June 7th, 2012
Last week I was putting together a couple of new loads for my 204 Ruger. I had the recipe book laying out and was checking out my powder options. Since I recently shortened the barrel on my 204 I thought maybe I would try the fastest powder available to me in my assortment.
As a rule, the only can of powder on the bench is the powder that I am working with. Everything else is to be put in the cabinet behind a closed door. That way there is no confusion as to what is in the hopper or what powder I am working with.
Based on the Hodgdon 2013 "Annual Manual", H335 looked like my best option. So I rifled through the cabinet, found the bottle of H335. Dumped powder in the hopper, set the bottle next to the measure where it always goes and began throwing and scaling charges.
I assembled 10 rounds with 29 grains and 10 rounds with 29.5 grains. Then I walked across the room to record my efforts in my database. When I walked back to the loading bench somebody had moved the bottle of H335 and it was now sitting next to my recipe book. So obviously I looked over at the measure to see how this could have happened and sitting next to the measure was a bottle of Hodgdon Lil Gun.
When the air in the room returned to clear instead of blue (from carefully selected curse words) I emptied the hopper of Lil Gun back into it's bottle and dug out my Kinetic bullet puller.
I still haven't figured out exactly why things happened the way they did but apparently the Lil Gun bottle was in front of the H335 in the cabinet. So I set it down on the bench and with the H335 in my hand I walked over to the recipe book one more time to verify numbers and at that point probably set the bottle down to flip a page or something.
The Kinetic puller works fine but my back was not enjoying squatting down to pound the puller on the concrete floor. So I dug out my RCBS Collet puller. I don't have a 20 cal. collet but was interested in discovering if the 22 cal. collet might work. It did work just fine and sped up the process of un-doing all my handy work of meticulously assembling 20 rounds only to start over with the correct powder.
The sad part of all of this is that I own bullet pullers in the first place. But shit do happen. And most likely I caught this error because I returned to the bench to retrieve the lot number from the powder can so I could correctly record my work in the database.
This isn't the first time the pullers have come in handy and the database, well, I'd be lost without it.
You certainly do not have to use a database, a notebook should work just fine but the database is a lot handier.
When I purchase primers, powder, brass, and bullets, they are entered into the database. I have a "Load Entry" screen that allows me to choose each component from a drop down list. Since most components are duplicated over time, for example:
Sierra Bullets
55 Grain
Blitzking
and LOT NUMBER
The LOT NUMBER is the critical key to the actual load created.
My database has grown considerably over the years and contains several hundred "Load Records". There is software available to help you keep track of your work and I strongly encourage you to take a look at your options if you are not currently otherwise recording you load data.
You can read a little more about my approach to record keeping here and it includes a link to Heavy Metal Software that I'm sure is one of many products available.
As for the bullet pullers, I like having both the Kinetic and the Collet type. For just a couple of rounds the Kinetic is fine but if you have several to do, the collet works great.