Good Monday Evening! It is that time of the month again, we get to talk about all the great things that have happened over the last week. In website news, the biggest announcement is that we’ve officially crossed 100,000 views. It’s a small number, compared to a lot of website traffic out there but it is a milestone that I am happy to have hit. It took us a little over two years to get there, and I have not spent any money in terms of promoting the site. So it’s a neat achievement. Thanks to everyone who has made it possible.
This past week I have been working on quite a few reloading-related projects, namely processing a bunch of 338 Lapua brass. It’s all once fired brass that has been sitting in storage and needed to be deprimed, and cleaned. If you have not tried it, or have been thinking about trying it, wet tumbling with stainless steel media is really the way to go. The results have always had me impressed, and it typically goes quicker and leaves less of a residue than any other media I’ve tried.
I know that a lot of people are not big on the “Wow” shiny factor on their reloads, and for a long time, I did not care as much either. So long as they worked and did not foul up my die or rifle I was happy. As I am slowing down, getting older, I find I appreciate the little things and sometimes those little things are nice clean shiny brass. While you can definitely get that with a bit of liquid car wax and corn cob media, the wet tumbling method just seems to do it faster.
My only complaint is that getting the primer pockets perfectly clean seems to be tricky. I am using the Stainless Steel pins, and I do wonder if the chips might be a bit more aggressive. I also wonder if the primer pockets might be a bit hard to clean when a magnum primer is used, given the heat and heat-related etching that likely takes place. I am not saying you can’t get picture-perfect, cleaned primer pockets using the stainless steel media and wet tumbling, I just have not found the right combination of time, additives, and pins to get it right for these 338 Lapua cases.
Another thing that may be worth mentioning is that wet media tumbling with stainless steel media seems to be a bit louder than vibratory tumbling with dry media. Which for most people, that’s not a big deal. When you live in an apartment, or you have neighbors directly adjacent to you, it could be a bigger issue. There are some rubber-lined tumblers on the market that are a good deal quieter than the tumbler I have been using. So your experience may vary and you may not have a problem with it. Since the vast majority of hobby-level reloading has been done in an apartment, or other shared space, I am probably unusually wary of the noise or inconvenience that my hobby may have on others.
Cleaning up some brass was not my only firearm-related venture this past week. I also replaced a magazine tube on a Benelli M4. We swapped out the factory reduced capacity importation rule compliant tube, with the US-made “proper capacity” tube. I’ll be honest, I was a bit disappointed, from everything I had read online, and the youtube videos that I have watched, I expected it to be a hassle. In an odd twist of fate, it was not. It was a pretty straightforward process. I’ll have a write-up done on it in a few weeks. Suffice it to say, this was not a big issue, and I may be I got lucky, but I wonder if people are not warming up the receiver enough to break down the thread locker that Benelli applies at the factory.
That is everything I have for this week. There are a few things I am working on in the background for the website, things take a while to come together, so stay tuned for that. It likely will not happen until after the holidays. As always if you are looking to get in touch, the best way is to send me an email at jay@theballisticassistant.com. You may check us out on Parler, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. If you’d like to submit a load to our load database, the instructions are here.
As always, shoot straight and stay safe!
The Ballistic Assistant