HSMITH
April 6, 2003, 12:38 PM
Well, complacency is dangerous and it should be one of the rules of reloading. Nothing bad happened at all, but it did serve as a wakeup call.
I loaded about 200 45 acp's from a recipe located in the Lee Modern Reloading manual, and never verified it anywhere else. Hodgdon Clays, start load with the 230 fmj was listed at 4.5 grains, max at 4.7. I set up for 4.6 and cranked them off. Recoil on round number one was stout and noise was not out of the ordinary, but I was duplicating(I thought) factory ball ammo and the casing ended up downrange. I ended up shooting 5 before I got a casing to inspect and the primer was badly flattened, and the test mule has a supported chamber so dimensionally the brass was fine. I shot a few more and they were fantastically accurate. I tested one in another gun with an unsupported chamber (standard 1911) and it showed a tiny "belly" in the case and the primers were flattened badly. Both guns have fitted firing pins or the primer would have cratered and possibly blown. I am pretty sure in a Glock they would have blown a case. I shot the balance of them in the supported chamber gun knowing that they were well into the hot zone.
Well, some research turned up that the MAX load for 4 other sources is FOUR grains, I was .6 grains OVER MAX, that is a lot when you consider the light charge weight, a full 15% over max. I would never have considered exceeding the max charge, and things could have gone badly.
VERIFY YOUR DATA, if there is a large diference do some digging or it could go badly.
Hope this reminds someone that is getting compfortable as I was.
I loaded about 200 45 acp's from a recipe located in the Lee Modern Reloading manual, and never verified it anywhere else. Hodgdon Clays, start load with the 230 fmj was listed at 4.5 grains, max at 4.7. I set up for 4.6 and cranked them off. Recoil on round number one was stout and noise was not out of the ordinary, but I was duplicating(I thought) factory ball ammo and the casing ended up downrange. I ended up shooting 5 before I got a casing to inspect and the primer was badly flattened, and the test mule has a supported chamber so dimensionally the brass was fine. I shot a few more and they were fantastically accurate. I tested one in another gun with an unsupported chamber (standard 1911) and it showed a tiny "belly" in the case and the primers were flattened badly. Both guns have fitted firing pins or the primer would have cratered and possibly blown. I am pretty sure in a Glock they would have blown a case. I shot the balance of them in the supported chamber gun knowing that they were well into the hot zone.
Well, some research turned up that the MAX load for 4 other sources is FOUR grains, I was .6 grains OVER MAX, that is a lot when you consider the light charge weight, a full 15% over max. I would never have considered exceeding the max charge, and things could have gone badly.
VERIFY YOUR DATA, if there is a large diference do some digging or it could go badly.
Hope this reminds someone that is getting compfortable as I was.