Dillon RL550B and First Sunday Match.

I have had this thing for several months now and I am finally getting it installed for use. Way back, I broke the particle board work bench top with normal press operation.

Even when I put it there, I knew it was just a matter of time until it would give.

I cleaned up the damage as best I could and put a piece of 3/4" birch plywood on the top of the bench, glued down and backed up with a metal plate underneath.

One the front edge, where the damage was most severe, I also sandwiched the damaged particle board with a strip of plywood underneath.

This has all served really well, the press was now mounted solidly enough to reveal other problems instead :)

Enter the Dillon.

The Dillon has the strong mount accessory base that is wider than the piece of plywood that I bolstered the workbench with. It solves problems with some installations, but it may not be the best solution for my installation, due largely to my relatively high benchtop.

My original plan was to add a strip of 3/4" plywood to make it a little wider to fit the Dillon. I decided that I didn't really want to piece it together like that and thought I should just cut bigger piece of plywood. I have a piece of exterior grade plywood I purchased but turned out not to need for a ham radio project.

Then I realized that the whole workbench could benefit from a plywood top. I have a bench vise on the other end of that work area. That plywood piece I have is solid, other than the holes drilled in it, but it's kinda rough. I remembered a plywood table/bench top I made long ago that was not friendly to skin.

I then decided that if I was gonna do the whole surface, it would be worth getting a nice piece of plywood for it, so I verified that a 2x4 foot piece would fit and I went to Lowe's for plywood, hardware and Liquid Nails adhesive.

By then, it was time to get ready for my attendance of the first official 1st Sunday IDPA match and I didn't want to fix the workbench right then as badly as I wanted to go shoot!

Matchwise, because of the troubles I was having with the Remington primers in the Starline brass, I didn't trust my last batch of ammo and shot with Remington UMC factory ammo. I brought a 10mm Auto barrel and some ammo for it, but elected to go with the 40S&W.

Stage 1 hurt but the rest of my stages were reasonably good, especially considering that it has been a couple of months by now since my last match. The majority of the pain was from one target. It was at the far left of the range, kinda in the dark, a vertical target with an angled non-threat in front of it. Not only did I hit the non-threat, but I aimed at the non-threat and having missed it, made up the shot. The actual target was clean. So, 10 down plus 5 seconds fail to neutralize on the target and not one, but two hits on the non-threat for 10 more seconds. I'm pretty sure there was another procedural as well, out of cover for another target. The rest of the stage was pretty normal, 1's and 3's.

The rest of the stages weren't bad either. Overall, raw time 109.59, total 142.09. Stage 1 points down and penalties accounted for 22 seconds alone.

BUG/CCP Match and Ammo Talk

Well, the BladeTech Southern Regional BUG / CCP Match held last Saturday was great fun! It had rained Friday and overnight Friday night. The rain was pretty much gone by match time Saturday morning, but it was still vera muddy.

I was my own worst enemy when it came to arriving on time. I left the house plenty early, but 20 minutes down the road, noticed I had left my wallet at home. So, 40 minutes added to trip. Caught at the railroad crossing on the way out the second time, so 5 more minutes there, though it always feels longer. Then as I neared the range, I lefted when I should have righted and didn't realize *that* for 15 minutes, so 15 extra minutes added. I arrived at the gate shortly after the shooter's meeting, and the range is still 15 minutes from the gate. Still, I got there, parked, registered and caught up with my squad and got inspection and stage description before the first shot, so not bad...

Two stages kind ate me up. The first was simply a matter of shooting faster than I can go. It looks good on the video but the score was pretty poor, 25 down on that one stage. One other stage had a poor score. Those two account for 2/3 of my total penalties. In contrast, the other 10 stages averaged 3 down.

Still, it was fun and I had almost no ammo issues. All rounds that saw the firing pin fired. I did have two rounds that failed to go into battery. I have gotten into what could arguably be a bad habit of racking out such failures. I think I need to develop instead the habit of bumping the back of the slide to attempt to force them into battery. With a BUG pistol at a BUG match, the stages were understandably BUG friendly, designed largely to be shot in groups of 6. Two targets get 3 each or 3 targets to two each, then move. Well, when you rack out a fail to battery, you now have only 5 rounds. You will run out before you address all 6 rounds. So, advance to cover, reload, take the last shot. *Now*, you're probably going be short for the next 6 rounds and have to stop and reload for that. Both rounds that were racked out were lost in the copious mud, so I could not check those to see if there was a dimensional issue with them.

