My daughter is going to shoot at the National Matches at Camp Perry this year, on the Michigan Junior Team. So we are loading ammo for her to take. She has been away at camps the last two weeks, so I have been working on the cases she had begun prepping before she left. I've primed 500 or so cases over the last few days, and now I've started loading them. Here's what I did today:
That's 100 rounds. Here's what I loaded them with:
I'm used to loading pistol rounds on my turret press and cranking out a couple hundred in an hour, but these we do single-stage and very exactingly. It takes me a minute or so per round to throw the powder charge, carefully trickling the last tenth of a grain or so. Seating the bullet is much faster than throwing the charge! Those 100 rounds represent about 3 hours of work for me today, and that doesn't include clearning, sorting, depriming, resizing, trimming, and priming the cases. And swaging the crimp out of the primer pockets of the military brass (that is a pain in the posterior!) I'm glad Lauren helped with the prep work!
I can also say that Varget powder is Un-Obtainium right now. None of the local shops has any, nor do any of the on-line retailers. I even checked Jay's up in Clare (a couple of hours drive from here) and they didn't have any either. I had a pound to start with and I'm down to about a third of a pound, and I'm shaking the trees for more to finish out her ammo loadout for Perry. I'm hoping there will be some available at the vendor booths at the matches so we can get ready for next year!
