Safety Procedures

Terry_P

One of my safety procedures saved my dumb arse tonight. I brought two boxes of reloads to the range the other day and only shot 30 rounds so I figured I would top off the boxes and be ready for the next trip. I prepped 30 cases and then got out some unique out because i figured that would be a good one to use and I just bought a full pound and had about a 1/4 in the open bottle. I set it out on the bench and came upstairs to get loads from the manuals. I didn't see a unique recipe for 147 gr so figured I would switch to blue dot. I was using Hornaday bullets so used that manual. They listed 6.6 gr as max load for 124 gr bullets. In the boxes I had 25 124 gr loaded to 7.6 gr and hadn't shot any of them. I looked at Speer manual and they had 7.8 gr of BD as a max load with 124 gr GDHP. I figured I better not mess around and would pull the bullets when I was done and load it to 6.1 just as a fun target load. I loaded the powder in the chargemaster and started loading away 5.1 gr with 147 gr bullets (max was 5.7) and 6.1 gr with the 124 gr. Got them all loaded and started pulling bullets and dumping the 7.6 gr of blue dot back into the container. After a few of those I noticed I still had the Unique out, had just loaded 30 BD recipes with Unique and had thrown actual blue dot back into the unique bottle. Never had a major screw up like that and I guess the over charge distracted me, I started pulling bullets, luckily I have a collett puller in that size. I wound up pulling about 60 bullets and the stuff I knew was BD and could clearly identify went back into the BD container, the rest into the unique container which will be spread as lawn fertilizer tomorrow.

I always leave the bottle of the powder out on the bench until I clean out the thrower and put it away when I'm done. That saved me. Stupid and distracted, time to do something else other than reload.