Sat Jan 6 Business Meeting and Dinner, 5PM Heritage Cafeteria
Saturday Activities at Dalton Range – All Matches Start at 8AM
| Date | Range | Match |
|---|---|---|
| January 20th | Dalton Range | Reloading Clinic – canceled due to ice storm |
| February 17th | Dalton Range | Fun Shoot |
| March 10th | Dalton Range | Position Clinic** |
| April 21st | Dalton Range | Beginner’s Any Rifle |
| May 12th | Dalton Range | John C. Garand |
| May 26th | Dalton Range | Carbine |
| June 9th | Dalton Range | RimFire Sporter** |
| July 21st | Dalton Range | M1 Rattle Battle** |
| August 18th | Dalton Range | Bolt Gun |
| September 1st | Dalton Range | Garand Rules |
| October | Dalton Range | John C. Garand |
**These matches are tentative and could be replaced with other types of matches. See also swampworks for updates.
Steve Kemm outdid himself this year. Not only did he get us a schedule very similar to last year’s, he was able to add the March 3 date so that we can have a clinic with classroom instruction followed a week later by a beginner’s match. Let’s go out of our way to invite new people to these activities. If necessary, we’ll shoot an abbreviated format for our match (say, 10 rounds slow prone) to provide enough time for coaching and instruction on the day of the match. I’m sure many of us old-timers would be happy to forgo shooting just to be able to coach if we have a slew of new shooters.
Steve Milholland also acquired a bunch of dates for the matches in Billings. I really like the Wednesday evening matches in the summer, as they add a little excitement and camaraderie to my week. He has a few Sunday afternoon matches scheduled too, and these, unfortunately, conflict with some other activities for me. But they have been very well-attended in the past, and I’m sure they will be this year too.
I have made up a wall calendar of shooting activities in Microsoft Word format. It prints out one month per page and has boxes to write in (just like a real calendar). It includes the dates for all OOS and Springfield Benchrest (Billings) activities, as well as the matches in Marshall (Bucksnort), De Soto KS (Mill Creek), Tulsa (Red Castle), and St. Louis. Of course, Camp Perry is on there too.
If you want a copy, send me an email and I will attach a copy in my return. If you have trouble with attachments or Word documents, I could try to include it in the mail message or we could explore other methods. If all else fails, I can print you a copy.
I’ve decided we’ll award medals at our matches this year. The CMP lists gold, silver, and bronze medals in their registration materials for JCG matches, and I have ordered some, but they have not yet arrived. The Fun Shoot, of course, has its own, separate, prize schedule.
Numerous people have commented that they like the idea of “theme” matches where we all shoot the same type of rifle. So that’s what we’ll try for some of our matches this year. Remember, at the theme matches, rifles will (and must) be available to borrow. You will be able to shoot your own ammunition, but we will of course have ammunition for sale too.
The Fun Shoot is our February 17 meeting. Knowing that it could be cold, we try to do some low-key shooting and keep things moving. In the past few years we have taken to shooting at various types of money with the idea that if you can hit it you can keep it. That can be a lot of fun when there’s a $10 bill down range. Last year it was 9° with a few inches of snow on the ground, faithfully simulating Bastogne-well, not really, but it wasn’t much of a day for precision shooting. The eight of us that showed up had a good time.
This year’s shoot has no limits on the rifle or ammunition-bring anything you want to shoot, and if you want to shoot a scoped rifle, have at it (no, I won’t tell you the course of fire ahead of time, but you won’t be shooting from a bench, and we will be shooting from position-standing, prone and kneeling). Bring an M1, your deer rifle, or bring a Ruger 10-22, it doesn’t matter-all rifles will be treated the same. And, yes, you may shoot different rifles in each event. Now, our next/new/last rule: NO SHOOTING JACKETS ALLOWED. See you on the 17th.
We ordered four rifles, two 03A3s and two M1s. They have arrived, and I am very pleased at their condition. Based on the rumors, we weren’t sure what we’d get, but these are very good rifles, and I’d like to have all 4 in my collection. There are some interesting parts here and there such as a ’77′ op rod and a WRA trigger group housing. We’ll raffle them one at a time, 100 tickets per rifle. As soon as we can raffle off one rifle, we’ll start the raffle on a new one. We’ll start with the first M1 and end with the 2nd M1. In between we’ll do the 03A3s, taking all rifles in the order in which they are described below:
Brand new birch stock and either birch or very light handguards that look like birch. No cartouche. Sight cover was loose so I “tuned” it, but it could use a new sight cover. Otherwise, the sight and receiver indentations are just fine. Barrel is an HRA 2-53 with some a good bore, and significant muzzle wear, although there is some rifling still visible at the muzzle. A GI M2-ball round inserted shows 9/64ths of an inch bullet visible between the muzzle and the brass (this is the worst barrel of the four rifles).
