimmer makes processing bearable. If my brass is clean and lubed I can literally do a 5 gallon bucket full of brass in about 3 hours. I can almost run as fast as the case feeder. Keeping brass in it, that is the challenge! I do that with a dedicated toolhead for decap and size/trim.

On the second tool head loading rounds you can still crank them out, but you don't want to go quite that fast.

I have a full bucket of once fired Remington commercial brass off of a police range and even with that, honestly it's still not that much more cost effective over factory bulk for M193 type range/training stuff. For long range stuff comparable to Mk262 OTM it's definitely worthwhile. For just M193 type ammo I just buy it since it's as as cheap as it is these days. I'm not shooting near as much as I'd like to either.

The T7 is great for load workup before setting up the 650 to crank them out. And it's sure nice to have a couple sets of dies waiting in the turret too.

[Jammer Six]

I'm retired and have lots of time. (Or very little time, depending on how you look at it. If you're lucky, fast and good, one day you'll see.)

In the interest of generating more time, I'm not yet interested in raw numbers. In bolt guns, that was just fine. I've already noticed that the AR likes more ammo than any of the bolt guns. I'm not really sure why that is.

I've processed large numbers before, primarily for .45 ACP. I have a garbage can full of .45 ACP brass, and I tumble twice a year in a concrete machine, then finish with a Thumbler's.

The problem has never, in all my years of reloading, been equipment. The bottleneck has always been inspection. None of my brass gets reloaded unless I've looked at each piece under a magnifier. (And because once you pick it up to inspect it, and once you examine it, sorting becomes merely a question of where you set it back down, all my brass was sorted by headstamp long ago.)

As long as the equipment can clean more brass in a given time period than I can inspect, the equipment isn't the bottleneck.

I don't know how long trimming is going to add, I haven't done any large-batch trimming operations yet, and there's no way to run trimming concurrent with inspection. So perhaps I'll have two bottlenecks.

[markm]

For me, neck inspection isn't needed because I use an expander die (I have my expander ball removed from my sizing die because it's bad for necks). With the neck expander die, I can instantly feel a split neck, and pitch that brass.

Trimming is simple... Giraud power trimmer or the other power trimmer some of the guys here use. If your die set up is good, subsequent trimmings are minimal and really only chamfer the neck for loading again.