S9 Episode 279: Are You Loading Your Bullets Too Long? Rethinking Seating Depth & Bullet Jump

So there's a couple things to talk about when it comes to reloading.

We are and have been working on our reloading class for our Patreon online long range shooting school, online reloading class, and of course, we're getting into our custom gunsmithing parts of what we're doing as well.

In the midst of the reloading class, though, we are getting ready to cover seating depths, and we got some emails about some primers and some questions that we're gonna cover that I think are worthwhile talking about.

But we're getting ready to record our episode on seating depth for the 6.5 Creed that we're actually getting ready to make ammo for for the class.

One of the things I wanna share with a lot of the shooters out there, especially those that are new, is we are going to find the length of the bullet to the ogive.

So in other words, how far can we seat the bullet out of the case before it comes in contact with the rifling? This is an important number to know.

That way we know that we're under that length, and we're not jamming our bullet into the rifling, which can cause pressure.

A lot of times you'll read on the forums and everything out there that everybody likes to jump, you know, one or two thou off the lands, or, you know, they're trying to get them as close to or even partly jammed into, depending on the sport that you're using this for, into the rifling.

One of the missed opportunities here, though, is getting the opportunity to load a big jump.

So everybody always wants to stay as close as possible.

Well, if you're trying to stay three, three thousandths off the lands, that's the width of a human hair.

And I'll be honest with you, in teaching a reloading class here for more than 10 years and having lots of clients come through and measuring the length of a rifle, all the people in the class are using the same rifle, and they all come up with s- different depths using the same tools and the same bullet.

So if we can't get 10 people to come up with the same measurement using the same tools, because there's a lot of feel to this, you have to give yourself a little bit of a break when you're trying to seat to something so exact as one or two or three thou off the lands.

And I always tell people you got the concept of, yeah, getting the bullet out of the case a little bit, maybe keeping it out of that neck shoulder junction area.

You know, there's some theories as to why that might be good in case you have donuts and some other things formed in there.

But a lot of times loading too long, you know, it, it...

Really, I think you miss a golden opportunity to what-- to find what might be the most accurate load for the rifle.

The other theory with loading bullets long is you're freeing up a lot of the case volume.

You're not compressing the load.

So the more you can get that long bullet out of the neck and out of the case, the more volume you have for powder, and I get that part is too.

Of course, we don't want to be putting so much powder into that we're seating the bullet that we're crunching it down into place.

That doesn't sound like a really great ideal situation to be in.

But that's why they have different burn rates.

That's why they have different types of powders too, that you can actually control that as well One of the big missed opportunities, though, is being open-minded to creating jump for the bullet to the rifling.

What we have found here, and we were talking with, we have a new team member on board, his name's Charles.