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<\/a><\/p>\nI lived, though it did sting a bit.<\/p>\n
I let myself run out of 180g 40\/10 Cimarron bullets. I like them overall and they shoot really well, but they are a little fussier to load. While waiting for a big order of Xtreme 180g bullets to arrive, I switched the press over to 9mm and loaded a bunch of 135g 9mm Cimarron bullets. I loaded 600 pretty much in one sitting.<\/p>\n
Right about this time, there was an interesting discussion on the Cross Timbers forum about sorting brass before loading and the reasons some people would do such a thing. There are basically two schools, those who want to make the most consistent ammo possible and those for whom the benefits are not commensurate to the required effort. I am in the middle somewhere, though closer to the latter.<\/p>\n The discussion had a significant bent towards weeding out known troublesome brass, such as certain brands that have a stepped interior or crimped primers, before loading them. Since I had 600 rounds of ammo that had been loaded and passed all my QA processes, I counted and sorted them. Of course, it is a slightly skewed statistic for the purposes of the forum discussion because these 600 rounds were all *good*, with no failures. On the other hand, in 600 rounds of loading, I probably didn’t have more than a dozen or so that were culled during loading (mostly crimped primers or obviously damaged cases) and fewer than that made it through the press to fail QA.<\/p>\n About 52% of the ammo was one of 4 headstamps and more than half of that was one or another form of Winchester.<\/p>\n One of the most interesting statistics to me was that there were 26 of a specific WCC headstamp that were all originally crimped primers, but obviously all of them loaded without issue. I’m presuming that some of them may have been previously loaded on a press that swages primer pockets or maybe the crimp happened to be of a suitable symmetry to reload without issue.<\/p>\n Until recently, I have ordered bullets in 500 and 1000 quantities only, mostly just to keep from spending a lot at once. The long term economics are a little better for the larger orders, at least in terms of shipping costs, especially when the seller runs a shipping special.<\/p>\n I noticed that, for X-Treme Bullets<\/a> at least, the bulk quantities of each bullet weight seems to be driven to keep the package weight right about 65 pounds.<\/p>\n I did some digging on UPS and FedEx websites and I could not find any magic price increase at or around 65 pounds. On the other hand, the price the website quoted for me to ship my 65 pound package was 7 times the flat rate $5 shipping for that order, so it may be part of a contract between X-Treme and UPS. In any case, a 65 pound bucket o’ bullets is pretty heavy.<\/p>\n As is my preference, I spent a little time splitting them into 100 round packages for my personal convenience. There were 2509 in the bucket. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the things that happened in January is that I got shot. Well, kinda. A bit of a bullet bounced back and dinged me pretty good. I lived, though it did sting a bit. I let myself run out of 180g 40\/10 Cimarron bullets. I like them overall and they shoot really well, but … Continue reading The Slides of March<\/span> <\/a><\/p>\n115g 9mm x 4000 = 65.7 pounds\r\n124g 9mm x 3750 = 66.4 pounds\r\n147g 9mm x 3000 = 63.0 pounds\r\n165g 10mm x 2750 = 64.8 pounds\r\n180g 10mm x 2500 = 64.3 pounds\r\n230g .45 x 2000 = 65.7 pounds<\/pre>\n
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