Chapter 1: What introductory information is shared about Jeff from Bulletology?
I tell you what, prices are getting high, but a fella still gotta get his guns and ammo. We go hunting for all them good deals online every day. Go to pew.deals, that's P-E-W dot D-E-A-L-S, in your internet. Now back to your podcast. Deal bro, deal bro, saving you money, don't you know. Standard disclaimer, folks. You probably will hear from episode to episode recipes for what we do.
Remember, we're telling you what we do. We're not telling you what you should do. What you should do is you should stick with published loads. So, you know, we disavow any responsibility for damages done because you might not be following a safe and careful reloading practice that Jeremy or I or Jason or Trevor or Mike might be following.
And it could possibly be the fact that you might have a tighter chamber. You might have a looser rifling. You might not get the velocity we do or you might get more. If you're going to take and reload, understand... You're responsible for what you do. We are not. Hello, welcome to the Reloading Podcast here on the Firearms Radio Network. Presented by Patriot Patch Company and Camerotto.
Let me fix that. So tonight we have a guest who has been nice enough to join us. And also he'll be taking questions in a little while. We do have a presentation first that we're going to go through. But we have Jeff Seward from Bulletology. And then we've got the usual cast of characters.
Jeff, what we like to do is kind of start off the show by talking about what you've done in reloading and shooting and stuff this week, except for Nick just bailed. But the rest of us can talk about it. Sure.
Well, I'm sort of a semi-retired ballistics engineer. I'm still doing work on things that I enjoy and that excite me. I'm a 2024 recipient of National... Defense Industrial Association's Chin Award. And you go on NDIA website and look at that and you can see that they don't give those away to everybody. So I'm very honored to have received that. I'm the author of a book, Ammunition Demystified.
It's available on Barnes and Noble. and uh and amazon and basically it condenses uh my 40-year career into about 450 pages of uh information so uh if that's something that uh after listening to me tonight you decide it might be more uh more information that you'd like to have um Feel free to go ahead and pick one of those up. Been reloading since 1983.
I just looked at my records, loaded in the neighborhood of 10,000 rounds over the years. It's not a big pile, but loaded everything from, let's see, 17 fireball up to this .50 caliber count. Yes.
Yeah.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of case preparation in reloading?
Ah, I've just been moving everything. I kind of decided I have way too many bullets and loaded ammo and powder and lead. It really makes bad. I got to lug it all up out of a basement.
That's terrible. I'll come down and rescue some of that from you since you said you have too much. It's all at my house already. So you got to come to my house. Oh, well, if it's in your house, then he doesn't have much anymore. Most of it is, I would say.
I think a lot of bullets and stuff here.
So then he doesn't have too much anymore. Because you have it all. He gave it to me. There you go. See, he solved the problem.
He gave me a thousand pounds of ammo or something, whatever it was.
Now he doesn't have enough.
I've still got enough to get by here. That's what I've been doing, just packing up, moving, painting, stuff like that. Getting ready to head for freedom.
There you go. Ray's following his son's lead and escaping from Illinois.
That's all that's new to me.
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Chapter 3: How do different powders affect accuracy in reloading?
There are steel cartridge cases. That one happens to be a Russian 545 by 39 and got a lacquer coating on it for corrosion protection. then aluminum, handgun cartridge. And those, you know, aluminum is kind of the material of the future, right?
It was first introduced commercially, well, not commercially, in military sense in the early 70s with the development of the Goway cartridge on the A-10 aircraft. So aluminum has been around as a cartridge case material for a long time. Next one over is a combination brass plastic cartridge case. After that is a steel plastic that was made by True Velocity.
