As you may know from some of my other posts, I've been gearing up to reload for my M1 Garand using my Hornady LNL AP. As in any reloading endeavor, I always research it to death and tend to lean towards being safe by maybe 'overdoing' certain things.
Case in point, I purchased the Hornandy OAL gage with the intention of trying to make as accurate of a round as I could by minimizing headspace. This sounded like this tool could do that, as you basically push a bullet to the lands and take a measurement of this dummy round. In theory, this should work...mmmm, not so much with an M1.
...as I found out that when you do this, the bullet is practically falling out of the case. This is due to the inherent length of freebore of this rifle. So I found out you can't really do what the bolt action guys do with a gas operated rifle...too much tolerance in this rifle. So I learned that you basically can only load these rounds to a given COl and not so much as loading them to the 'lands'....on the bright side it was only about 35 bucks, plus Midway just gave me a store credit anyways !!
So for any of you guys loading for the M1, save your money and don't buy the Hornady OAL gage for it. Not to say this is a bad product, just doesn't work for the M1 is all !!
On a side note, got my Greek HXP ammo from CMP this past week and was able to zero in my M1 this weekend !! WOW !! Forgot how much fun it was to shoot that thing
My poor pistols didn't even get fired this weekend....