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Osage Orange
Sharpshooters 2007 Schedule Steve Milholland also acquired a bunch of dates for the matches in Billings. I really like the Wednesday evening matches in the summer, as they add a little excitement and camaraderie to my week. He has a few Sunday afternoon matches scheduled too, and these, unfortunately, conflict with some other activities for me. But they have been very well-attended in the past, and I'm sure they will be this year too. I have made up a wall calendar
of shooting activities in Microsoft Word format. It prints out
one month per page and has boxes to write in (just like a real
calendar). It includes the dates for all OOS and Springfield
Benchrest (Billings) activities, as well as the matches in Marshall
(Bucksnort), De Soto KS (Mill Creek), Tulsa (Red Castle), and
St. Louis. Of course, Camp Perry is on there too. Prizes The Fun Shoot is our February 17 meeting. Knowing that it could be cold, we try to do some low-key shooting and keep things moving. In the past few years we have taken to shooting at various types of money with the idea that if you can hit it you can keep it. That can be a lot of fun when there's a $10 bill down range. Last year it was 9° with a few inches of snow on the ground, faithfully simulating Bastogne-well, not really, but it wasn't much of a day for precision shooting. The eight of us that showed up had a good time. This year's shoot has no limits on the rifle or ammunition-bring anything you want to shoot, and if you want to shoot a scoped rifle, have at it (no, I won't tell you the course of fire ahead of time, but you won't be shooting from a bench, and we will be shooting from position-standing, prone and kneeling). Bring an M1, your deer rifle, or bring a Ruger 10-22, it doesn't matter-all rifles will be treated the same. And, yes, you may shoot different rifles in each event. Now, our next/new/last rule: NO SHOOTING JACKETS ALLOWED. See you on the 17th. Raffle Rifles M1-21892102
(1st raffle rifle) M1-5842218
(4th raffle rifle) 03A3-3752092
(2nd raffle rifle) 03A3-3478012
(3rd raffle rifle) Perhaps at the March or April meetings we can test-fire these rifles with GI ammunition and see how they shoot. I have no qualms at all and believe they will shoot just fine. I cleaned the bores fairly well and rubbed the stocks down a bit, but they all need a real cleaning. In particular, the 03A3s had a lot of cosmoline on them (but nothing like the Greek 03A3s a few years ago), and I expect there is a lot of it inside the stock and handguards. Some Comments on Reloading Lee Loadmaster
and Autodisk The Lee Loadmaster Progressive press sometimes goes on sale for $120 at Midway. You need to buy a couple of dies such as the powder-drop die and a decapping die (to automatically make sure there is no corn or walnut in the flash hole). And of course, I wanted to try the Lee Autodisk powder measure, since I've heard it is very accurate. I also added a Lee flaring die (and later a Lyman M die for the same purpose), as well as an additional turret since I had two main steps in mind. The general reloading process I was seeking to follow was this: for brass preparation, resize using the RCBS X die, which eliminates trimming, and then run the brass into the flaring die or M die to flare the mouth by about .003" just to make sure that there is no ridge of brass at the case mouth to damage the bullet. These two steps can be concurrent on a progressive press. Then, once the brass has been cleaned of lube, begin the real reloading process which primes, drops powder, and seats the bullet with one pull of the press handle. Ideally, you'd only pick up a piece of brass twice in the whole process: once to re-size and flare, and once to begin the reloading process. I had read all the bad reviews of the Lee Loadmaster, but I'm smarter than the average Midway customer, and I'm pretty good with machinery; I reload shotshells on a MEC Grabber, so I'm familiar with progressive reloading. And being an experienced rifle ammunition reloader, this should be a piece of cake. Well, if anyone wants to buy my Lee Loadmaster setup, complete, at half price, it's yours. First, the priming system is too unreliable, and one booboo in its operation costs you much more time than you save by going progressive. In my experience, I was getting a primer problem about every 20 rounds. Maybe it would work better with a different brand of primers (Lee says use only Winchester). Machinery like that I don't need. Another problem is the mechanism that advances the shellplate from station to station. Richard Lee calls himself a genius and always designs things slightly differently with an eye for saving (the consumer) money. Here he went overboard. The shell plate is turned by a single steel bar or flapper that is struck by the press handle-whack, whack, whack! The flapper has to move in two dimensions inside the guts of the machine to describe a circle in order to advance the machinery and then return to its original position, very much like the drive system on a steam locomotive, except the flapper is not connected to anything. Oh, and it doesn't work. The tolerances are too great, powder slops into it, dirt accumulates, and the whole thing is so sloppy in operation that periodically it jams. One reviewer on Midway had about a 3 page