When I got into reloading a few years ago I purchased a LEE single stage kit that came with the .50 BMG dies. I haven't been brave enough to load .50's on it, only used it to load .308 until recently. My buddy Joe (pictured) has a BOHICA that should be delivered any day and when he realized how expensive .50 BMG ammo is, he wanted to load his own.
I finally broke out the .50 dies and we got to work. I was very surprised how far (or NOT far) a pound of powder goes when loading .50 BMG. There's barely enough to load 26-28 cartridges per pound. With the H50BMG powder costing around twenty bucks, that adds up pretty fast.
I've got a bunch of once fired Talon brass, but haven't resized any or trimmed any yet. I just received my Giraud case trimmer a couple weeks ago, so that should make the trimming process cake when we get to that step. We didn't do the whole process yet, Joe got primed brass to start with. We got a couple thousand AP tips, unsized, and ran them through a resizing die. After cleaning off the lube we dropped powder (the RCBS automatic powder dispenser is awesome) and loaded them up. The black tips are AP and the silver are API, we bought the API sized since I wasn't sure how the incendiary crap worked and wanted to handle the API as little as possible. It wasn't a huge price difference for sized when we were only buying a few hundred API.
I'll let everyone know how they shoot!
Shawn
I finally broke out the .50 dies and we got to work. I was very surprised how far (or NOT far) a pound of powder goes when loading .50 BMG. There's barely enough to load 26-28 cartridges per pound. With the H50BMG powder costing around twenty bucks, that adds up pretty fast.
I've got a bunch of once fired Talon brass, but haven't resized any or trimmed any yet. I just received my Giraud case trimmer a couple weeks ago, so that should make the trimming process cake when we get to that step. We didn't do the whole process yet, Joe got primed brass to start with. We got a couple thousand AP tips, unsized, and ran them through a resizing die. After cleaning off the lube we dropped powder (the RCBS automatic powder dispenser is awesome) and loaded them up. The black tips are AP and the silver are API, we bought the API sized since I wasn't sure how the incendiary crap worked and wanted to handle the API as little as possible. It wasn't a huge price difference for sized when we were only buying a few hundred API.
I'll let everyone know how they shoot!
Shawn
