My brother brought a 22 rim fire kit I'll see if he well comment on it.

What powders are optimal?

I emailed them and asked if they were considering the 32 rimfire. They said they were working on it.

Dave

very interesting
I hope to read more about this

Man! I have to have one of those kits!

..................................................................

That is really cool! Brian

quote:

Originally posted by ForrestB:
What powders are optimal?

Hodgdon Universal Clays, the one they mention in the review, is right next to Unique on the burn chart.

http://www.lasc.us/BurnRatePrint.htm

Some observations from a couple of years of pulling & reloading 22WMR to subsonic loads.

You need an exceptionally accurate powder scale to get reliable groups

Using a balance scale its necessary to get the arm swinging upward to rest slowly without oscillating to get consistent powder loads.
If the beam oscillates to rest the difference can be 0.1 gn............this is a lot (%) in a small case.

I only use cup & core OEM loaded shells to pull & reload with lighter powder loads & different cup & core projectiles.

FWIW

Good luck.............& report in.

A lot of R&D went into our present commercial primer mixtures. What happens when we are forced to use the home-brewed stuff?

What about the possibility of using jacketed bullets .22 LR? Like the Barnes 30 grain or Speer 33 grain. Placing my order today, it's not a total loss with the bullet mold.

IIRC all .22 rim fire bullets are heeled. Maybe not .22 Magnums but all the .22 S/L/LR. I don't know if jacketed bullets will seat and still allow the round to be chambered.

Most commercial jacketed bullets will be .224", unless you seek out the .223" bullets made for the early Hornets, Bees, etc., made from rimfire barrels. Rimfire barrels have different internal dimensions depending on manufacturer, but all will be smaller than barrels intended for .22 centerfire cartridges.

The idea here is to make .22 rimfire reloads possible. Unless you are going to breech-seat the bullets ahead of a charged case with no bullet (a blank, of sorts), you need the heeled bullets. A couple of smaller bullet mould makers offer moulds for them.

Breech-seating lead bullets (bullets made without the heel) takes you into a new world of accuracy, but that is another thread.

My satellite connection sucks and maybe I missed it, but what is a .22 reloader going to use for priming compound?

http://22lrreloader.com/design-details/

http://sharpshooter-22lr-reloa...l-repriming-compound

quote:

To prime the cases there are two recommended sources for priming compound. The first is the tips of commonly available strike-anywhere matches, the second is the shock sensitive material found in the paper coils used in children’s cap pistols. (See Picture)

http://22lrreloader.com/22lr-reloader-reviews/

Corrosion? Our .22 target rifles are vulnerable. It took 30+ years of experimenting to develop today's non-corrosive priming.

If you're so deep in shit that you are forced to reload 22LR, corrosion is the least of your worries!
But you could do as they did in the black powder days.

quote:

Originally posted by waterman:
Corrosion? Our .22 target rifles are vulnerable. It took 30+ years of experimenting to develop today's non-corrosive priming.

I wonder a little bit how much difference if any; Aguila uses older Eley priming equipment, mentions it prominently in their advertising. Maybe for hunting and plinking it's not significant.

In the days of black powder .22 rimfires and copper cases, the black powder fouling neutralized many of the corrosive properties of the priming compound. The 80 % + black powder content of semi-smokeless continued to limit the corrosivity of the priming compound. When smokeless powder was first used in .22 rimfires before WW1, priming compounds were very corrosive. In 1917, Townsend Whelen wrote (in his book "the American Rifle") that if you used smokeless cartridges, there was no way to preserve your barrel. It would be ruined.

It was not until the late 1930s that truly non-corrosive priming compounds appeared. It took some pretty good chemists 30 years to develop rimfire priming compounds.

Target-grade ammunition was loaded with semi-smokeless powder (King's or Lesmok) until just before WW2. The reason was that the priming needed for reliable ignition of smokeless powder would ruin a target rifle barrel in a single season or sooner.

Are we going back to scraping priming from match heads? Or will some of the components of priming compounds appear, to be blended and made effective in our home workshops?

When Aguila advertises that they use Eley priming, I think they mean that they use machinery replaced at the Eley factory in the 1990s.

I just bought 8000 new primed Eley 22lr cases & was going to machine a mold to cast my 22 bullets as I think they need a heel don't they?