Category: Uncategorized

First Monday in March. This year is flying by!

We had a busy week last week and got a lot done. Thus we were able to get a few things published.

I made a mistake when I tried to improvise my own tool for disassembly of the Mexican Mauser action. I twisted the action, and when I tried to correct it, I really just made it worse. No one to blame but myself, and I learned what not to do. I have been able to source an additional Rem 700 Small Action, so the heart of the build lives on. I took a moment to do a design evaluation before continuing on the project. This lays out the goals of the build, and discusses some of the challenges that we may expect to encounter with the build.

308 Scout Rifle: Design Eval

As mentioned previously Potato Cannons, also known as Spud guns, are really what kicked off my journey into the world of Ballistics. As a fun side project, I want to revisit my youth and apply what I know now to this simple spud accelerator. We formally kick off this series of write ups with the construction of the gun itself. I want to get a little bit fancy with the ignition, metering and mixing set up, so expect separate write ups covering those systems.

The Humble Spud Gun: Construction

It’s been awhile since we’ve had a formal update on the VZ-58 project. We were able to get the rifle a fresh coat of paint. I am extremely pleased with how it turned out. Thanks to Utah Hydro Graphics for a job well done. Just a few more things left to do on this build before we can sign it off as complete!

VZ-58: A Fresh Coat of Paint

That is it for this week. Thanks to all those who have subscribed! If you have comments questions, or suggestions please email me at jayandrew338@gmail.com or give us a shout over on our Facebook page.

The Ballistic Assistant

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

Good Monday Morning!

Lots of exciting news coming out of SHOT Show this week. I am working on a write up going over some of the highlights, that pertain to ammunition manufacturing, and industry developments.

Last week posted a write up that I had been wanting to do since the launch of the website. Ways to Measure Pressure, presented is a general overview of how pressure is measured in the industry, including the equipment used, a some of the pros and cons to each method.

Ways to Measure Pressure

Being able to accurately measure pressure and velocity in a controlled manner really sets a company apart. With that said it can be a large investment depending on how the testing is done. It can seem a rather complex task to a new comer, hopefully this breaks it down to something that be easily understood.

For the most part I have slowed down posting to try and get at least one article posted per week. This gives me more time to work on projects, and then to do the write ups on those projects. If you have questions, suggestions or comments please shoot me an email at jayandrew338@gmail.com. You can also check us out on Facebook.

Thanks!

The Ballistic Assistant.

Good Monday Morning!

This week is the kick off for 2020 SHOT Show. This is a yearly industry Show held by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). It is closed to public, you have to have a media pass, or be a company that is involved in firearm industry to be able to attend. Having been to SHOT, I can tell you it is huge, and it is very busy.

Many companies wait until SHOT show to announce new products. We are of course excited to see what new cartridges, bullets and powder are announced. We’ll be paying attention this week and hope to give information to you on these new products. If you want to learn more about SHOT Show click here.

This past week has been busy working on various projects. We did take some time to put together a write up on a Basic IFAK kit. This was done at a request of a reader, wanting to know what to carry that goes beyond just a basic First Aid Kit. As a EMT, I offered my thoughts on what I think should be included in a IFAK to treat incidents that may happen at the range.

Individual First Aid Kits (IFAK)

Measuring pressure, and velocity are two of the core metrics that ballisticians use to determine the viability of a cartridge. The equipment to do this is fairly expensive. Someday I hope to make that investment. Over the Christmas break I brainstormed ways to do present the concepts of pressure and velocity on my shoe string budget. The solution I came up with brought me back to my roots and what got me started in this field. Potato Cannons.

What Started It All: Spud Guns

I debated about kicking that project off with everything else I got going on, but when I looked at my project planning, I realized most of my time is spent ordering parts and getting the money together to get these projects in motion. This is a small project that is budget friendly that I can work on while I’m waiting to move the other projects forward. I realize people may discount the idea of using a Spud Gun as a firearm analog, but when you get into the details, all of the basics are there. The pressures and velocities are lower, but the mechanics are near identical.

That is all for the update this week. We’ll have a few new articles drop this week, so stay tuned. If you have questions, suggestions or comments email me at jayandrew338@gmail.com, or check us out on Facebook.

Have a Good Week!

The Ballistic Assistant

Good Monday Morning! This past week has been quite busy catching up from the long break. As such there I was only able to finish and publish one write up to the site.

I hope this write up serves as a good introduction to the ins and outs of the modern metallic cartridge case.

The Modern Cartridge Case

Next week is 2020 SHOT Show! I’m excited to read the press releases and see what’s new in the industry, specifically new reloading equipment, and reloading powders! Any new powders announce will be added to the Burn Rate Chart. So expect to see an updated chart in the coming weeks. If there is any powders that you would like information on, or need to be added to the Burn Rate Chart please reach out to me. I’ll do the research and get them added in the appropriate spot.

Thanks for subscribing, and as always, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions feel free to email me at jayandrew338@gmail.com or check us out on Facebook.

Have an Awesome Week!

The Ballistic Assistant.

Happy New Year! This is the first update of 2020!

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday break. I certainly did. I took the time to work on some planning for the website, project planning, and visiting with family. Hopefully there will be some new and exciting content for this upcoming year.

2020 SHOT Show is right around the corner and there has already been some interesting new developments with new cartridges being rumored. As details emerge we will be sure to take a closer look.

In the meantime we did do a few site updates prior to leaving for the break. Most of the work has been centered on the Photogrammetry Drone. We worked through the initial CAD modeling of the Drone and then started using some basic Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), offered by Solidworks to begin to see how the drone will glide through the air. You can read the write up on this at the link below.

Photogrammetry Drone: CAD Modeling

We also go the official go ahead to do an initial parts order for the drone. So here is the parts we’re going with and an explanation as to why I decided to go with these parts. The write up can be found at the link below.

Photogrammetry Drone: Initial Parts Ordering

In the next few weeks we will have several write ups on more fundamentals of cartridges, their design and their manufacture. With Sig Sauers announcement of the 277 Sig Fury, it will be important to understand the strengths and weakness of existing cartridge technology before we can appreciate what Sig is trying to accomplish here. Hopefully it will be adopted by SAAMI soon so we can have an industry standard spec, if not we may need to go to CIP.

As always if you have questions, concerns or general feedback you are more then welcome to reach out to me directly at jayandrew338@gmail.com or to check out our Facebook page, The Ballistic Assistant.

Thanks for being a subscriber!

The Ballistic Assistant

Another Monday, the last Monday before Christmas. Have you got your holiday shopping done yet? Me neither.

This past week was quite busy, but we still managed to get a few write ups done, and cross a few things off the ToDo list. We received the wrecked Ebee from the repair shop, in pieces, and we did a quick look at the parts that go into the Ebee and see if there’s anything that would be hard to replicate in our own drone.

Photogrammetry Drone: Examining Wreckage

We also finished putting together the airframe for our own drone. There is much to be done with this drone, but this is a good first step.

Photogrammetry Drone: Airframe

Turning back to the reason for the website, we were able to process some scrap lead into ingots. Unless you’re starting with clean lead, this is usually the first step in casting your own bullets. Here’s how we do it.

Turning Scrap Lead Into a Resource

That’s been our week. I’ll be taking a holiday break for 2 weeks, so there will be no new updates during that time. I’ll expect to have new updates by the second or third week of the new year. Thanks again for being a subscriber, and we hope to continue to bring you interesting content through 2020!

As always if you have any comments, questions or concerns, please email me at jayandrew338@gmail.com, or reach out to us on Facebook.

Happy Holidays!

The Ballistic Assistant