quote:

Originally posted by FN in MT:
Congratulations NikonUser! What an accomplishment.

Your cover is blown now.

FN in MT

Thanks, very kind.

Yeah, I know. Sigh.

Let me too offer my congratulations on your win. It's nice when a shooter of your caliber is willing to share his knowledge and helps the newer shooters among us. I know I have learned a great deal from your posts and appreciate it.

Semper Fi...Sig Marine

Thank you very much, Sig Marine, I truly appreciate the kind thoughts.

The Giraud trimmer has finally arrived and just in time as I have a lot of match brass to load. I will be doing the setup and whatever adjustment may be needed and then I will be using it this weekend. I'll report on that in due time.

quote:

Originally posted by NikonUser:
The Giraud trimmer has finally arrived and just in time as I have a lot of match brass to load. I will be doing the setup and whatever adjustment may be needed and then I will be using it this weekend. I'll report on that in due time.

Nikon: I know you f/l resize every time you process and you have a lot to process. How have you been trimming before?

RMD

Actually I was not trimming at every load. I truly hated trimming and delayed it as much as possible. In the past I would trim only every fifth load using a contraption made up of a Forster trimmer, a power screwdriver, a piece of wood and a plastic bullet box. The whole thing kept the power screwdriver in line with the trimmer and it worked; after a fashion. After trimming, I would chamfer and deburr the cases using my trusty rusty RCBS Trim mate.

I discovered that I was in fact waiting too long to trim (that cost me a state championship, but that's another story,) and I got a WFT device to attach to a power drill and started trimming every 3rd load.

I hated the WFT; it was painful. I tried various tricks to hold the case without mangling my fingers; nothing satisfactory worked. And I still needed to run the cases through the Trim mate.

It was undeniable that my most accurate ammo was the one loaded after the trim/chamfer/deburr operation. I did well in Raton with just trimmed cases and I won Texas State with same. So being the smart guy that I am, after getting hit in the head multiple times with the results (you don't have to tell me much more than 22 times,) I decided to spend the money and get the king of case prep devices; the Giraud Trimmer and will be processing my brass through it every time; it trims, chamfers and deburrs in one operation.

So my new regimen for match ammo will be: anneal with Giraud annealer, F/L resize with Redding S-Type bushing small base die, tumble in my ancient Lyman, trim with Giraud trimmer, prime with RCBS tool, load powder with Chargemaster and GP-250 and seat with Redding Competition seater.

I adjusted the trimmer to my desired length and the thing is amazing. It trims, chamfers and deburrs cases in a few seconds. I should have gotten this device a long time ago.

Congrats on the win! Yes, your cover is blown. I truly enjoy you sharing your knowledge of long range shooting and loading. It's triggering my interest in the discipline.

I might have missed it. But what press do you use?

quote:

Originally posted by SeattleDude:
I might have missed it. But what press do you use?

You didn't miss it; I never mentioned it and for that I apologize. For almost 30 years, I used an RCBS Rock Chucker Jr, then about 4 years ago, I bought a Redding T-7 turret press. I was using Redding dies almost exclusively, I figured why not a Redding press. It's a great press and I like it very much; it holds 7 dies at any one time so I never have to mess with my .308 match dies.

The Jr press served me well for many decades and I loaded a huge number of rounds on that thing; lots of 9mm in the 80s when I was competing in IPSC. It saw a lot of .223 when I was competing in Service Rifle in the 90s and early 00s. When I started doing a lot of .308 is was a little more difficult; 20 rounds in one sitting is one thing, 200 rounds is another. So at the end of the last decade, I got the T-7 and it's been great.

I still have the Jr, but it's stored away somewhere.

quote:

Originally posted by scratchy:
Congrats on the win! Yes, your cover is blown. I truly enjoy you sharing your knowledge of long range shooting and loading. It's triggering my interest in the discipline.

Scratchy, thanks for the kind words.

Well, another device has been incorporated into my loading. While the GemPro 250 worked fine and helped me tremendously in eliminating the WTF shots on target, I just could not get past the large increase of time spent weighing charges on it. Also, with the Nationals and the AZ regionals coming up in a few months, I was dreading the 400 round loading marathon coming up.

I briefly looked at the Prometheus and just could not justify the $3400 cost coupled with the fact I may not have it in time for the events above. Add to that it's only a powder measure and not even a scale that can be used to weigh other things.

