Case gauges

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jeep45238
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Case gauges

Post by jeep45238 »

BLUF: get a good case gauge - preferably a 50 or 100 hole unit.

I recently moved from a Hornady Lock n Load AP to a Dillon 650, and before that took several years off from loading due to living on military bases - they don't take kindly to having explosives, combustables, ammunition, etc., in the housing. I also cast, and they're not a fan of having furnaces and molten metal either. Weird.

In my excitment of having a case feeder and a press designed to work with it from scratch (as a system, not a later add-on), I started to make ammo. I loaded long based for my Beretta, based off it going into battery by hand. If you aren't familiar, the breech face is recessed on them, so there's no real way to use a barrel hood like that of a glock, 1911, etc., to accurately use as a case gauge. Later on a Sig entered the picture, and the ammo was a smidge long, so I shortened it to be just flush with the barrel hood.

Big mistake. The ammo was WAY too long, as 50% of the time the slides of both pistols wouldn't go fully into battery. Rather than be a bigger fool than I was, I pocketed those rounds for later. My buddy was making fun of me as this happened, and his Glock 19 got locked up tighter than a vault (bulged base on the brass he used - left over from an IPSC major match). I decided to buy a case gauge that night, but couldn't see myself doing the one hole case gauges. Off to find equipment for higher volumes so I'm spending less time doing this and more time shooting or living life :)

I found that EGW made a 7 hole and 50 hole, and double alpha made a nice 20 hole unit. Then I stumbled across Shockbottle - the 100 round case gauge. Jackpot. Now to buy some ammo boxes to make it easy to unload the gauge....

Long story short I ran my ammo through the gage and found out they were all incredibly long. Duh. I dialed the length in and found that I still had a high failure rate - 10-20%. It then occured to me that I'm using brass that's been in storage for over 5 years that I didn't tumble in my excitment to be loading again. Sure enough, tumbling makes the difference in the failure rate! Not to mention much easier on your dies, but that's a different topic.

Point being is that the gauge is set to be tighter than all but match chambers, so if it passes the gauge, it'll function in your pistol. They're helpful to diagnose exactly what the problem is - too long, too much crimp, too little crimp, too much bell, dirty cases, etc, and verify that all your ammo will function. That alone is worth the extra effort before match day. The Shockbottle case gauge (also known as the hundo) is the only one I can really recommend unless you're shooting a match pistol with match ammo, and you're at the top of the nation in talent (basically, everything outside of that is a point of diminishing return). It takes a minute or two to load up and verify all your ammo, which is only a tad bit longer than loading your ammo cases by hand anyway. And for reference - this picture is what helped me figure out I need to tumble my brass every time. A couple had a minor bulge at the base, but most of the rejects are from dirt. The rest that aren't perfectly flush are due to using cast bullets, which are .001 larger in diameter. Light thumb pressure wiping over them and they went perfectly flush.

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