dissertation detailing the different types of flappers Lee has tried and how they have to be lubricated and cleaned. Most of you would look at it and say that it is just too cheap. Lee has a device called the cartridge inserter which places your brass onto the shell plate. It, too, doesn't work well. Eventually I just put it back in the box and put the cartridges in by hand. Every now and then a piece of brass doesn't get located precisely, so while you're concerning yourself with placing the bullet in the cartridge and pulling the handle, the decapping die or the powder drop die dings the case mouth of one of the other cartridges. The same thing happens during resizing, but you have the opportunity to inspect the cases and discard dinged up ones. Compound this with the little fingers that retain the cartridges on the shell plate-they are not spring loaded but screwed down-so removing a cartridge midway through the process (which you must do to check a powder charge or to clean things after a screw-up) is a major pain. This press is one aggravation after another because of attempts to save on manufacturing costs. Finally, the Lee Autodisk Powder Measure was a major disappointment. It uses a sliding disk with a hole (cylinder) in it to meter powder. The disk slides under the powder hopper and the cylinder receives a charge of powder, then the disk is pushed out over the drop tube, and the powder drops down into the cartridge. Originally designed for pistol cartridges, Lee sells an extra set of disks so that you stack cylinders of different sizes one over the other, thus making a larger cylinder in total for rifle cartridges. Since all the cylinders are of fixed size (duh!), you tune your charge weights by selecting different cylinders, somewhat like a shotshell reloader. But the kicker here is that in rifle reloading we are very painstaking about our powder charge weights, and it is sometimes impossible find a cylinder combination that will get exactly the charge weight you want with a given powder. Lee makes an additional micrometer disk to fix this issue, but at some point I quit buying things from Lee. (See also my problems on the Loadmaster press with removing a cartridge to weigh the powder. It is a real pain in the rear to test-run some cartridges, try to weigh the powder, and then completely disassemble the powder measure to insert new disks.) The disk-return mechanism is a little brass pull-chain as found on cheap light switches. I broke it 3 times before giving up in disgust. Finally, the powder drop is actuated by a special die that has a sliding sleeve inside it. As the cartridge goes up into the die, it pushes the sleeve up which trips the mechanism on the Autodisk which drops the powder. If the die is not adjusted tight enough, the disk only partially advances over the drop hole. If the die is too tight, the case mouth gets slightly crimped. And sometimes the cartridge gets out of alignment and the case mouth gets dinged by the die. Since the Autodisk had at least one gun writer saying good things in its stead, I decided to give it one last try and mounted it on a spare single-stage press I had thinking that it would fit into my single-stage reloading process just like any other powder measure-drop the powder on one press then seat the bullet on another. I didn't record the statistics on drop weights, but the variation in charge weight I was getting, both with ball powder and RL-15 was so great that even I wouldn't shoot it. It was awful. I was trying to throw 25 grains of WC-844 and got occasionally charges of 23.5 grains, then 26.1. My Lee Perfect powder measure never varies by more than a total spread of .4 grains with this ball powder. And yes, I wiped it down with anti-static sheets and tried to standardize my procedures as much as possible. Couple this with the extremely annoying steps required in changing disks to change powder types, and I was truly pulling my hair out in exasperation at this device. I normally don't weigh
my charges for anything under 600 yards, and the only reason
I do weigh the 600 yard loads is that I shoot some 'nuclear'
loads at that distance, and a couple tenths of a grain more powder
than I want can easily cause a blown primer. This we wish to
avoid. A few tenths of a grain more or less in a moderately-loaded
.223 round is insignificant at the shorter distances. And in
a .30-06, a half grain of powder more or less has absolutely
no impact on accuracy. As an example, when I load for Camp Perry,
I do weigh my 200/300 yard powder charges, and I will accept
any throw that is 23.7 to 24.1 grains. That's for the most important
match of the year I played with these devices for 6 months before giving up in disgust. My Christmas vacation gave me a whole bunch of time to devote to testing, and here is where I have ended up: I will use the Lee Loadmaster Progressive press for brass preparation only, and that only because I want to get something out of my investment. Used in this way with the X die and the M die, I don't have to trim and I don't have to chamfer/deburr. Everything else I do in a 'normal' single-stage fashion. Maybe someday I'll buy a Dillon. Odds n'ends I have 3 AR-15 magazines, 20 round, still for sale for $15 each. Rumor has it that primers are going to get real scarce, so stock up now.
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