All in all, however, it was a fun match with ammo I feel I can trust, at least for competition. This Thursday, I may get to test that load in the Glock, though Thursday is also the last day of work for my retiring spouse. I might be busy. :)

It's Not Really Science If You Change All The Conditions

I loaded up 100 rounds of low recoil 40S&W, using new Starline brass, Remington 1-1/2 primers and a slightly hotter 4.6g charge of Power Pistol and shot it from my Kahr CW40. So, other than keeping the Xtreme 180g RNFP projectile, I changed all the parameters of the test.

First, the Kahr is running it's stock spring, which is pretty stiff to judge by just a finger pull. I'm sure the smaller size of everything magnifies the apparent effort needed to cycle the slide, but the ammo never failed to extract or in any other way, fail to operate the pistol.

So long as it actually fired.

I had a few click-no-fire failures. Several, in fact. I recovered at least three manually ejected cartridges with seemingly light strikes. Upon closer examination, it appears that the primers are set deeper in the pockets than expected.

On the left is one of my previously loaded 180g rounds, with used brass and CCI primer. In the center is a light strike failure and on the right is an unfired "new" round. The really sharp observer will notice that the light strike is also a smidgen off center, but that is not generally a problem unless it's WAY off.

It may be tough to see in that picture, but the primers in both of the new rounds are noticeably set back.

Not sure if this is a better or worse illustration.

Since the previous load is in different brass and using a different primer, it's hard to compare them fairly, but the degree to which the new rounds are wrong is very clear.

Since I need to load about 200 rounds of ammo for a major match *tomorrow*, I need to resolve this tonight.

Most obviously, I will see what CCI or even Tula primers look like in the Starline brass. Before I load any, however, I will see if the Remington primers are smaller than the others and/or if the primer pockets in the Starline brass are different from the fired brass I have. The Remington primers gave me some fits anyway. They didnt want to feed reliably in the press. It seems to like CCI better. Actually, it seems to like Tula primers as well or maybe better. My hopes are very high that this will resolve the problem and I can use this load tomorrow without issue.

Using new brass was an unaccustomed joy. None of the usual QA gyrations that fired brass needs seemed to even apply. Never fired means never GlockBulged; loaded rounds dropped straight through the bulge buster without interference, so that fairly time consuming step could be eliminated. Thanks to a minor adjustment of the crimping die, they dropped into and out of the gauge block as well. I did not put a caliper on every round, but the 20 or so random rounds that I checked were all dead on 0.419" at the case mouth and OAL 1.115", +/- 0.001. That is a little short, so I will move that out to 1.120" or so. I have had some feeding problems in the Lone Wolf conversion barrel of the Glock and that will likely help.

In looking up some figures about primer pocket depth, I came across an article about the dangers of loading 40S&W with 180g bullets. The gist of the article was that since the 180g bullet is physically longer than any other weight bullet, but that we maintain the same OAL, the combination results in significantly reduce loaded case volume. This volume does indeed affect the burn rate and peak pressure of any powder in any round and the article included a scary chart showing that a variation of 0.140" in cartridge OAL and thus case volume, resulted in pressures soaring as high as 4 times the maximum SAAMI pressure for the cartridge.

The same sort of problem comes from too light of a crimp on an autoloading pistol cartridge and even more often, chambering the same cartridge over and over (like you might do if you unload and reload your carry ammo into a pistol you also compete with) can set the bullet back from being rammed into the feed ramp. At the very least, it can affect accuracy because the pressures vary from shot to shot and in the worst case, your pistol comes apart in your hand due to extremely high pressures, possibly taking your hand with it.

In my case, I think my handloading goal avoids this issue. I am not loading anywhere near full power, let alone max power. Just the opposite, in fact. I am developing the lowest power load that will meet minimum power factor for my competition and reliably operate the pistol.

Punching Holes Gently, Continued...

The 13 pound spring did seem to help operation of the pistol in general. With the stock spring, I had several issues where extraction and ejection seemed to not complete in pretty much every stage I shot. The lighter spring as reduced that greatly, but it has not completely eliminated it. Last Thursday, I still had a couple of them.

Also, the lighter spring seems to have made the pistol a little less forgiving about about case mouth tolerances and thus I had a few failures to go into battery.

In my defense, though perhaps it's not a truly warranted defense, I have found that I can have rounds that drop freely into the gauge block but close observation reveals a tiny bit of the flared mouth remains. This might not be an issue on a Glock 22, with it's native 40S&W magazines, but using the 10mm mags and a 40S&W conversion barrel might introduce enough geometric change to take up all the usual tolerances and result in a failure to go into battery.

