Month: February 2020

Good Monday Morning/Afternoon/Evening

This past week was pretty productive for us at the Ballistic Assistant. In case you are curious, we are nearing 6,000 views to the site. Our main focus has been, and will continue to be, providing content to all of you. Hopefully we will develop the site into a useful resource. There is still a lot of work to be done, but we are getting there. We appreciate everyone sticking with us.

Last week we continued the series of write ups on Handloading Your Way taking a hard look at some of the ways to measure/meter powder. All of this is based on my experience, and this write up hopefully covers the spectrum from the inexpensive, to the border line obscene.

Handloading Your Way: Powder Metering

Unfortunately when tearing down the Mauser Action for the Old Mauser to Scout Rifle build, I made a mistake and torqued the action. It was one of those, “I should have bought the proper tool and not tried to improvise” mistakes. We have sourced a new Remington 700 Short Action for the build, and will continue on. We are planning on doing some things that are outside of normal on this build, look for a Design Evaluation post this week detailing what we are thinking for this build.

We also made some progress with the Spud Gun project, there should be an update coming this week or next. We’ve got the part in to measure pressure, we have a PVC “Gun” put together, and are now just working on the ignition system.

Lastly I wanted to give a shout out to Utah Hyrdo Graphics. They did the paint on the VZ-58, and it came out looking quite nice! We are almost finished with this project, just a few things to be done before we can call it finished. For now, here’s how it looks.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for subscribing, and as always if you have any suggestions, comments or complaints, please email me at jayandrew338@gmail.com. Alternatively you can check out our growing Facebook page.

Have a Good Week!

The Ballistic Assistant

Good Monday Morning All!

We’ve been taking a hard look at some of the basic equipment used in reloading. Whether you do load development as a profession, or you are just getting started we hope to give a good outline of some of the equipment out there. Recommendations are based on equipment that we have personally used.

Handloading Your Way – The Press

We will continue the Handloading Your Way series with looking at powder handling equipment. That should go live sometime this week. These are fun articles to write, and with all reviews, if we haven’t used it we don’t disparage it.

We also have a couple of local business shout outs we added to the page. Boring Rifles located in Beaver, Utah is a small business focused on building custom rifles. Their rifles are anything but Boring. Whether you’re looking for next long range paper puncher, or your next hunting rifle, check these guys out.

Utah Hydro Graphics is a small business located in Beaver, Utah. These guys do everything from Hydrodipping to Cerakote. They are doing the cerakote on the VZ-58 build, which will be an upcoming writeup. If you are considering having your rifle or pistol coated, give the fellows at utah Hydro Graphics a try, you won’t be disappointed.

As far as other news, we received a bunch of small components needed to progress some of the other projects that we’ve been doing on the site. So expect to see some progress in the near future on some of these projects.

Thank you for those who have subscribed, and who take the time to visit the site. If you have comments, questions, or suggestions please feel free to shoot an email to jayandrew338@gmail.com. You can also check us out on Facebook.

Have a Great Week!

The Ballistic Assistant

Good Monday Morning!

I hope everyone has had a wonderful weekend. Unfortunately we did not have any website updates over the past week. With that said, a few things caught my eye over the past week that you might find interesting.

Cutting Edge Bullets, known for their machined copper solids, announced an new 22LR load during SHOT Show. I missed this in my initial summary, but felt it was worthy of at least a mention.

These unique bullets are likely too long to feed in a 10/22 but they offer high BC values. It will be interesting to see how they perform. There are some serious questions I have, such as will they stabilize in a standard 22LR barrel? Only time will tell, but it is refreshing to see a company try something new with a cartridge that’s over 100 years old. It will also be interesting to see if they offer these in a 22 WMR cartridge.

I recently got my hands on a Rock River Arms VR80. This is a 12 Gauge mag fed shotgun. Unfortunately I did not get to shoot it, but I did strip it down in preparation for cerakote and reassemble it post cerakote. For an MSRP of $699, I was impressed by the build quality. The upper was completely unique, but the lower stripped similar to an AR. Handling the shotgun felt similar to an AR-10.

Having spent quite a bit of money on my Benelli M4, I almost felt a bit cheated, almost. The extended mags for the VR-80 thing are borderline absurd, due to the single stack design. I doubt it will feed the 1 3/4in shotshells which are becoming popular. ( I am still waiting for a company to come out with a shotgun designed solely around feeding the 1 3/4 12 Gauge Shorts. Heaven knows my Benelli won’t).

With the popularity of 3-Gun and Tactical type shotguns, it will be interesting to see if anyone tries to bring the 12-Gauge shell in to the 21st century. I see a rimless 1 3/4in shot shell using a service pressure of ~25,000psi, with a gauge of 20.5/16.5/12.5 (to prevent chambering in standard 20, 16 or 12 gauge). This would allow for large capacities in a tube magazine, or enable double stack magazines all while shortening the action.

Anyway, now I’m dreaming. That is all I have for this week. I hope you have a wonderful week!

As always if you have any questions, suggestions, comment or concerns feel free to reach out to me at jayandrew338@gmail.com. Alternatively you could check us out on Facebook.

The Ballistic Assistant

Good Monday Morning!

Hope everyone is recovering from the Super Bowl weekend. To aid those in recovery mode, Utah has ordered a snow storm. So far it’s dropped 6in and its suppose to last until tomorrow. Giving all Utahns (Except those in St. George) valid excuses as to why they were late to work 😉

This year we were not able to attend SHOT Show, but we still wanted to look at what companies were doing. In addition to looking at some of the newer powders on the market, we took a look at some of the new products being offered by companies to manufacturers. These products don’t get the limelight, but some people might be interested in them nonetheless. Check out some of these highlights here;

SHOT Shot Highlights

We also updated the Relative Burn Rate chart to include some of the newer powders released in the last two years. It is important to remember with any burn rate chart, that the positions are approximate, and powder burn rate is dependent on the cartridge, and pressures it is subject to. Burn rate charts are a useful tool to see what powders might work well in a cartridge, but are not a substitute for published load data.

Updated Relative Burn Chart

For inquiring minds, the groundhog saw his/her shadow, and we can expect an early spring. If today’s weather is any indication, Mother Nature disagrees.

As always if you have questions, comments or corrections, email us at Jayandrew338@gmail.com. If you want to join the conversation, check us out on Facebook.

Thanks for Subscribing!

The Ballistic Assistant