And then the last one on the far right-hand side is made by Shellshock, and it's an aluminum base with corrosion protection coating on it with a steel, a drawn steel cup that's kind of crimped in the primer pocket. So it's a really interesting approach to solving the let's save some weight necessity for the military, okay? And... For better or for worse, some of these...
notably the steel and the plastic offerings and the aluminum steel offerings, you're going to get higher bolt loads as a result of the cartridge case not being able to share as much load in friction between the case wall and the interior wall of the chamber. So as the case is pressurized, there's a fair amount of load that can get dumped out in friction
through that case wall, the body of the case wall, that interface. So the real problem for us reloaders and shooters is the fact that the gun life decreases pretty rapidly with case chamber friction. And the next slide is a video, and we'll have to come back to that one. But basically, it's an animation of the cartridge case expanding out to contact the chamber.
And Mike, I think we'll have to come back to that. I don't want to, I don't want to interrupt while we're doing this. Okay. Okay. And, and basically the, the, the case mashes out to hit the wall. You can see, you'll find, you'll see exactly where the case hits the wall. And then the, the composite structure of case and chamber deflects outward to seal the bore and
And then it contracts, and at the end of the interior ballistic cycle, you'll see the case wall shrink to fall out of contact. So it's a pretty interesting animation. Okay. So this slide is a slide that shows the relative bolt load for four different cartridge cases. The yellow diagonal line is 556 with a brass case. The gray line is an aluminum case. The blue line is a steel case.
And way up at the top under the red dashed line is a polymer case. with a polymer body with a brass base on it, okay? And so you've got lines on there for a wet or lubricated cartridge case. And so anytime you lubricate it, your bolt loads are going to go up. That's just the fact of life, okay?
You've got a vertical line for dry, and that would be, you know, you've inserted the cartridge case into the chamber. It's completely free of any fluids, lubricants, water, etc., And then over on the far right-hand side is a dirty cartridge case. So this would be a cartridge case that's contaminated with some sort of high-friction dust or dirt, something like that.
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Chapter 4: What are the challenges with cartridge case design?
And then you do the first draw, you do the second draw, and then you preform the primer pocket. The next step, you draw a little more and you do another preform on the primer pocket. The third, what is that, the fifth step there, you put the extractor groove in, and then moving further to the right, you put in the shoulder. You basically preform the shoulder.
And then the second to the last step, you'll notice that that case has been annealed. And because you're putting so much work into it, That's going to need to happen during the forming process. And on the last step here, it shows that the primer, I'm sorry, the flash hole has been, okay. And each manufacturer has their own series of steps that they perform in order to make a cartridge.
And they're optimized for their factory. Shall we move on?
Absolutely.
Okay.
Sorry, I had a cough, so I was muted.
All right. From an analytical standpoint, the... Analyzing what's going on in a cartridge case is pretty complicated because there are three different stresses or strains present in the cartridge case along the body. So there's a strain or actually stress and stretch in the axial direction along the longitudinal axis of the cartridge case. There is a radial strain.
pushing in from the outs, out from the inside, pardon me, due to the internal pressure. And then that causes a hoop strain to develop. So you've got stresses in three different directions at every section along the length of the cartridge. So from an analytical standpoint, you have to Any analysis you do on them has to take into account those three, stress and strain condition, okay?
Now, in terms of stretching, where does the case stretch most? Well, usually it's just aft of where the case body last contacts the chamber. And if you do it enough, you fire enough times, you're going to stretch it and thin it as shown with the the big red arrow on the right-hand side and you can get separations there if you're not paying attention.
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Chapter 5: What factors affect peak chamber pressure in handloading?
You know, they tend to be typically very small web because their usage is in low-pressure items like pistols and shotguns, and ball powders and extruded powders or tubular powders are used in much higher-pressure systems. And this graph is all... keyed by the different propellant manufacturers that produce powder. There's St. Mark's, there's IMR, Alliant, Norma, and Hodgson.
So they're all in here. And obviously the peak pressure affects the choice of the powder. And in order for us to get the muzzle velocity as high as possible, You need to run pressures to the upper limits of the firearm design. So let's just say that the design working pressure is 60,000 PSI. You want to have your average...
load be up around 57 ish if you can manage that and assuming that your your variability is kind of small in the 500 to 750 psi range of course we can't measure that you have to be able to measure velocity and hope hopefully they correlate and in most cartridge cases they do correlate pretty well
So different bullet weight and construction, copper jacket, lead cord versus monolithic copper bullets, that affects the peak pressure. No surprise there. And the other thing that you need to worry about is you'd really like to have the powder completely burned out while the bullet's in bore to extract maximum velocity out of that powder.
