It’s been a little over a year now since my retirement. The Chemo kept me from reloading most of that time, and I just got back to it after New Year’s. Mostly it was about stamina and to a certain extent the neuropathy in my fingers, but I kept doing the exercises and eventually achieved a threshold where I could spend useful time in the Shamanic Secret Underground Reloading Facility (SSURF). Once I was past that, I have been spending many hours a week catching up on projects.
In between jobs cranking out new loads, I have also been attending to an overall re-working of the SSURF facility. I got all my brass sorted out by chambering. I hung new shelves for my bullet molds and reloading dies. This week, I reorganized my ammunition. I was running out of room, and replacing some old cabinets with shelves gained me back an extra 25% of storage space.
It has not taken me all that long to run through all my outstanding reloading projects. Whereas previously, I could pretty well plan on loading 25 rounds of rifle ammo in an hour, post-Chemo that output is just about half. Some of that is me just being rusty. Some of that is fatigue. My last big sticking point is that I have a hard time standing still. Moving around is fine. I’ve had to adjust some of my operations to allow me to sit on my stool more. I also have to watch myself and get out of the basement at the first sign of tiring. Yeah, I still spend a lot of time in the recliner, but it gets better every week.
Recent Reloading Projects
30-06 Replenishment of Moose’s deer loads
30-30 Replenishment of Mooselette’s 30-30 Marlin loads.
Cast lead and plated 357 Mag Wadcutter loads on the Hornady LNL Progressive
223 REM A bunch of loads for a future coyote hunt
30-30 New load development
The last two are what I want to crow about in this missive.
Getting Progressive Again
You may remember that I cast some .358 Wadcutters a while back.
I also ordered some Berry’s 148 grain DEWCs for comparison. I had no stomach for doing these all up on a single-stage press, so I brought the Hornady LNL Progressive out and got it going. If you are wondering why I have not written much about this press in recent years, it is because I had pretty much shelved it. This is not a complaint about the press per se, but I found that loading projects using that press ate up a lot of time. I loaded a lot of ammo in the first couple years I had it, and then I put it away. In most cases, I’m still going through the ammo I loaded.
I had one niggling problem with the press prior to it going dormant. It had a nasty habit of tossing a little bit of powder from the case as it advanced from station #2 to #3. It was just a flake here and there, but it would add up and accumulate in all the worst spots. I had found this article that promised a fix.
https://www.ar15.com/forums/armory/How-to-tune-the-Hornady-Lock-N-Load-AP-progressive-press/42-414607
I had bought the shims, but had not gotten around to installing them. Now that I am retired, I have all the time in the world. That is probably the key to this whole post. Now that I am becoming free of the effects of the Chemo, I’m finding my schedule is wide open. This time around, I found a way to install the shims without much hassle. The fix worked. I loaded the wadcutters with nary a flake lost.
Success with the Savage 340
The second project worth mentioning relates back to this theme. I bought a Savage 340 in 30-30 for the Mooselette back in 2017. At the time, she could barely pick it up. She was only 5. However, I had sort of had my eye out for one since #3 son Angus was that age. This was a good deal. It has taken her until now to finally grow into it. Over the years, I have been trying to work up a load. All this time I have spent in the recliner the past year has not gone totally for naught. One of my favorite past time is going through and reading the more turgid volumes in my library. Tops of these is Ken Water’s Pet Loads, a compilation of his decades of columns in Handloader.
In his 1977 update on the Winchester 30-30, Ken actually used at Savage 340 as one of the rifles to test loads. I had been spoiling around looking for a load that would give me some manner of accuracy in this rifle. Reading between the lines, somewhat, I deduced that Ken had found 170 grain bullets to be more accurate in the Savage 340. I had just acquired some 170 grain Winchester PP pull-downs and since I had already tried H4895 per his suggestion, I decided to try some Hodgdon LeverEvolution instead. I compared these to Hornady FTX 160grains. The latter proved to be minute-of-bushel-basket as had all the others. The 170 grainers over the LVR grouped a little over 1 MOA. Hurrah!
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