'Blunderbuss' Blog

Metallic Silhouette Shooting, Reloading Bench, Ammunition, Firearms Maintenance & Marksmanship Techniques

Category Archives: Reloading / Handloading

Centre X My New .22lr Ammo

Centre X Out To Impress

Earlier this year I had my .22lr Anschütz 1710 batch tested for Lapua’s Centre X as an alternative to shooting with Eley Match & Tenex due to costs and availability.

Today was my first chance to shoot out to 100 yards from a bench rest and after a few sighter shots and adjustments to windage and elevation I began to drop in a few tidy cloverleaf 3 & 5 shot groups. Although not all groups were tight masterpieces, this is something I will mark down as my lack of experience in the discipline of rimfire benchrest skills. I know my little ‘Annie’ is much more accurate than I am.

Now that I have witnessed how the new Centre X performs on paper at 100 yards I will be excited to get back to knocking down a few Rams once our range is fully functional ‘but that may not be for a few months yet’.

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Flipping Primers Using A Lee Safety Primer Feed

Primed & Ready

There are a number of makes and models of priming tools on the market for both manual and automated priming of a case.  I prefer to use a priming tool than to manually handle the primer.

At all costs I try to avoid touching the live primers with my hands mostly for safety reasons as these little babies could cause you severe damage if one were to explode.

As I use the Lee Safety Primer Feed that attaches to my Lee Press I thought I would put this little video together to demonstrate how you can flip the primers over to have them presented the correct way up before seating them into your cases.

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New Season, New Brass

New Season New Brass

With a new shooting season beginning I decided to spend a couple of hours during the weekend preparing some once fired brass for my 6.5×55.

The first step in my brass preparation was to anneal all the case necks. A demonstration on how this was done can be found here. Once annealed and dried off I Neck Sized and Deprimed the cases before dropping them into my case tumbler for a few hours to brighten them up. Three hours later and a few mugs of tea drunk my cases were clean and ready for their next step. The final six stages of case preparation involved cleaning the primer pocket, deburring the flash hole, squaring of the primer pocket, ensuring the case length was not exceeding the recommended published limit and finally chamfering and deburring the case mouth for bullet seating. I now have an additional 35 Lapua 6.5×55 ‘Once Fired Cases’ ready for reloading.

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16 Seconds To Anneal One Case

Time To Anneal

During the Christmas holidays I decided I would put my annealing workstation to good use and anneal the 60+ cases that I was gifted a few months back.  After the initial setup to ensure the case neck was alligned properly and a test case run through the flame, I got the annealing process underway.

It took approximately 16 seconds per case for the 6.5×55 to anneal before I dumped the case into a pan of cold water.  In 25 minutes I had completed the annealing process and now I had to find a method to dry the brass without applying any additional extreme heat to the case.

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Examine Your Cases Everytime

Range Brass

Just recently I was donated 100 cases of Lapua 6.5×55 fired range brass from a friend who bought a similar calibre.  Yep it’s always nice to get quality Lapua brass as a present.

Visual Inspections Are A Must

The other day I popped the cases into the media tumbler for a good cleaning so that I could De-Prime them and run them through my Neck Sizing Die and Prep them for loading.  After the cleaning process I started to examine the cases to check for any signs of damage in the case neck, body and head.  In all honesty I wasn’t expecting to see any signs of fatigue in the cases.

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