Thanks to everyone's help around here, I finally made some ammo!!! 20 rounds of 9mm cartridges all ready to go bang! (Hopefully in the right direction...)
I know I have been a pain lately with all of my questions, but it finally paid off with some real results.
Here are my first 20 cases, already resized, de-primed and then re-primed. The case and bullet at the top is for the dummy round that I used to set the bullet depth. I was pretty anal and weighed everything. I sorted cases by headstamp and weight, and then did the same with the bullets. (Go ahead and roll your eyes and chuckle at the newbie!)
I did everything by batch, and weighed the powder individually on my Chargemaster rather than use the powder drop on my press, and then verified each charge using my 5-0-5 beam scale. (Nothing like paranoia!) I just dropped each charge through a funnel on the press individually, checked the charge visually, and then immediately seated and crimped the bullet.
After they were all completed, I checked each cartridge in my Lyman case checker, and then did a plunk test in one of my barrels. I then weighed each cartridge to confirm there were no squibs or double charges.
And finally, you can see some finished cartridges as I got down to the end...
I ended up using the Berry's plated 124 gr. 9mm bullets with 3.8 gr. of Titegroup with a CCI 500 SPP at an OAL of 1.150. Starting weight was 3.6 gr. and the max was 4.1, so I figured 3.8 gr. was a good place to start.
Next time I load, I will work up some different loads for testing, but for this first batch of 20, I just wanted to keep everything consistent and that meant all at the same load. Hopefully they will all go bang and cycle my pistol, otherwise I might be wishing I only made 5 instead of 20.
Honestly, I could not have done it without all of the help in this forum. I will pay it all forward, I promise. An extra thanks to 1911ly for patiently leading me through a few hiccups today over the phone. Thanks Bro!!!
I know I have been a pain lately with all of my questions, but it finally paid off with some real results.
Here are my first 20 cases, already resized, de-primed and then re-primed. The case and bullet at the top is for the dummy round that I used to set the bullet depth. I was pretty anal and weighed everything. I sorted cases by headstamp and weight, and then did the same with the bullets. (Go ahead and roll your eyes and chuckle at the newbie!)
I did everything by batch, and weighed the powder individually on my Chargemaster rather than use the powder drop on my press, and then verified each charge using my 5-0-5 beam scale. (Nothing like paranoia!) I just dropped each charge through a funnel on the press individually, checked the charge visually, and then immediately seated and crimped the bullet.
After they were all completed, I checked each cartridge in my Lyman case checker, and then did a plunk test in one of my barrels. I then weighed each cartridge to confirm there were no squibs or double charges.
And finally, you can see some finished cartridges as I got down to the end...
I ended up using the Berry's plated 124 gr. 9mm bullets with 3.8 gr. of Titegroup with a CCI 500 SPP at an OAL of 1.150. Starting weight was 3.6 gr. and the max was 4.1, so I figured 3.8 gr. was a good place to start.
Next time I load, I will work up some different loads for testing, but for this first batch of 20, I just wanted to keep everything consistent and that meant all at the same load. Hopefully they will all go bang and cycle my pistol, otherwise I might be wishing I only made 5 instead of 20.
Honestly, I could not have done it without all of the help in this forum. I will pay it all forward, I promise. An extra thanks to 1911ly for patiently leading me through a few hiccups today over the phone. Thanks Bro!!!
