JT
ADDRESSING "FINICKY" SEMI-AUTO LOADING
Thursday, January 28, 2021, 07:39

Over the past couple years I have been tossing my spent .45 ACP brass into 5 gallon buckets. I have shot enough to accumulate three such buckets full of brass. I was always going to get to this brass “someday.” So instead of spending the time I prefer to use eating at Jalapeno’s Mexican Restaurant I decided to attack the .45 ACP brass instead of Arroz Con Pollo. If I had realized how much time and effort it was going to take I may have seriously reconsidered.
How many rounds of brass will three five-gallon buckets hold? The first thing I did was sort everything by head stamps. I don’t know how practical this is, however I do know when I did a test with .44 Special brass my groups with all of one kind of brass were smaller than the groups resulting from mixed brass. Was it enough to make it practical to sort? That is debatable.
I looked at every piece of .45 ACP brass in those three buckets and sorted them individually. This allowed tossing out any that had small primer pockets as well as those I knew were old military brass I started loading 40 years ago. When I got through sorting I had 5,250 pieces of quality brass ready to be reloaded. There were 10 different head stamps saved for loading with 1,370 being Starline and these were followed by 895 Winchesters, 565 Federals, and 547 Remingtons with six other brands bringing the total amount. Now it was time to really start to work. Using a RCBS RockChucker single stage press each case was sized and de-primed using the Lee Undersized Carbide Sizing Die. After this I then used the Lee Universal Expanding Die to just kiss the mouth of the case enough to allow the bullet to enter. The use of these two dies insure the tightest possible bullet to case fit. This is especially important with .45 ACP loads as there is no crimping groove. Sixgun cartridges receive a heavy role crimp while semi-automatic cartridges which head space on the front of the case are taper crimped.
After priming each case one at a time with Winchester Large Pistol Primers using the RCBS Bench Mounted Priming Tool (I’m now up to handling the brass cases a total of 21,000 times) the next step is to charge each case with powder using a loading block so I can look in each case with a flashlight. Bullets are then seated and then separately taper crimped using the Lee Factory Crimp Die which brings the total handling of the cases up to 36,750 times. (If it wasn’t for the fact that my RockChucker is equipped with a Case Kicker which automatically kicks each piece of brass out of the shell holder and into a container as each operation is finished there would be 21,000 more). Is it/was it worth it? I don’t want to even count the number of hours spent or the energy expended, however this is overshadowed by the fact I have over 5,000 rounds of .45 ACP loads which are as perfect as I can make them.
The use of the Lee Undersized Sizing Die, Lee Universal Expanding Die, and the Lee Factory Crimp Die accomplish two problems encountered with .45 ACP loads. One is when shooting them in a semi-automatic pistol while the other happens with these loads used in a sixgun. In the former we have to watch out for bullets being pushed back into the case thus raising pressure while in the latter the problem is just the opposite as the bullets can move forward under recoil. The use of these three dies, even though it requires one extra loading step, prevents either one of these situations occurring.