I have had this Dillon 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 a bigger piece of plywood. I have a piece of exterior grade plywood I purchased but turned out not to be needed 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 2×4 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 factory ammo for 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 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 miss. The actual target was clean and untouched. 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.

A few days later, I managed to finish the bench top and mounted the Dillon and the bench vise.

Upon removing the vice, I found that the particleboard beneath it was probably only a few solid whacks from complete separation like the original Lee press did.

Now the workbench is too pretty to work on…

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. 🙂

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.

No, spring is in the Glock…

The 13 pound recoil spring worked as expected. I did have two ammo issues, but they appeared to be ammo dimensional issues.

As I was rushing somewhat to have 100 rounds of this low recoil ammo recipe ready for the match, I QA’d the rounds with the gauge block only. Usually, I run all rounds through the Bulge Buster first, then case gauge block. In the interest of cranking out 100 rounds that morning, I just cleared all rounds though the case gauge only. If they drop unrestricted into the block, I called them good. I’m not sure if that allowed a couple of marginal rounds through or not. Shrug.

What I really need to do is take a few hundred rounds to the range and test them under non-competitive conditions, with the chronograph, too.

I have also been looking into a bullet trap for easier and safer ammo testing at home.

We have about 12 acres of land in a subdivision with a minimum lot size of 5 acres. We have a pond on the property which includes a dam that I have used as a firearm backstop before. However, that area is muddy much of the spring rainy season, limiting access to keep it mowed. Consequently, it is overgrown much of the rest of the year. It is a good place for daytime target practice, for part of the year, but it less than convenient for the kind of shooting needed to work up a handload recipe.

After shopping for commercially available bullet traps, I have found that there are a few available that would suit my needs fairly well, but they tend to be $1000-2000 and I just can’t justify that kind of cost. I think I’m going to have to go homebrew.

There are three *basic* designs for small bullet traps, four if you include clearing traps. Clearing traps are designed to simply be a safe direction to point the muzzle when unloading and clearing a weapon. They are not truly intended to be fired into regularly. For bench work, a sand filled bucket is adequate for most handguns.

The other bullet trap designs are variations on a theme of safely dissipating a bullet’s energy. The most common design, both commercial and home made, uses a hard steel plate, generally at somewhat of an angle to the shooter, to absorb most of the bullet’s energy and deflect it into a soft material, often sand, to absorb the rest of the energy and capture the projectile. The home made version might be adaptable to indoor shooting and in fact, many indoor and even outdoor ranges use another variation of this technology wherein the angled steel plate deflects upward, but the plate is covered in several inches of shredded tire rubber.

Another very common design that is a little more complex is some form of a design that uses highly angled plates to deflect and guide the projectile into an enclosed tube to dissipate the remaining energy in the tube. This design makes recovery of the spent projectiles easier, thus making the lead easier to recycle. The specifics vary somewhat, but they mostly look like a big funnel connected tangentially to the side of a pipe. This would be my favorite design to try, mostly because there is no need for any kind of sand, ground rubber or other media to sift spent projectiles out of.

The last common design is really basically a scaled up clearing trap, a tube filled with baffles or some other energy absorbing media, large enough to safely shoot at from a distance. One of the slickest example of these was from a company called Target Shooting Solutions. As of November 2017, their web presence is now for an indoor range in Pennsylvania, with no bullet traps to be found. Sadly, their least expensive model was $1000. However, their basic design lends itself somewhat to the DIY builder, a tube filled with absorption media.

The easiest to build your own tube trap with would be 12″ or larger steel pipe, about 3 feet long, with a heavy plate securely welded to one end, the other end made of something a bullet should be able to pass through, like a piece of a horse stall mat.