Vince Green

I have bid on a rifle in the auction, if you want to buy those cartridges you have to pick them up yourself afterwards, Where are you? can you get to Hammersmith?

Unique is not really a magnum powder but around 4.8 - 5.3grns in a .38 special works well. Its best to double lube your bullets if you are going to avoid leading.

And every time you switch powder you are back to square one testing loads. That uses up a lot of time and ammo.

Its getting to be a case of buy it if you see it at a good price. Wait and it won't be there when you go back. Bullets too. I get about 170 reloads from a tub of powder (500 grains or 1lb) so that works out at just under 25p a shot at £42 a tub. Its 28p a shot if I use Varget because I only get 150 reloads out of a tub. I've been using Varget with the 123grn bullets and its a sweet load but it takes 46grns of powder. Add the price of the bullet ( 14p plus postage for the 123grn or £30 plus postge for Matchkings) and primer and its about the same or more compared to just buying PP factory loads which work pretty well in my .303 rifle so in future thats what I will probably do. I don't see any benefit in reloading for nothing. I easily use 50 rounds in a day on the range and its a lot of work reloading the ammo.

There is a brilliant article in the current issue (October) of Sporting Rifle / Target Sports by Laurie Holland in which he sets out the history of twist and bullet weights in the .223 for target and advanced military uses. Like you say they are now using up to 90grn bullets and a 1 in 6.5" barrel to stabilise them. Even the 77-80 grain bullets have been relegated to the sidelines. I'm not sure what the barrel life would be like with these sort of twist rates, short I would imagine because the first hint of wear and the groups will start to open up. Its becoming a very specialised form of shooting. Loading ammunition for it is highly technical. Not really within the capability of the average reloader which restrict the number of shooters who are able to compete effectively. The costs must be pretty prohibitive too which would keep people like me out of it.

1 in 12 was the original rate of twist but fashions change and people are starting to demand the faster twists in the mistaken belief that they are more accurate. Part of the reason for that is because 8/9/10 are becoming the preferred twist rates as the .223 starts to make real inroads into the target shooting world. What started as a quirky gimmicky form of target shooting has really come into its own in F Class. The faster twists are more accurate at the longer ranges mainly because they allow for the use of heavier bullets but it comes at a price. Very fussy ammunition requirements and require very high quality bullets, Berger and the like.

Not all guns are handed in for destruction, every time someone dies the police have to deal with the disposal of their guns because the family don't usually know what to do. So someone dies and they have a cased pair of Purdeys under the bed, What happens then? The police come round and deliver them to a local dealer who sells them for the family. If there was a degree of dishonest practice going on it would probably take the form of collusion between the officer and the dealer. This would be almost impossible to prove but if the dealer said he only got £50 for the Purdeys who could say he didn't. This would be a lot more "sensible" because while it may be dishonourable its not illegal. At least not from a firearms law point of view but it may still be fraud or theft according to how it was done. Years ago the police used to have "sealed bid" auctions which if you were a registered dealer you could be notified in advance. Our local RFD went to a few but said it was mostly rubbish. All confiscated goods, lost property, etc gets auctioned by police routinely.

A lot of stuff handed in to police gets re-sold anyway through auctions. I don't think anything any good gets scrapped. If you are looking for cheap guns check out Holts Auctioneers website and look at the sealed bid auction on 25th. Probably quite a lot of that stuff has been handed in.

I can't get anything from your link. Probably why you got no replies(?)

Thats a good idea and one I have never thought of. Thanks for that, I will do it in future.

Holts Auctions can be an absolutely marvellous source of cheap guns often at a fraction of what you could expect to pay from a dealer. Only trouble is unless you are prepared to take a chance there could be a problem that wasn't declared but its still worth a punt. Pick up a nice little .410 for £10. Have a look at their website and view the online catalogue fore the 25th. I guarantee your tongue will be hanging out.

Absolutely correct.

Winchester AA s were the standard clayshooting cartridge for many years. Every bin at every clay range was full of them. They have a one piece moulded body which gets thicker inside as it goes down and an 8 fold crimp. They used to reload well but looked very tatty after a couple of times.

Thats a Kilo though, I think the tub I bought was 500 grammes but its cheaper by the kilo from what you say. Reloder 15 is £39 a tub. Vectan powders are about £30 a 500gramme tub from Peter Lawman but I don't have any experience with those powders. Plus you have to pay postage so theres not much in it. Does anyone know of a link to Vectan reloading tables for rifle? I could only find one for pistol loads.

