Monday, November 16, 2020

One of the perpetual yells of handloading (updated)

is mentioning a rifle load that uses pistol/shotgun powders, and the screams of "You'll blow that gun up!"
 
Be it noted that improper use of such powders CAN do anything from damage to destroy a rifle(and quite possibly injure you), so care is required.  But with cast bullets(I would never try these with jacketed*) there are a lot of tried & true uses for those powders in rifles.
 
One of them is '170 to 180-grain gas-checked bullet and 16.0 grains 2400' I first read about here(which also lists several other loads for numerous cartridges).  I've tried this in .30-06, .308, 7.62x54r, and .303 British with very good results.  

Another one is here, "The Load" is 13.0 Grains of Red Dot.  I haven't tried this one(just bought a pound of it to give this a try), but like the previous article this has been used but a lot of people for quite a few years with good results.

If you try these, take great care to do it right.  The #1 worry with these is that since they fill so little of the case compared to a rifle or black powder, it's easy to double-charge a case and not notice.  Which means(my methods) you either charge one case, then stick a bullet to make sure you can't do that, or if you charge more than one case check every damned one before you start seating bullets.  NO exceptions.
 
Update:
In comments Joe linked to two pages on the subject of pistol powders in rifles, well worth reading.


*Yes, the Red Dot piece does mention using it with jacketed.  Personally I'll probably stick with cast for these types of loads.

6 comments:

Phelps said...

I would wager that more guns have blown up while feeding factory loads than hand loads.

(Based on people who poorly maintain guns or attempt to "improve" guns almost always running factory loads, and people running hand loaded ammo generally understanding how guns work and why taking a hacksaw to them or never cleaning them is generally unhealthy.)

Eaton Rapids Joe said...

This guy shot a boatload of cast bullets in multiple calibers using "pistol" powders. His data is limited because he was not shooting any gas-checked or paper-patched bullets and he was very specifically looking for the velocity limits for Marlin microgroove rifling.

http://www.gmdr.com/lever/pistolpowi.htm

His actual load data can be found by selecting the cartridge along the left side of this page: http://www.gmdr.com/lever/lowveldata.htm

Firehand said...

Eaton, thank you. I've seen the 'lever' data page, but not the 'pistolpowi' page, interesting reading.

Stuart said...

Is is my understanding that the danger associated with reduced rifle loads is one of erratic pressure. If some sort of filler is not used, the powder tends to move away from the primer when the firearm is horizontal. This causes erratic ignition resulting in varying burn rates and pressure spikes. These spike have caused rapid, uncontrolled firearm disassembly and subsequent tissue damage to the operator. This is fairly well documented but still not fully understood. If you're going to use reduced loads it behooves you to use a filler such as Cream of Wheat (or Kareem of Wheat nowadays)

Firehand said...

With some powders that seems to be the case, I've read of it myself. The other fix seems to be to chamber a round, then tilt the rifle muzzle up to put the powder to the rear, then level it and fire.

Anonymous said...

It seems to me I've read some old notes from Frankford Arsenal from when they were developing the .30/03 and .30/06 cartridges. Unique can get you 2500 ft/sec with a 150gr spitzer bullet in '06 from a Springfield rifle, but not the 27-2800 that was the military spec.

Unique seems to have a very forgiving pressure curve. If you believe modeling tools like Quickload, you can do similar things with a lot of the 20th Century bottleneck service rifle cartridges. A standard weight ball projectile over a charge of Unique with about 70% load density--that is, 70% powder in the case and 30% empty space--can get to within about 10% of the velocity of a full power round using slow burning rifle powder and keep peak pressure in the 50K to 55K PSI range. This is, of course, offered for entertainment purposes only.

And no, you can't design a super short .30 caliber cartridge to be loaded with 35-ish grains of Unique to fill it to the base of the bullet and still get 150gr bullets to 2500 ft/sec with safe pressures. The increased charge density drives pressures way up into the "grenade" area, sort of like bullet setback in a pistol cartridge.