Well-used dark (varnished?) walnut stock looks pretty nice to me. Front handguard is varnished and perhaps glued in place. At any rate, the front handguard and gas cylinder are tight and touching. Rear handguard is new, dark, unfinished, non-matching, walnut. With cleanup and re-finish, it will match just fine. Barrel is 1-55, strong rifling at the muzzle, and 3/8″ of the bullet shows.
Straight stock in very good shape with FJA and RA cartouches. 5-43 barrel, good rifling, 3/8″ bullet shows. Rear sight is badly gouged as if it had been dropped on a rock, but it is tight and the adjustments are all very tight, so it should be just fine. Front sight is ‘A’, which is the tallest blade, so it should be good for 100 yard shooting.
Straight stock is a bit rough with numerous dings and a gouge. Very nice FJA, crossed cannons, and RA cartouches. There is a home made steel pin across it where the newer stocks have a recoil pin. Rear sight is tight and good, front sight is ‘A’. Barrel is 2-43 with good rifling, and 3/8″ of the bullet shows.
Perhaps at the March or April meetings we can test-fire these rifles with GI ammunition and see how they shoot. I have no qualms at all and believe they will shoot just fine.
I cleaned the bores fairly well and rubbed the stocks down a bit, but they all need a real cleaning. In particular, the 03A3s had a lot of cosmoline on them (but nothing like the Greek 03A3s a few years ago), and I expect there is a lot of it inside the stock and handguards.
During the past year I have experimented quite a bit with my reloading techniques. Some of the things I have learned from you guys have been put to use, and I took a chance on trying a progressive press. I was looking forward to sharing my experiences at our clinic, and I know at least one of our members has a new turret press with which he is pleased, so that would be a good demonstration too. Unfortunately, we have ice storms around here. But I’d like to write a bit about my experiences and then share some (fairly obvious) conclusions. There’s a lot of toil and trouble in between, but the conclusion is that the old way is the best.
The Lee Loadmaster Progressive press sometimes goes on sale for $120 at Midway. You need to buy a couple of dies such as the powder-drop die and a decapping die (to automatically make sure there is no corn or walnut in the flash hole). And of course, I wanted to try the Lee Autodisk powder measure, since I’ve heard it is very accurate. I also added a Lee flaring die (and later a Lyman M die for the same purpose), as well as an additional turret since I had two main steps in mind.
The general reloading process I was seeking to follow was this: for brass preparation, resize using the RCBS X die, which eliminates trimming, and then run the brass into the flaring die or M die to flare the mouth by about .003″ just to make sure that there is no ridge of brass at the case mouth to damage the bullet. These two steps can be concurrent on a progressive press.
Then, once the brass has been cleaned of lube, begin the real reloading process which primes, drops powder, and seats the bullet with one pull of the press handle. Ideally, you’d only pick up a piece of brass twice in the whole process: once to re-size and flare, and once to begin the reloading process.
I had read all the bad reviews of the Lee Loadmaster, but I’m smarter than the average Midway customer, and I’m pretty good with machinery; I reload shotshells on a MEC Grabber, so I’m familiar with progressive reloading. And being an experienced rifle ammunition reloader, this should be a piece of cake. Well, if anyone wants to buy my Lee Loadmaster setup, complete, at half price, it’s yours.
First, the priming system is too unreliable, and one booboo in its operation costs you much more time than you save by going progressive. In my experience, I was getting a primer problem about every 20 rounds. Maybe it would work better with a different brand of primers (Lee says use only Winchester). Machinery like that I don’t need.
Another problem is the mechanism that advances the shellplate from station to station. Richard Lee calls himself a genius and always designs things slightly differently with an eye for saving (the consumer) money. Here he went overboard. The shell plate is turned by a single steel bar or flapper that is struck by the press handle-whack, whack, whack! The flapper has to move in two dimensions inside the guts of the machine to describe a circle in order to advance the machinery and then return to its original position, very much like the drive system on a steam locomotive, except the flapper is not connected to anything. Oh, and it doesn’t work. The tolerances are too great, powder slops into it, dirt accumulates, and the whole thing is so sloppy in operation that periodically it jams. One reviewer on Midway had about a 3 page dissertation detailing the different types of flappers Lee has tried and how they have to be lubricated and cleaned. Most of you would look at it and say that it is just too cheap.
