Old magazines.
By Jeff Brown
The club to which I belong has an aging library dating back to the time the organisation was established. To younger neophytes a cursory glance over the shelves may register thoughts of viewing a museum rather than a library as in the last 30 years few items have been added. To older gun/cast bullet cranks the likes of myself the shelves are a treasure trove of information that has long since been forgotten or set aside by modern shooters as they chase the 'latest and greatest'.
I was on two weeks of leave recently and June/July are the mild of winter in the Southern Hemisphere here in New Zealand. It goes without saying that as soon as my holidays began so did the cold rain. Whilst I got some good range time in during my break I took a precaution of borrowing some of the old 'Handloader' magazines from the club library to provide a distraction from the weather and save some wear and tear on our carpet as to keep me from pacing like a caged animal.
This is my third (if memory serves me correctly) time reading through the stash of Handloader mags from the club. What I have found over the years and as I grow older (wiser?) is that interests change and develop with the passage of time and a magazine article that held little or no interest 10 years ago all of sudden can become a valuable resource when engaging in a new project. An example of this is I have made a conscious decision to very much minimise if not completely stop the use of plastic wads in my shotshell loading. In order to do so I have begun loading card and fibre wad columns; remember the orginal bio-degradable materials from the past? Modern shotshell loading literature makes no reference to such archaic practices however and the best sources of information are older magazines/books. Bullet casting features very significantly in the old magazines also and we, as a shooting community, seem to go through cycles of forgetting or casting (pun intended) aside ideas and methods just to reinvent the wheel and rediscover the same information decades on. This was evident after WW2 into the 50, 60 and 70's when cast bullet shooting was resurrected; thus the value of this old text.
Something interesting I found last evening in the #3 and #4 Handloaders, Sept-Oct and Nov-Dec 1966, was a two part series by Edward M Yard on the principles of primers. Very comprehensive material relating the construction differences between pistol and rifle primers and a measure of the energy created by each. He also conducted an experiment where primers were exposed to varying humidity and the subsequent effects of this.
I was on two weeks of leave recently and June/July are the mild of winter in the Southern Hemisphere here in New Zealand. It goes without saying that as soon as my holidays began so did the cold rain. Whilst I got some good range time in during my break I took a precaution of borrowing some of the old 'Handloader' magazines from the club library to provide a distraction from the weather and save some wear and tear on our carpet as to keep me from pacing like a caged animal.
This is my third (if memory serves me correctly) time reading through the stash of Handloader mags from the club. What I have found over the years and as I grow older (wiser?) is that interests change and develop with the passage of time and a magazine article that held little or no interest 10 years ago all of sudden can become a valuable resource when engaging in a new project. An example of this is I have made a conscious decision to very much minimise if not completely stop the use of plastic wads in my shotshell loading. In order to do so I have begun loading card and fibre wad columns; remember the orginal bio-degradable materials from the past? Modern shotshell loading literature makes no reference to such archaic practices however and the best sources of information are older magazines/books. Bullet casting features very significantly in the old magazines also and we, as a shooting community, seem to go through cycles of forgetting or casting (pun intended) aside ideas and methods just to reinvent the wheel and rediscover the same information decades on. This was evident after WW2 into the 50, 60 and 70's when cast bullet shooting was resurrected; thus the value of this old text.
Something interesting I found last evening in the #3 and #4 Handloaders, Sept-Oct and Nov-Dec 1966, was a two part series by Edward M Yard on the principles of primers. Very comprehensive material relating the construction differences between pistol and rifle primers and a measure of the energy created by each. He also conducted an experiment where primers were exposed to varying humidity and the subsequent effects of this.
Interesting old information still applicable to this day. I know of a gentleman who made a muzzle loading rifle from a singleshot bolt action .22RF that only ever shot with fair accuracy. His ingition is a shotshell primer that I always considered a bit grunty for setting off 10gr of 3Fg black powder under a 45gr bullet. The table above appears to agree.