I got 69 usable .45 cal 200 grain SWC and 23 usable .45 cal 255 grain SWC done before the on-call phone went off and I had to stop. It was 9:00 anyway.
They look awfully shiny to me. I have no idea what the hardness is either.
I just used the ingots I got from ebay. I suppose I should buy a hardness tester.
I think I need a sizer too, the bullets measure between .452 – .455.
I’ll be trying another batch tomorrow night and maybe some more this weekend. Whee.
This is going to be very long, and picture heavy, so be warned.
This post is how I go from these raw materials:
to this finished product:
So, if you are interested, join me below the fold for our journey.Continue reading →
Time to dust off this blog.
Is this thing on?
I’ve been reloading my own ammunition for .45 ACP, .30-06 Springfield, .270 Winchester and now .45 Colt for a while.
I’m pretty happy with it, but my cheap bullet supplier – Missouri Bullet Company – is having problems. They are too successful and can’t keep up with their orders.
So it’s time to start casting my own. I can buy lead for around $1.17 a pound on eBay, and there are people on the CastBoolits forum selling it for $1.00 a pound. At that price my finished boolits will be about half the cost of Missouri Bullet.
I bought a bunch of casting stuff recently:
Yesterday I bought 2 pounds of the 50/50 bullet lube and one pound of the Carnuba Red bullet lube from White Label Lube. I can’t make my own for what they charge.
I’m planning on pan lubing my bullets and 2 pounds should last me for quite a while.
Just today I bought 50 pounds of lead on eBay for $58 shipped.
I hope it arrives by Saturday so I can cast some bullets up on Sunday!
It will be interesting to see what size the bullets come out of the molds at. I hope they are close to .452″. Otherwise I’ll have to buy a sizer (which I forgot when I bought the casting stuff.)
Now this is clever. I’m going to have to jump in and make something like this. I’ll have to make some improvements, but this is great as a starting point.
Easy-to-Build-Desk-Top-3-Axis-CNC-Milling-Machine
I will try and remember to document the build and take photos, but I’m not usually good with that. 🙂
Just think about the 1911 grip engraving possibilities. And it opens the door to CNC milling other pistol grips.
I think a machining envelope of about 6x6x6 would be adequate for most of what I want to do.
First I have to find the stepper motors…
I joined the Oakdale Gun Club a couple of weeks ago and I took Dave there on Sunday for some shooting.
It was my first trip since joining the club.
We got there around 12:00 or so on a beautiful sunny day. There were a few other cars in the lot but not too many.
We started out at the 25 yard pistol range. There were 4 or 5 people already shooting there, and they had moved the benches up so they were about 7 yards from the targets.
I brought my new Uberti Hombre in .45 Colt, my Pietta 1858 Remington replica in .44 caliber and my RIA 1911 Tactical in .45 ACP.
Dave brought his Sig Saur P-6 and Berreta 90-Two, both in 9mm.
We had attended the local gun show yesterday and I picked up a box of MagTech .45 Colt Cowboy load for $27.50 – best price I could find there. .45 Colt is spendy stuff, so I’ll be reloading that for sure.
I proceeded to run 40 rounds through the Hombre. It seems pretty accurate and hits close to point of aim – but I didn’t test it on a rest. The recoil from the MagTech ammo was stout, but not really bad. It’s not loaded really hot. I let Dave run 10 rounds though it too.
The grips seem small. My pinky finger was hanging off the bottom. I think I need to experiment with my grip some more. Dave didn’t like the grips either.
Then I loaded up and shot 18 rounds through the 1858. It’s always fun (but slow) to make smoke with the Holy Black. And that 1858 is surprisingly accurate with 25 grains of powder. I let Dave launch 6 rounds down range with it also. No fouling related issues in 24 rounds.
Dave in his best dueling pose.
Finally I tested some .45 ACP hand loads. When I started reloading I bought a box of 185gn LSWC bullets from Missouri Bullet. But I had feeding issues with them and stopped loading them up. The other day I made a couple of dummy rounds with them and they seemed to feed pretty well, so I loaded up a box of 50 with various charges of Unique.
They all fed and fired just fine. The loads were batches of 10 starting at 5.0 grains and going up to 5.8 grains by 0.2 increments.
The 5.0 grain loads were real powder puffs. They cycled the action and the bullet hit the target at point of aim, but the recoil was really mild and the brass pretty much fell out of the port at my feet.
Each increment added a little more recoil and the brass flew a little further until it got to the 5.8 grain load. That was a bit more stout, but still shot fine.
I think I’ll load up some 5.5 grain rounds and call it good.
Dave also let me put 17 rounds through his Beretta, but I don’t want to talk about where they hit the paper.
Then we moved over to the 100 yard rifle range. It was a mud pit, but we hung targets and shot at them anyway.
I brought my Remington 740 .30-06 with 25 rounds and my Savage .22. Dave had his M4 in .223. Dave had bought a new red dot scope for his M4 at the gun show and wanted to sight it in.
I out of my 25 rounds I had for my .30-06 I had 3 stove pipes and one FTF. I rechambered the FTF round three times with no go. The round didn’t even have a primer strike, so it’s possible that I pushed the shoulder back a little too far when I resized the brass.
The last time I took the .30-06 out it refused to fire most of the rounds and had light primer strikes. I replaced the hammer spring and that seems to have helped.
On the other hand, all the rounds that did fire managed to hit the paper and I rezeroed the scope a little. I really do need a new scope for that rifle…
The .22 rifle just plinked away, although the scope seems to be a little off also.
By the time we left a little after 2:00 it was getting packed.
