Thinking about reloading 7.62x54R

[Cosmoline]

bullets cost $60 for 100 and brass is $130 for 100

There are much less expensive sources for 54R components. Most major bullet makers sell .311" bullets for the same price as their .308" bullets. Even Barnes is coming out with some. The brass can be reused from old Winchester/S&B/Wolf Gold/Privi Partisan or you can find bulk from Graf & sons. I bit the bullet and got a bunch of Norma and Lapua. Cost a fair chunk but that brass has lasted for many, many reloads.

I went to the Midway site and found some bullets close to 7.62 in size (.308).

For a Mosin (unless it's a pre-war Finn) you should be reloading with bullets in the .311" or .310" range. Look at the Midway bullet selector for rifle bullets and you will see a category for them. Also most major outlets have at least some. Sierra, Hornady, etc. make them. The high end are made by Laupa and are called D166, but those are expensive. I've also had good luck shooting .312" Woodleigh slugs from my Soviet Mosins with their wider bores.

The absolute CHEAPEST reloads for the 54R simply use AK-47 pulled bullets, typically 123 grain .310" rounds. Of course these days x39 isn't as cheap as it used to be so pulling the bullets may not make as much sense. But you can find boxes of 100 123 grain AK bullets for good prices if you shop around.

Reloading rounds like 54R isn't as simple as loading the .30'06 or .308, but it's NOWHERE NEAR as tough as it was ten years ago, and orders of magnitude easier than it was twenty years ago. We have a wider range of coponents now than ever before, from midway, graf, and the other online sellers. It used to be you'd have to hunt for years to find this stuff.

 

[taprackbang]

That $130.00 brass is reloadable more than once. If processed properly, you can expect 10 reloads from each case.

I have heard that some guys reload the steel cases for the 54r. Check me on this though... this is a rumor only!

 

[NuJudge]

Effectively, steel case is not reloadable now. All the steel case 7.62x54R that I have seen has pockets for .254" berdan primers.

Some brass-cased 7.62x54R has .217" berdan primer pockets (all Albanian and some very early Bulgarian), but most of it has .254" primer pockets.

Back when RWS .254" primers were available (20 years ago), I loaded a lot of 7.62x54R with them. Back then there was no non-corrosive available except super-expensive Norma, and most of the surplus was Finnish-captured Russian from about 1940.