Full Circle
I am a self taught shooter and reloader. Nowhere in my family were there any outdoor people to show me the ropes. As a result, I had to learn the hard way what many friends were taught as they grew up. There are advantages to having an older and wiser mentor to keep you from the pitfalls, but in learning the hard way, I have found a certain sense of satisfaction. My lessons were hard learned but are well imprinted on my mind. I am proud to report; I still have my eyebrows and all ten of my fingers.
My reloading career started somewhere around 1964. I was the proud owner of a twenty-five dollar Springfield 03-A2. Now I had to feed it. A trip to the sporting goods store and I was all set up with a Lee Loader, a pound of powder, a hundred primers and a box of thirty caliber bullets. Today the owner of any store that would sell a setup like that to a fourteen year old would be cordially invited to cease and desist from doing business, but times were different back then. I am quite sure my parents had no idea what I was up to in the basement hammering on the bench made from two sawhorses and a selection of 2 by 6 boards. My focus was to be able to afford to shoot; hitting anything was secondary in importance. Early ballistic testing media was the soft gumbo mud that made up the Merrimack River banks. Looking back, I can remember few details of my early loads. The can was the shape of today’s IMR offerings but the numbers on the can are just a blur in my mind. The weight is easy, one scoop. I don’t have a clue how much the scoop held but it seamed to work for me.
Several years and many miles later found me wanting to load .357 Magnum. Once again, I turned to the Lee Loader. My reloading bench was a wonderful sturdy steel bench. I am not at liberty to give a lot of details of the when and where this took place, the US Navy not being known for a sense of humor about explosives aboard their ships and I’m not sure what the statute of limitations are on such offences. At this point in my shooting life, the desire to actually hit a target manifested itself and I began to practice shooting and experimenting with different loads. A mentor/teacher came on the scene at the same time; I still call Ron a friend today. One duty night, he came down to the locksmith and engraving shop I called home aboard ship for an evening of reloading. The first time he attempted to seat a primer he accidentally set it off, launching the knockout rod and almost causing him some embarrassment in the laundry department. We had to recover the rod from its resting place, buried in the lagging on the overhead. He led me up four decks to the optical shop, his home, where he proceeded to turn out a reloading set on the tool room lathe. It was ingenious. He enlisted the shop’s bench top drill press into service as a press. It did everything a modern “C” press could do. He turned the first powder trickler I ever saw. And he introduced me to a scale. The whole setup disappeared during working hours but could come to life in less than a minute when needed on a duty night. I couldn’t begin to guess the countless thousands of rounds that home made setup loaded. I discovered load development and the vast improvements changing powders and charge weights can make in shooting.
Five years and nearly a continent later, Ron and I set up a gunsmith and reloading shop. We had the top of the line progressive presses and more than eighty sets of dies. Somewhere in that time, I learned to shoot and tiny groups became the focus of my reloading instead of just hitting the backstop. Today the shop is gone but my basement reloading bench has an RCBS Rockchucker, electronic scale, three powder measures, two trimmers and hand tools two numerous to list. There is even a big blue press and a monster sized orange progressive of some sort down there somewhere although I have never used them.
Today I spend a lot of time in case preparation. A new case will be full length resized, trimmed to length, the flash hole will be deburred, the neck turned, and the primer pocket uniformed before loading. Has it made a difference? You bet it has. Is it worth all the effort? That depends. I find great satisfaction in shooting small holes in paper. I also feel comfortable in taking some long shots in the field and making clean kills, something very important to me. I also enjoy spending those cold wet evenings we are so famous for in the Pacific Northwest carefully crafting the best ammunition for each of my rifles. I find a sense of accomplishment looking at a reloading block full of shiny rounds ready for the range or a day of varmint hunting.
I have gone back to the beginning in some ways. I prefer to use hand dies for most of my reloading. I have made them myself from scraps of one-inch diameter scrap stock. My only expense is a Redding TIN coated bushing and two 4-40 cap screws. With a press I made from a four dollar antique bottle capper and my Harrell’s powder measure I can reload in the field, making load development at the range a breeze. Another advantage became evident last spring when I was invited on a squirrel hunt. My friends brought thousands of rounds for the hunt but I only have ninety-eight pieces of brass formed for my wildcat varmint rifle. I was able to load right from my shooting bench. I would shoot until my barrel got hot, reload, and then spot for my friends until the barrel cooled and I could resume shooting.
As I look back, those hand dies look a lot like those early Lee Loaders of my youth. And in some ways, they resemble the drill press dies of my Navy years. They are simple, easy to carry and use, and load some pretty good ammunition. In some ways, I have gone around in a complete circle.
Oh. Almost forgot...I still use my Lee dippers that I started with a long time ago...
