Just Installed QuickLoad

[Hoot]

Wish I could remember where I saw this, but someone is successfully using a little bit of balled-up wool to take up the unused space in cartridges with less-than-full powder charges, much like your grits experiment (do you prefer regular or instant?). Seems to work well, and they said it combusts completely with no residue.

Now, where the heck did I read that? (First thing to go is your memory, and...danged if I can remember the second thing now...)

Using fiberfill, jute, hollowfill, etc work fine on straight-walled cases like ours. You don't want to use instant cream of wheat or instant grits. Just the rgeular works fine. The issue with spongy fillers is that despite holding the powder back initially they still compress when the shokwave hits them. Granular solid fillers may tighten up a little as the air is driven out from in between the granules, but nowhere near that of a spongy filler. Now whether that amounts to a hill of beans in our particular caliber, I can not say. Then again, I can't say whether normalizing the primer pockets and deburring the flash holes add up to anything either, but I do that too.

I was hoping for a weekend of playing with QL, reloading and going to the range. It is beautiful outside. Unfortunately, the main power feeder pole to our development twisted off in the severe weather yesterday afternoon and though we had power for a while afterwards, they diverted to to areas more severely hit until 11 PM Sundy night. In an unfortunate (at the moment) gesture of charity, I gave my manual scale to someone who didn't have any since I have this high falutin electronic one, only to discover that if you have no power, you can't reload. DOH!

So, I changed the oil in both cars, mowed the lawn, the scrubbed floors and now I sit here all revved up and nowhere to go.

I'm on call this weekend, so I have the crash bag with battery powered laptop and aircard, so I am able to send this. I have to conserve power now in case an emergency arises at work.

Hoot

[commander faschisto]

So, you're just sort of taking it easy today, eh?

[Jim in Houston]

Hoot -

I can mail your RCBS manual scale back to you, if you would like. As I got further into reloading, I went with an digital scale (that runs on batteries), so it is now surplus to requirements.

PM me with your address.

[Hoot]

Hoot -

I can mail your RCBS manual scale back to you, if you would like. As I got further into reloading, I went with an digital scale (that runs on batteries), so it is now surplus to requirements.

PM me with your address.

Jubilation!

Power and sanity have been restored. I suspect the local utility company was hedging their bets. The venison in the freezer did not defrost, so I'm good until November. That was what I was most concerned about as I eat venison stir-fry 5 days a week for lunch. It's good and serves to justify the cost of hunting. Everyone at work thinks I'm weird, but I'm a meat monger.

Jim, I don't entertain reloading during a power outage. Never have until yesterday and probably never will again. I tried doing some brass preparation by flashlight. It was very frustrating and I ultimately gave up anyway. You keep that scale until someone else is in need of it. Maybe get a kid started. Tomorrow promises to be just as nice as today and this time, I'll be ready to go.

It will be interesting to see how these 200gr XPBs compare to Hornady 200gr FTXs which I have already tested. I will also try the water jug test I've used on the FTXs. I want to see one of those picture perfect four petal bullets like you see in the ads.

Hoot

[Hoot]

Well, luck be a lady...

As I was loading the truck to go to the range in the late morning, I got a page and much to my regret, had to go into work to fix a problem. That's the price for hoarding the on-call assignment. By the time I got home, it was hot and without a breeze, I didn't want to go spend a lot of time waiting for the barrel to cool. So, looks like I'll be out there tomorrow morning. Last chance before the holiday weekend comes to a close. On a positive note, that call-in paid for QL and a bottle of powder to boot. There are worse fates...

Besides the parallel 4-step, 5-shot of WS2 coated and plain 200 XPBs, I also threw together a flight of WS2 coated 275 XPBs loaded in one grain steps from 35 to 39 grains of Lil Gun. If QL is correct, I will end up stopping short due to pressure signs, but as Tim will quickly point out, Hornady specs the 450b cartridge rather conservatively in terms of chamber pressure. Perhaps all will fly without excessive pressure signs. These are all out of new brass, so keeping an eye on the body expansion just above the web will be easy. The bolt imprinting is easy to spot with fresh brass as well. I never rely upon primer flattening in this caliber as a sign.

A QL tip I read last night for this caliber. In a powerful, straight walled, rimless caliber, if you just lay on a taper crimp after seating. When using QL to predict a starting point for a new load, use a shot start pressure of zero. QL will predict your velocity rather closely. Indy Joe just posted some results in another thread. For his load, he averaged 2144 fps. I punched his loading particulars and shooting temperature into QL and it predicted 2156 fps, which is less than 1/2% off. There are lots of good QL forum posts out there, ripe with good tips for us rookies.

Hoot

[commander faschisto]

Sounds like QL was a dang good investment...seems to let you get right close to where you want to go with a load, without burning up needless rounds fishing for the right answer? Let us know how it goes with the new loads. BTW check your PM.

[Gruger]

Hello, i contacted Mr. Broemel regarding the Case length error in quick load (Version 3.6).
He promised to correct it in one of the coming updates.

No big issue, but annoying if you do not create an edited .450BM caliber.

Greetings from Germany
Gruger

[9x19MdM]

How often do you NEED to get the updates? $15.95 + S/H for just the updates

http://www.neconos.com/index.html

[Hoot]

How often do you NEED to get the updates? $15.95 + S/H for just the updates

http://www.neconos.com/index.html

I would not get the annual update if it did not add powders, bullets or new calibers I wasn't interested in. I am a big fan of Alliant AR-Comp powder in other calibers. It was in this year's update so I bought it since I had bad luck modifying another powder's characteristics to mimic the results I got. After paying $150 for the initial software, $15.95 didn't seem too dire. Come next May, I'll once again see what the next update offers. If it interests me enough, I'll get it. If it doesn't, I'll skip it.

Anyway, it's not like your current copy of QL stops working if you don't buy the update. It takes all of one or two minutes to correct an incorrect dimension or other specification in the existing caliber file. I did mention the error to Ed Dillon (yes, that Dillon) as soon as I saw it and he promised to pass it along to Reimer for the next update. That did not happen and I mentioned to Ed that he was supposed to get that taken care of. We were talking on the phone both times and I'm not going to "cast the first stone" WRT forgetting something I was told on the phone. Hopefully it gets corrected this time.

It's a great program. It could be improved upon, like adding primer choices to the calculations, but all in all it is fun as well as useful to play with and do what-ifs?

Hoot

[Gruger]

Hartmut Broemel is the programer of quickload. Reimer Johannsen ( http://www.johannsen-jagd.de/data_de/katalog/katalog.php?navid=2 ) is a dealer for reloading equipment.
Just to clarify things. I hope Mr. Broemel will do as promised.