reloading 5.56mm with CFE223 and 55gr FMJ----with update

Sounds kinda boring and vanilla, right?

Lake City never-fired pulldown cases, still have the Uncle Sugar primer.  I miked a pile of them for head-to-cone length and separated them into cases with .003" or less under nominal, and those with .004 or more under nominal, and used these shorter ones for this trial.

Generic 55 grain FMJ (Hornady?  IMI?  Milsurp?  can't remember) but they've been tumbled in molybdenum disulfide powder in a pill bottle for a few hours.

Hornady's manual, on the page for 5.56mm NATO instead of .223 or 5.56 Service Rifle, says CFE223 goes max at 27.6 grains  Hodgdon's site says 27.4.  With a 20" barrel, a startling 3200 fps. 

So I rolled 5 each starting there and going downward to 26.6 gr in .2gr increments, so I would start shooting them at the bottom of the charge weights and move up, stop at first pressure signs. 16" Bushmaster barrel.  I should be able to stretch 3050 fps out of that with 55 grainers, maybe? 

Nope.  2826fps. The bolt wasn't locking open until I shot the 27.4 grainers.  Cases come back out with HTC of about .002" over.

Feedback, people.  Meanwhile I'm pulling all that are left, and starting over. 

Update 20190201:  Small sample size, but 27.6gr yields 2834 fps.  27.8gr, 2865fps.  28.0gr the MV dips to 2862, 28.2gr @ 2916fps.

I'm moving back to WC844.   

The Collective needs martial poster artists!

Sourced from one of the social disease networks: 

What the artist should have been going for:  

  

One more bold, dramatic face fixed on a bold, dramatic future somewhere in the distance, off to the  reader's Left. 

another wish list item

I've always gotten an adrenaline rush from ELP's "The Barbarian."

Since youngest Toad, now in excess of 6 vertical feet of stature, has joined his school's marching band, I suggested that somehow The Barbarian could be arranged for a marching band.  I can hear it in my mind's ear. 

While looking for a marching band arrangement, this you tu b came up.  Who knew that, yet again, ELP repurposed a classical piece as spaceman progrock?

These guys---3 Hungarians and a Usonan---knocked it the fuck out of the park. 

well we just sit around here

Midway 1292:  new motor from Grainger costs more than a new tumbler. 

New tumbler:  Amazon is undercutting MidwayUSA something sick. 

Amazon:  "hey why not stream some music from a bearded Justin Timberlake while you are sitting around in your house waiting for your tumbler?" 

Midway 1292 tumbler

It just blew up. 

I was cleaning up some 6.5 Grendel brass and some Lake City 7.62 after success at a range.  Stopped the tumbler to have a look, figured they needed a little more cowbell. 

I flicked the switch, and sparks jumped out from beneath the bowl, then smoke curled up from within. 

Motor is smoked.  It had a good run, I probably bought it in '92 or '93, before joining my Sainted Wife in matrimony. 

Though running it on the floor of a dusty garage might have hastened its demise.  

Maybe somebody has a replacement motor. 

Hello, Miss Margaret

 

Luth-AR out back, Wolff extra power buffer spring, home-milled 80% lower, no-name eBay modular trigger, Voodoo integral bolt carrier, DeadShot 24" Grendel barrel and bolt, Odin click-adjustable gas block, no-name tubular handguard.   Athlon 4-14x44 FFP.  

and I'm out a 20-year-old drill press, it roasted as I was finishing the milling in this lower. The Polymer80 jig kit was handy, it will probably make it through a second lower.  I'll do a new lower for Bobbie Jo.  

Anybody make a pistol grip that looks like a Springer XD?  

maybe this can be witnessed only in flyover country

or again, maybe not: 

along the shoulder of a US highway as it passes through the former economic dynamo of the town, there poddled an electric scooter, facing against the traffic, with a guy sitting on it, using one leg to try to push it along. 

So let me get this straight.  A person who depends on an electric scooter to get around, riding a scooter with maybe not enough power left in the battery, or a motor nearly worn out, using one leg to boost it. 

If he's strong enough to boost his own electric scooter, maybe he does not need an electric scooter. 

At his rate, I've been home half an hour since driving past him.  I could probably find him and capture some video. 

tracer for 6.5mm

it's begun to annoy me that tracers are not available for 6.5mm, compared to US or Soviet calibers.

The prospect of  forming a cavity in a boattail and filling it with barium nitrate, magnesium, and other pyrophoric unobtainium compounds doesn't thrill me either.

Applique tracer devices stuck to otherwise non-tracer bullets intrigue me.  Glowammo seems to have disappeared, and may never have been introduced in rifle calibers anyway.  And there may be a reason they were not introduced.  Velocities too high for human eyes to track the glow or for the device to hang on to the tail, chamber pressures too high for the applique to withstand?

So I wonder if a phosphor compound could be mixed with ground glass filler and an epoxy, and dabbed on the tail of a bullet?  Would the intense heat and light of the burning propellant cause the phosphor to light up, but not burn up?

the next Grendel

I need a woman's name for this. She'll wear a 24" barrel and a 4-14x44 scope.