Message received, Cody. I need to mic those case mouths. Adjusting the crimp die will be very simple and will probably take care of it.

So, with the BUG match coming up this weekend, I have two critical ammo related problems to address.

Even the lighter spring on the Glock isn't quite light enough for the current load, so I need to bump up the powder charge just a little. As I am using the Lee Pro Auto Disk powder measure, I will just go up one cavity size on the disk. I think I'm using the 0.40 cc cavity and the next larger 0.43 cc cavity should raise the powder charge to about 4.8g. This should add about 50 fps to the velocity, but more importantly, about 31 foot pounds of energy to the slide.

Of course, that whole paragraph applies to shooting the Glock. For the BUG match, I'll be shooting the Kahr, and I haven't tried that ammo at all in that pistol. The current load might work, or I might need to bump that even higher for the Kahr. I may be able to test that this evening.

Punching Holes Gently

I loaded up some soft shooting 40S&W ammo to take to Winchester last Thursday. In the past, I have loaded a lot of 165 gr RNFP rounds and got very comfortable with them. 4.5 gr of TiteGroup send those at about 960 fps (per chrono stage at a major match) for power factor of 158. That round worked really well. Hotter than necessary, perhaps, but as I say, I had gotten pretty comfortable with them. I never did chrono the 155 gr RNFP with the same charge, but those are probably a little faster, still in the 160 or so range in power factor.

I decided that since I espouse custom ammunition as one of the two main reasons to handload (economy being the other) that I could probably do better.

The rule of thumb is that, for a given power factor, heavier bullets at lower velocities will recoil with less energy. The math works because power factor is a simple momentum calculation of mass time velocity whereas energy involves the square of the velocity. So, the next heavier common 10mm bullet is 180 gr. To make minimum power factor of 125, the 180 gr needs only run at a pretty pokey 695 fps, as opposed to 758 fps for a 165 gr bullet. I consulted various load data sources and found a few loads with fast powders that showed 180 gr bullets at 750-ish fps and I decided to try 4.4 grains of Power Pistol. The slightly longer 180 gr bullet was seated a little bit deeper in the case, but as the profile/ogive is the same as the 165 gr, I used the same OAL of 1.125" and all rounds gauged properly in my EGW case gauge.

There is, however, a caveat.

Using the math referred to above, my 165 gr bullets at 962 fps works out to 339 foot-pounds of muzzle energy and by inescapable physical law, 339 foot-pounds of recoil, though a goodly portion of that is used to operate the pistol. My 180 gr bullets at an estimated 750 fps works out to 225 foot-pounds, 34% less energy. That, it turns out, is enough reduction to make the pistol cycle less reliably.

The round was an absolute joy to shoot. Reacquiring the front sight was fast. Power Pistol is a bit flashy and boomy (and I have in fact some pretty smokin' hot, bright and loud loads using Power Pistol) but in this charge, it was a nice report and very light recoil. It won't be confused with a 22, but very gentle. On the other hand, I had several jams that centered around incomplete extraction and ejection. I was initially disappointed, fearing I had a dimensional issue, but as I paid closer attention to the jams and noticed that it was empty brass gumming up the works, I realized that my pistol just has too much recoil spring for these far-lighter-than-factory loads.

This is a Glock 20 with a Lone Wolf 40S&W conversion barrel but the stock recoil spring designed for 10mm Auto. It kind of surprised me to learn that the stock recoil spring for the Glock 20 is the same 17 pound rating as the stock spring on almost all other models. Then I realized that what is different for the Glock 20 (and 21) is the larger, heavier slide. The combination of the heavier slide and the 17 pound spring is what helps the pistol cope with the 575 to 800 foot pounds of recoil energy of full power 10mm ammo. Compared to that, its no surprise that my 225 foot pounds, a paltry 60% less energy, might have trouble operating the pistol reliably.

I ordered a 13 pound spring on Friday. Tracking said it woudl be here by Friday, but it arrived today! Bonus!

Thursday Night Back to Normal(ish)

Thursday's Match Director brought us a few stages lifted from the IDPA World Match and, just to make it easier for all, he set up all four stages in one space. We didn't have to stop and reset after two squads did two stages, as is the norm.

Scoring was less than stellar. The biggest problem seems to be that I failed to slow down.

I did have one interesting PE. The stage had two targets visible from P1, two "surprise" targets obscured by visual barriers enroute to P2 and one behind the barrier at P2. Two on each except the last, which gets six. My plan was pretty simple and similar to almost everyone elses, 2 each, advance, 2 on the first surprise, shoot to slidelock on second surprise, reload behind the barrier, 6 on the last.