I make a point of always keeping the bill when I buy reloading components so I can prove that I have been reloading because my certificate doesn't show much in the way of ammo purchases. I think thats probably a good tip for the rest of you who reload. In 2003 I bought a tub of Vhit N140 for £21. To buy it today it would be double that! Now I know we have has the credit crunch and the pound has dropped against the Euro but I can't see any justification for that sort of increase. Has the price of the raw materials doubled? I don't think so. I don't think the dealers are making vast profits when they sell this stuff so why the price hike? My income has not really increased in the past six years significantly and a lot of people will be earning less than they did in 2003. We seem to be getting hit with large increases in the cost of ammo and components and its right across the board but nothing really explains why. We get some pretty lame excuses about the price of lead etc but that doesn't apply to powder. And Vhit powder comes from Finland so the US economy can't be blamed either. My mate who lives in Wales was moaning to me the other day because he had to pay £40 for a box of primers. Thats just gross.

the only place may be Claygame and thats only a may be.

The is a possibility thats its barrel "walking" due to it heating up. All barrels shift the point of impact as they get hot but it should only be apparant in very light barrels. If you shoot a number of shots very quickly you might get it but it should be showing up as a line of shot on the target rather than a random group.

First of all, are you sure its 1 in 12? I would have thought 1 in 10 would be more likely. Put a tight patch on the cleaning rod then see how far you have to push the rod into the barrel before it makes exactly one rotation. It should be 10" but it could be 9" or even 8". Twist is critical with .223. You need to choose your bullet according to the twist. Do you know how many rounds it has fired? Those barrels can start to go tits up in as little as a thousand rounds if someone has been banging shed loads of surplus 5.56mm down it at the range. Whatever use its had may be important. The trouble with the .223 is that its low recoil and you can plink away with it all day. I you tried that with a .308/7.62 you would start to find the recoil too punishing after a while and give up. Even as recently as a couple of years ago there was some very cheap military 5.56mm around and it was possible and affordable to put many years worth of normal wear on a barrel in a single day. Once the first couple of millimetres of rifling starts to go the groups start opening up rapidly with those small calibres. It might be worth having the barrel wear checked by a gunsmith if you are in any doubt. What you describe could be down to barrel erosion. The barrel will still look mint even if the throat is knackered, you can't see it by eye, you need a bore scope to see the wear. It could also be down to a loose element in the scope. It does happen that something comes loose inside under recoil. Try switching scopes. .223s are not usually all that fussy with up to 50-55grn bullets its only normally when you start going up in weight beyond that the problems start. Howa is a good make and their barrels should give you 1"- 1 1/2" at 100yds no problem. The bedding should be good too but if someone has had the rifle apart and not put it back togeather properly that could be a problem. Check all the bolts are tight or get a gunsmith to do it for you That also is critical. Some rifles require the bolts holding the action to be tightened up to a pre specified torque setting and too tight can be as bad as not tight enough. What groups are you getting? You say the groups are random but you don't say how random. If it is 1 in 12 however you will have to stick to the lighter 40grn bullets and thats going to limit your choices of ammo qute badly.

This wouldn't happen with a Lee Loadall,or indeed virtually all reloading presses because they measure the shot by volume. What does happen is that the weight of shot will vary ever so slightly according to the size of shot used, However this won't be enough to make a difference until you get up to very large shot. The actual weight of shot will vary anyway from one brand /type of shot to another according to the percentage of antimony it contains but its very slight and not enough to worry about. You tend to find that Lee powder and shot bushes throw less than the stated weight on purpose because they are worried about overloading. You will find that the actual weight of powder can vary in weight from a given bush because of batch to batch variations in the powder. Thats why its always wise to check weigh your charges, espescially when changing to a new tub of powder. Sometime the difference can be quite noticable. When loading cartridges the constant jerking will cause the powder to settle in the hopper so load a few cartridges before you check the weight of powder. If you take the first charge it is liable to be unrepresentative.

No its not realistic, anyone who has used solid slugs will know that they drop like mad even over 100 yds range.

The length of the wad column is critical if you are going to get the right crimp. A bit of experimentation and you will soon get the feel for it, a good over powder card wad (2mm min) is a must. A sunken crimp indicates too short a wad column. Too high a wad column and the crimp will be flat and distorted, thats if it will crimp at all. You just have to add or take out card wads to get it right. A supply of thin 1/16" wads is good for this purpose. Put them under the shot but on top of the fibre wads, they are just to take up space. The wads cut from scrap cardboard with a wad punch can be useful here because they are just used to fine tune the wad height. Different makes of case will require different wad columns to suit the different internal volumes inside the case, even though they all look the same from the outside. The base inside the case will vary in size and so the internal volumes of different makes of case will vary. A good reason to try and stick to one make of case as much as possible. Obviously, if you can find a cartridge that requres less wads it will be that little bit cheaper to reload, Good consistant compression on the wad column is important too if the cartridge is going to be tight and perform well.

Did you check the serial number on the vendor's certificate?

What do you call cheap? The days of cheap surplus ammo are long gone but for the most part it wasn't really accurate for anything except blazing away in any case.

Capsulated shot is section 1. It counts as a solid.

Henry Krank's