reloading: first 8x57mm loads

I have some Hornady 170gr SST on the way to the next town over and they also claim to have large rifle primers shipping to store. I’ll believe it when I see it.

[update: Feb 9 - everything shipped and I picked it up this morning]

making do

In the meantime, bulletless and primerless I will break down some 8mm I bought in error. What I thought was 8x57mm JS was 8x57mm JRS. Yes, there is an oddball Rimmed variant of the cartridge. Apparently it’s used in single loaders, including shotgun+rifle combos, in Europe. I am not immune to “read the specs” failures.

No use to me so I pulled the bullets and carefully deprimed. So now I at least have a few components to work with. I already had some once-fired 8mm and some .30-06 formed to 8mm.

WTF is SPCE?

Soft Point Cutting Edge is a weirdo stepped bullet that is supposed to increase control of penetration/expansion. The forward part mushrooms and the cylindrical rear part stays intact to push penetration. Or so they say. I didn’t choose them in the normal sense, they were on the cartridges I disassembled above.

My non-salvage plans are to use 170gr hollowpoints and ~195gr FMJ.

OAL

S&B’s page on the cartridge showed an OAL of 3.075”, but since the rimmed variant headspaces off the rim rather than shoulder I didn’t think I could trust it. Luckily they also use that in the normal 8mm and that shows 3.075” also. The projectile was already listed in Gordon’s and setting OAL to 3.075” there gave sane results. So I’m starting there.

master / blaster

The comparison between loading 8x57mm and .380acp is amusing. About 13x the powder by mass,¹ 2x the bullet weight, 20x the muzzle energy…

testing

when the stuff comes in at the Las Cruces Sportsmans I’ll pick it up and camp outside LC for a while. On the way out of Texas I’ll test fire the first batch of 8mm.

in other news

Experimenting with dry tumbling brass in white rice instead of wet tumbling. I think I like it.

1. different powder, obviously. Win 748 & Win 231. ↩