Where I went wrong must have been in the count. I shot at the 2nd surprise target and initiated my reload, only to notice that my magazine was empty, but that there was a round in the pistol; it wasn't at slide lock. I am pretty sure I retained my magazine, reloaded and took the last six shots. I got a PE for it and I was not at all surprised, so I had no reason to review the details.

During the day today, I was discussing the match with coworkers and when I described what happened, it occurred to me that if I retained the magazine, it would be a tactical reload and maybe should not have been a PE. I consulted to rules and verified that a magazine can be empty at tactical reload. What makes it a TR is that there is still a round in the pistol and you do have to retain the magazine, not drop it. I emailed the SO that I thought had run me on that stage and we ended up chatting on the phone about it. Turns out he wasn't who ran me, but he observed that the PE was for initiating the reload before I was behind cover, not the reload itself. I feel better now. :)

Overall, I placed 12 out of 16 shooters, but really I was 4 out 5 Markman ESPs.

I definitely need to shoot a lot more and get back in the groove!

Speaking of scoring, news from the banquet at the IDPA World Match is that they are going to change the penalty for points down. Currently, each point down is a half second. The change is expected to be to a full second. There has been much forum discussion about it. The intent seems to be to discourage shooting real fast for a bunch of 1's and thus encourage accuracy. I'm not convinced that is the best way to do that, but it will make the math of scoring easier :)

Rejoining Society

Oh, it was fun shooting again last Thursday!

And there was a cool stage shooting under a "garage door" laying on one side!

Thanks go out to Josh C for letting me nab his PoV video, from which this still came.

Score-wise, considering I was rusty from 155 days between matches, I did ok, middle of the pack stuff. No huge problems.

I did have a little trouble with ammo failing to go into battery. I was shooting 40S&W, 155 gr RNFP over 4.5 gr Titegroup. Historically, I know that these boxes were loaded during the time I was dialing in on some consistency issues, so a couple such issues were not totally a surprise. After I got home, I ran a bunch of these rounds through an additional Bulge Buster and gauge block QA process. There were about 10 rounds out of 250 that I could not refurbish.

Friday was a quarterly classifier. I was somewhat interested in trying for Sharp Shooter in ESP, but decided instead to go for BUG. I had a 'default' Novice classification in BUG (9.6.2.1 A shooter’s initial BUG classification is the shooter’s highest Classification attained in any division, minus one level) but Marksman is the minimum classification required for a sanctioned match. I like those, so I thought that would be best.

Having had some ammo issues on Thursday, I elected to buy factory ammo for the classifier. From the limited choices I got the heaviest bullet, hoping it would be subsonic and maybe lighter recoil. I'm not sure if I chose correctly, because by the time I was done with 90 rounds, I had a blister on the bottom of my trigger finger due to recoil from the little Kahr CW40.

I made Marksman in BUG. The range for Marksman BUG is 171 to 234 seconds and I shot a 206. My biggest problems were the longer range shots. The classifier is Limited Scoring, so no makeups are allowed anyway, but I couldn't see well enough to determine whether I made those shots until we scored the targets.

Still, 206 is well above 234, so I'm in.

Last night, I had planned to go practice for a while. In the afternoon, however, I had a fairly extensive eye exam, which included dilation. By 6PM, my eyes were still partly dilated and I had troubles focusing at much distance. It wasn't too bad driving, but I think the precision of shooting would have required more acuity.

I may as well mention now that the eye exam was to see if I have glaucoma. There isn't really *a* test for that, but rather a battery of tests that, taken as a whole, determines the answer. While not all tests are completed, my opthamologist says that I am "glaucoma suspect" until they finish looking at everything. With all the various chemicals they assaulted my eyes with for this exam, there were some tests that could not be done on the same day, so I have another appointment in about a month for the rest of the battery of tests. Being nearsighted indicates a risk for glaucoma and at the same time, can give a false positive on some tests, looking like glaucoma when it's not. Also, I apparently have pretty thick corneas, which serves to protect the iris from one common cause. In the mean time, I take comfort in knowing that if I do have glaucoma, we have detected it very early and it will most likely be completely manageable, though that will be a "rest of my life" type of management, particularly since glaucoma usually doesn't present any noticeable symptoms until you have already begun loosing eyesight. Treatment is most commonly drops that are like localized blood pressure drugs. In some situations, laser or conventional surgery is indicated.

Here's my scoresheet :)