Chapter 6: How do different bullet types influence accuracy?
And powder burnout affects muzzle flat. Burned out's good, not burned out. Adds to the flash. Okay. So are there any questions here? Okay. We will move on. What factors increase peak chamber pressure? Okay. Increased powder charge. No surprise there. Use of identical charge weight of powder within an increased relative quickness. Again, no surprise. Increased mass of the projectile.
Again, that bullet...
Chapter 7: What is the importance of ballistic coefficients for rifle shooters?
Can't accelerate as rapidly as a lower mass projectile. So the volume generation rate behind the bullet is going to be lower. That's going to cause the pressure, okay? Increased bullet engraved length, that's going to drive the resistance, inbore resistance pressure up. That's going to cause the peak pressure to spike. Excuse me. Increased bullet stiffness.
In other words, a copper, all copper versus a cup and cord jacket, that's going to bump the pressure. Okay. And yes, guys put, you know, particularly Barnes and Hornady on their monolithic copper offerings do put cantaloupes in there.
Chapter 8: How do random and bias errors affect long-range shooting?
Basically, it's a receptacle for the displaced jacket or body material to be pushed into, and that helps reduce the engraving pressure, but it's not 100% effective in terms of getting it back to cup and core kind of levels. Decreased free run to the start of engraving is going to boost your pressures. Decreased internal case volume relative to a baseline
will increase your peak pressures, and obviously decreased barrel internal dimensions will drive up the resistance pressure and then also increase your peak internal pressure from combustion. So in the block there down below, changing loaded cartridge length is complicated, okay? Longer loaded cartridge length means more chamber volume which would tend to give you lower pressure.
But it also comes with shorter jump to the rifling, which gives you higher pressure. Your results are going to depend on the bullet, powder, and cartridge, okay? So you have to – there's not a good answer for if I load my bullet out, am I going to bump the pressure up or am I going to reduce it? There's no one-size-fits-all answer to that question. Questions here? No, sir. Okay, we'll move on.
All right. Why do some powders shoot smaller groups than other powders in my rifle? This is a little bullet barrel powder interaction study that I did, kind of, you know, I had been yakking at the guys at Hornady a little bit, and they said, oh, yeah, powder, changing the powder, changing the dispersion.
And I was, you know, for a very long time, I was of the camp that, you know, powder is just a push. How can it affect the dispersion? And so I started looking into it. We have a... what's called an inbore balloting code. It looks at the dynamic interaction between a flexible projectile and a flexible gun tube, okay? And so you can put in different propellants
and look at what the dynamic response is for a given powder in a given barrel with a given bullet. So that's what I did here. So I looked at H4350, W760, H100V, and Varget, okay? And each of these had a slightly different average muzzle velocity, and the muzzle velocity variation that you see is unique for each propellant. So the H4350 had a muzzle velocity variability of eight feet per second.
The W760 had 15 feet per second. The Vargot had four feet per second. And the H100V had a velocity variability of 10 feet per second. And so let's talk about all the graphs here with the blue dots and the orange dots. So the blue dots are what's called the yaw rate. That's the wobble of the bullet as it initially exits the barrel. And that's one of the primary sources of the
the fall of shot scatter at the target. We know it's dispersion. Some folks call it accuracy. It's not accuracy really. But so, you know, and at zero in the middle of each of these charts is the average muscle velocity. And then we go out from outwards from there, left and right, there's plus and minus one, two, and three standard deviations or sigma from the average
So that's the variation that you're going to see as a result of firing lots and lots and lots of bullets, okay? And you can see that, like, I'm going to just pick on the H4350 for a little bit. So there's, you know, it's pretty easy to see that there are waves in that response map.
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