All in all a fun couple of hours at the range.
Lessons learned:
So on Thursday 12/30/2011 I was in the basement and I heard a pretty loud noise coming from the server rack. I thought I was just losing another fan, so I didn’t pay it much attention.
Then I realized that my server was not behaving as it should, so I looked at the console. Lots of drive errors. Great.
I rebooted it and it refused to come back up. Oh boy, this is going to be fun.
I do run backups every night of the home directories and the mysql databases, and they get copied to my NAS device, so I should be in pretty good shape.
I also had another server built (that I built more than a year ago, maybe two) that I was planning on migrating to anyway, so this forced my hand.
I run a handful of email lists for some friends and a handful of websites for myself and some friends. How bad can this be?
This is long, click continue if you want the gory details.
I transferred my domains from GoDaddy to 1&1 and had a bad experience. So I sent them this letter. We will see if I get a response.
To: support@1and1.com, sales@1and1.com
I recently transferred my 5 domains from GoDaddy to 1&1. I chose 1&1 because I know you have been around for a while and your pricing was great.During the transfer process it was not obvious whether you would keep my current name servers for the domains or if they would be changed to the 1&1 name servers.
It was also not obvious how to setup non-1&1 name servers during the transfer – it may not have been possible at all.
When the domains transferred the name servers were changed to the 1&1 name servers.
This caused all my web sites to go dark and all my email to stop flowing. Needless to say, I am not happy about this.
Additionally the TTL is set to 48 hours, so it will be up to 2 days before everything is working like it should again.
I just want to express my displeasure with the way you handle domain transfers.
For a new domain purchase it makes sense to park it at 1&1 on your name servers.
For a transfer you should either default to using the existing name servers or you should make it really obvious that you will be changing them to the 1&1 name servers and also make it really obvious how to change them to my specific name servers during the transfer.
I am not new to domain transfers or DNS. I have been working in the IT field for 12 years and DNS and domain transfers are part of my job. This is by far the worst experience I have had transferring a domain between registrars.
I bought a CrashPlan (a local company) subscription a little while ago and managed to back up my data by mounting my old FreeNAS shares on my Windows 2003 server, but that is not supported by CrashPlan and it didn’t always work.
So I wasn’t happy with it.
Now that I have this new iomega NAS, I could not get CrashPlan to see the mounted drives on my Windows server.
So off to teh Googles.
CrashPlan does have a Linux version of their software, and the iomega NAS runs a Linux variant.
root@dot:/# uname -a
Linux dot.anansi-web.com 2.6.31.8 #1 Thu Sep 8 12:14:38 EDT 2011 armv5tel GNU/Linuxroot@dot:# cat /etc/debian_version
5.0.8
I found this great tutorial about how to setup CrashPlan on my NAS.
Not only was it a great tutorial, but it worked! (Not always the case.)
So my iomega NAS is now backing itself up directly to CrashPlan! Sweetness! It’s still not really supported by CrashPlan, but at least this unsupported solution works.
Since I had Friday off, and since it was relatively nice out (for November 25th anyway), and since I hadn’t been shooting for quite a long time, I thought it would be fun to run out to Bil’s farm and sling some lead.
So we did.
My iomega NAS arrived at work yesterday and I started using it last night. Here are some first impressions.
They sell it as a 2TB unit. But it’s not really. It’s two 1TB drives in a RAID 1 mirror. So the actual capacity is 1TB (actually a little less as there is an OS partition.) You can un-RAID the drives and get 2TB, but who wants to do that? On the other hand, $200 for a complete 1TB mirrored NAS solution is a pretty good price. The 4TB (actually 2TB) unit is $600. I would buy two of the 2TB units instead…
This was a slight pain. I tried to set it up at work and failed. The unit comes configured to pull an IP address with DHCP. If it can’t find a DHCP server it’s supposed to assign itself an address in the 169.254.x.x range. Then you need to install this application that goes out and finds the unit. It didn’t work at work or at home. What I had to do was let it pull an IP address and then go look at the DHCP server to find out what IP address it was using. Then I added the IP manually to the application. The best part was that when you click on the Manage button in the application, it launches your browser! Application == useless.
Once I got into the web interface the configuration was not difficult. It’s not really intuitive for non-computer types though.
The unit is pretty full-featured. You can share out the drive using AppleTalk, Windows CIFS, WebDAV, iSCSI and NFS. You can also attach it to your Active Directory server, which I tried, but I ended up just putting it into a workgroup again with full access allowed to everyone. It’s on my home network, I don’t need to lock it down.
It also supports rsync, and each share turns into an rsync module. Pretty slick.
There is also a long list of features that I won’t be using. It has a web server and you can use it to show a slideshow of your photos. It has a torrent client, but I already have a system for that.
Seems to be a pretty nice unit. If you search the web for comments, it’s well liked. People complain that the web interface is slow, but I didn’t think it was bad.
There are no disk quotas. All the shares you setup pull from the same pool, so there is no way to limit usage on a per-share basis (that I could find.) Not a show stopper, but that means I need to pay more attention. If I fill the disk with torrents, there won’t be room for more photos.
The disks are a little noisy. I have it next to me on my computer desk and it’s chuckling away as I rsync my data to it. It’s not objectionable, but I wouldn’t put it in a media room.
I turned off the write caching since I don’t have it plugged into a UPS. I don’t really want to put this unit in the basement (though I could) since it’s super dusty there. I suppose I should buy a small UPS to plug it into. It supports auto shutdown with a UPS, so that’s cool.
So far I like it. I have not done any speed benchmarks yet. I might in the future, we’ll see.
