41 Mag
Member
Well I am not even close to the first person who headed down this road, but ya really don't see much if anything mentioned about the handloaded portion of this caliber. So figured I would throw in my initial foray into getting started up.
I first found a video on someone making them, then found the 3D printed jig. Looked at several of the little mini chop saws but found out a coworker had one so borrowed his. I did a little over a hundred cases with it in about 15 minutes.
It leaves them just a touch long so they still need be run through the RCBS trimmer. Before that however, I figured I would go ahead and anneal them, so did that with about 20 using my drill and torch. Well that led me to getting one of the AGS annealer's. OH so much better. (I was already looking into one for a number of other calibers I need to dress up)
Throw in a 358 sizing stem for a Lee die that I installed into my Universal Decapper, and in a weekend I had around 120 formed, trimmed, and ready to load 360 cases made out of Win and Rem 30-30 cases. They only had the slightest remains of the original necks, and once we fired them those ironed out just fine.
I had already managed to purchase 3 boxes each of the factory Remington ammo in 180 and 200gr. I used Speer 180 and Hornady 200gr for the loads and AA-1680 and CFE BLK for the initial testing. We fired both weight of factory ammo across the chrono to get a base number to compare the loads to. I am impressed they were both right at the numbers on the boxes. That said, I managed to get right there with them with both powders, using the incremental loads as we moved up in charge weights. We didn't shoot for group as we were just concerned with the charges and looking for pressure. I did find high pressure with the upper loads of both and didn't load the max listed charge weight for either powder.
All in all it was fun and now to load up a bunch using the comparable velocities and se how well they do on a hundred yard target. The other part of this will be the cast solids and HP's I made up which will be tested as well. I'm hoping to get them into the same range or at least right around 2000fps.
I first found a video on someone making them, then found the 3D printed jig. Looked at several of the little mini chop saws but found out a coworker had one so borrowed his. I did a little over a hundred cases with it in about 15 minutes.
It leaves them just a touch long so they still need be run through the RCBS trimmer. Before that however, I figured I would go ahead and anneal them, so did that with about 20 using my drill and torch. Well that led me to getting one of the AGS annealer's. OH so much better. (I was already looking into one for a number of other calibers I need to dress up)
Throw in a 358 sizing stem for a Lee die that I installed into my Universal Decapper, and in a weekend I had around 120 formed, trimmed, and ready to load 360 cases made out of Win and Rem 30-30 cases. They only had the slightest remains of the original necks, and once we fired them those ironed out just fine.
I had already managed to purchase 3 boxes each of the factory Remington ammo in 180 and 200gr. I used Speer 180 and Hornady 200gr for the loads and AA-1680 and CFE BLK for the initial testing. We fired both weight of factory ammo across the chrono to get a base number to compare the loads to. I am impressed they were both right at the numbers on the boxes. That said, I managed to get right there with them with both powders, using the incremental loads as we moved up in charge weights. We didn't shoot for group as we were just concerned with the charges and looking for pressure. I did find high pressure with the upper loads of both and didn't load the max listed charge weight for either powder.
All in all it was fun and now to load up a bunch using the comparable velocities and se how well they do on a hundred yard target. The other part of this will be the cast solids and HP's I made up which will be tested as well. I'm hoping to get them into the same range or at least right around 2000fps.
