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Old March 3, 2005, 05:22 PM   #13
G56
Senior Member
 
Join Date: June 10, 2004
Location: Oklahoma
Posts: 302
Quote:
Wow, 6.5g of Unique in a 230g FMJ is factory? I was using 5.8g and the brass was just sailing across the room!
The pressure can vary substantially depending on the length of the loaded cartridge, seat a bullet a little bit deeper and pressures can go from so-so to over the top in a hurry.

A number of years ago I tried the Ranier 200 gr SWC, the starting load was supposed to be 5.6 gr of 231, so I loaded a bunch up at that charge, when I shot them I was blowing primers out of the cases and the ones that didn't blow the primers out, the primers were flattened by excessive pressure, remember this was at the recommended starting load! I ended up reducing the load to 4.6 gr to shoot the rest of the box up. I was loading them to the same OAL that I had used with 200 gr lead SWC's, that had worked perfectly. This was before Ranier had load info available on the net, years later I saw their loading info online and found the reason for the problem, Ranier recommended an OAL that was just a bit longer than I used, I had about 15 or 20 bullets left from the original box of 1000, so I loaded those up to the recommended spec listed on Ranier's website, they worked perfectly.

The lesson learned the hard way...pay close attention to the OAL listed for that bullet/load combination. That information wasn't available when I originally loaded those cartridges, it is available now, always make use of as much information as possible, and since different bullets might have different depth inside the cartridge, try to get info specific to that particular brand and style bullet.
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John
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