Lee has a device called the cartridge inserter which places your brass onto the shell plate. It, too, doesn’t work well. Eventually I just put it back in the box and put the cartridges in by hand. Every now and then a piece of brass doesn’t get located precisely, so while you’re concerning yourself with placing the bullet in the cartridge and pulling the handle, the decapping die or the powder drop die dings the case mouth of one of the other cartridges. The same thing happens during resizing, but you have the opportunity to inspect the cases and discard dinged up ones. Compound this with the little fingers that retain the cartridges on the shell plate-they are not spring loaded but screwed down-so removing a cartridge midway through the process (which you must do to check a powder charge or to clean things after a screw-up) is a major pain. This press is one aggravation after another because of attempts to save on manufacturing costs.
Finally, the Lee Autodisk Powder Measure was a major disappointment. It uses a sliding disk with a hole (cylinder) in it to meter powder. The disk slides under the powder hopper and the cylinder receives a charge of powder, then the disk is pushed out over the drop tube, and the powder drops down into the cartridge. Originally designed for pistol cartridges, Lee sells an extra set of disks so that you stack cylinders of different sizes one over the other, thus making a larger cylinder in total for rifle cartridges. Since all the cylinders are of fixed size (duh!), you tune your charge weights by selecting different cylinders, somewhat like a shotshell reloader. But the kicker here is that in rifle reloading we are very painstaking about our powder charge weights, and it is sometimes impossible find a cylinder combination that will get exactly the charge weight you want with a given powder. Lee makes an additional micrometer disk to fix this issue, but at some point I quit buying things from Lee. (See also my problems on the Loadmaster press with removing a cartridge to weigh the powder. It is a real pain in the rear to test-run some cartridges, try to weigh the powder, and then completely disassemble the powder measure to insert new disks.) The disk-return mechanism is a little brass pull-chain as found on cheap light switches. I broke it 3 times before giving up in disgust. Finally, the powder drop is actuated by a special die that has a sliding sleeve inside it. As the cartridge goes up into the die, it pushes the sleeve up which trips the mechanism on the Autodisk which drops the powder. If the die is not adjusted tight enough, the disk only partially advances over the drop hole. If the die is too tight, the case mouth gets slightly crimped. And sometimes the cartridge gets out of alignment and the case mouth gets dinged by the die.
Since the Autodisk had at least one gun writer saying good things in its stead, I decided to give it one last try and mounted it on a spare single-stage press I had thinking that it would fit into my single-stage reloading process just like any other powder measure-drop the powder on one press then seat the bullet on another. I didn’t record the statistics on drop weights, but the variation in charge weight I was getting, both with ball powder and RL-15 was so great that even I wouldn’t shoot it. It was awful. I was trying to throw 25 grains of WC-844 and got occasionally charges of 23.5 grains, then 26.1. My Lee Perfect powder measure never varies by more than a total spread of .4 grains with this ball powder. And yes, I wiped it down with anti-static sheets and tried to standardize my procedures as much as possible. Couple this with the extremely annoying steps required in changing disks to change powder types, and I was truly pulling my hair out in exasperation at this device.
I normally don’t weigh my charges for anything under 600 yards, and the only reason I do weigh the 600 yard loads is that I shoot some ‘nuclear’ loads at that distance, and a couple tenths of a grain more powder than I want can easily cause a blown primer. This we wish to avoid. A few tenths of a grain more or less in a moderately-loaded .223 round is insignificant at the shorter distances. And in a .30-06, a half grain of powder more or less has absolutely no impact on accuracy. As an example, when I load for Camp Perry, I do weigh my 200/300 yard powder charges, and I will accept any throw that is 23.7 to 24.1 grains. That’s for the most important match of the year.
So I have retired, prematurely, the Lee Autodisk. It is just too cumbersome with the powder drop die and the disk-change operation, and too inaccurate for me to have any confidence.
I played with these devices for 6 months before giving up in disgust. My Christmas vacation gave me a whole bunch of time to devote to testing, and here is where I have ended up: I will use the Lee Loadmaster Progressive press for brass preparation only, and that only because I want to get something out of my investment. Used in this way with the X die and the M die, I don’t have to trim and I don’t have to chamfer/deburr. Everything else I do in a ‘normal’ single-stage fashion. Maybe someday I’ll buy a Dillon.
I finally bought an electronic digital calipers, and boy do I like that better than the dial calipers.
I have 3 AR-15 magazines, 20 round, still for sale for $15 each.
Rumor has it that primers are going to get real scarce, so stock up now.
Any questions?? Contact… Bill Corcoran (417) 862-861 or send me an email