reloading 300 Blackout

I had to knock a couple years’ worth of dust off my reloading gear and a lot of cobwebs out of my reloading brain, but I reloaded a test batch of 300 AAC Blackout ammo up today.

This is a new cartridge for me. It is somewhat young to the shooting world, but hugely popular already.

Wildcatters cut down a .223 case, opened it up to .30 caliber and stuffed various weights of bullets into it. As often happens, gun and ammo factories saw a good thing and adopted it for commercial production.

It is definitely a strange thing with big, fat, long bullets filling the top half of shortened little 5.56 cases while the bottom half is full of a very fine powder that is almost like dust, instead of the long grains I’m used to. This is one odd duck.

I’m one who is going for the big, slow loadings that end up slightly below the speed of sound to be gentler on our ears.

It also doesn’t hit quite as hard as the faster prescriptions. Out a hundred yards or so it will be more like a .45 ACP than a true rifle round.

That, by the way, is considered more than adequate for a lot of small game, varmints and thin-skinned predators.

The disadvantage of not carrying energy out great distances is a direct relative to the advantage of not going as far beyond intended targets as normal rifle rounds do.

Factory 300 Blackout ammo is currently running $1 to $2 per shot! It is real hard for me to have much fun at that price.

The array of gear you see on my reloading bench below enables me to cut the cost down to something like 35 cents per shot.

That is a whole lot more bang for my buck.

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