So I decided to look around for an accurate scale that would be dramatically more responsive than the GP250. I elected to buy the A&D FX-120i from an outfit in Canada that sells it much below the cost in the US. I paid $550 CDN for it, including shipping and that worked out to being $525 USD. It took 4 days to get here.

This past weekend, I loaded my first 100 rounds on it and I must say I am very pleased. The scale is FAST, even at its regular setting. It can be set to weigh faster, but it becomes more sensitive to drafts and such. I get a weight within a couple of seconds and it's solid. I can trickle or remove kernels and it detects it right away. I find that I am now waiting for my Chargemaster to dispense the next load every single time. This has cut my loading time in half but with the same precision as before.

Before anyone asks, I am NOT selling my GP250. It's a great little scale and I will keep it as backup for my FX-120i.

I have changed my methodology a little bit and now I get the CM to dispense my target weight and I transfer it to the FX where I either do nothing to it because it's dead-on or usually add between 3-6 kernels. Sometimes, I have to remove a few kernels; plastic tweezers work well.

In my 100 rounds Sunday, I had about 8 that were spot on from the CM, 4 or 5 that were over, one of which was over by .2gr but was indicating my target weight on the CM. The vast majority were undercharges with the CM indicating the target weight. Two of those were as much as .24 grains under; that's a lot at 1000 yards.

The FX performed flawlessly throughout the 100 rounds, as one would expect from a $770 scale (if one bought it at a US site.)

I found and purchased what I believe is a quite similar scale to yours for a slightly different reason(my GemPro 250 failed after about 100 loadings). However I got mine for around $75 on Ebay. The downside is that mine is likely an older,or a discontinued, a QA reject, or optimistically a marketing side/back door but it is a model which doesn't display in grains. So I must convert/operate in milligrams (which is not a big deal for me). Several years ago I found a pocket sized scale from the same manufacturer(whom I believe may be http://digiweighusa.com) and while it is still a superb instrument its weighing platform is quite(too) small. I only paid ~$40 for it(current price is ~$100 on ebay).

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Orthogonal,

Well, after much bitching and moaning, Nikon has converted me to a secondary scale loader.

I loaded some test runs up for a friend and his 75 Gr Hornady HPBT match bullets and shot them today.

I ran ten of the "chosen" loads thru the chrono and had a 20 FPS extreme spread. Each load thrown on the auto loader and then finalized to the second decimal place on the Gem Pro.

The group would have been a .402 MOA at 100 yards had I not yipped the last shot.

So I have now incorporated the Gem Pro into my scheme and have a reasonably solid work flow setup for my reloading tasks.

I have been to the mountain and seen the light.

Thanks for the "learnin'".

RMD

That is excellent. The GP 250 is a great little scale that served me well for about a year, loading over 2000 match rifle rounds. I just needed it to go faster.

I will add that the next step to get the ES to single digits is to anneal the brass every time.

Before you ask, I haven't a clue what my SD or ES is and I don't care. What I care about is that I can put 5-6 consecutive rounds in the X ring at 1000 yards every once in a while when I have the conditions right. That's half-MOA at 1000 yards and for that the SD must be in the low single digits.

Now. If I could do that all the time, I would win every friggin match that I entered. In my dreams.

Reading through all of this makes me realize that I have a LOT to learn...thanks for such detailed posts.

Thank you for this thread. The details offered here are impressive.

When you get time, can you please tell us about your experience with the Giraud trimmer? What, if anything, have you done to adjust it?

Sunbear and deepocean, thank you so much for the nice comments; I appreciate them.

About the Giraud trimmer, I have not had to do much in terms of adjustment. I resized a few retired cases (10) and zipped them through the device to learn how to do it quickly and easily and to see how it was set out of the box. I adjusted it some, just get a little closer to my minimum case length set for the way my shoulder is pushed back. Then I ran several more resized retired cases to confirm everything and locked down the setting and ran a few more.

What is critical when using the Giraud is to apply the same pressure on the case every time and doing the little flick at the end as you remove the case from the cutting hear.

I can zip through a box of 100 cases in about 5-8 minutes, something like that. Where I used to dread having to trim, now it's a non event, just another small easy step in case processing.

Do you use the Giraud Meplat cutter accessory?