frater secessus

retired snowbird

Took the new chrono out for its maiden voyage.

how it worked

the chrono

The Athlon did great. It didn’t miss any of the ~175 shots I made. It was powered on for about 2 hours and remaining battery life was ~75-80%; a little hard to tell from the tiny battery indicator. The screen was easy to read in direct sunlight.

The app did OK. The AUDIO PLAYBACK function seemed to come and go, which would make a difference for reasons discussed below. I noticed the live view definitely worked although I was not actually using it.

I had a bunch of ladders to test and I bumped into the 50 session limit.1 This is a non-issue in practice because you can sync to the phone before accepting the chronos warning about overwriting the oldest session.

my processes

I opened each box and shot the ladders in the order of the included info sheets. Some of the ladders had 2x the number of rounds in each step for testing in both a pistol and carbine.

the ladder tests

successes

I settled on a good load for carry .380, 68gr Lehigh Defenders over Titegroup. 1,075fps out of the LCP’s tiny 2.75” barrel.

I settled on two good loads for carry 9mm:

  • 124gr Speer Gold Dot over Longshot
  • 124gr Federal HST2 over Longshot.

… and a plinking load: 124gr MEDEV FMJ pulls over Titegroup.

In .40 I found a carry round (155gr GD over Longshot3) and plinking loads (180gr Berry’s FN over Titegroup).
Speer’s load data on the 155gr goes higher but I found that load’s 567 foot-lbs of energy is the limit of what my aging hands can enjoy. Starting to encroach on factory .357 magnum ammo territory.

failures

I failed to consult the range calendar to see that the nice main range with covered benches was closed for an event; I’ve corrected that by adding their calendar to my google calendar so it’s easily accessible. There are other covered ranges for rimfire and for pistols but that would rule out pistol caliber carbines. The auxiliary range allows everything but is uncovered. I ended up getting pretty hot.

My current process on the range is imperfect; the chrono’s data saved me from myself for the most part but there were a couple ladders (or steps in the ladders) that were unusable. These are me problems, not chrono problems.

Before I started using BSK I was hand writing just enough data for the test ammo boxes to tell what was what. With BSK I use the output of the PRINT function to make my own version of info for the range. Much neater and more comprehensive.

But the old crappy info I had scribbled down combined with other factors in a Swiss cheese model of failure:

  • the insufficient data
  • the app sometimes not reading out FPS
  • my human failure to call out at least one FPS value in each ladder
  • the large amount of ladders to run
  • multiple boxes of 9mm test ladders

meant that a couple ladders (and a couple more steps in otherwise-good ladders) were lost to my inability to figure out what data went with what ladder.

failures to cycle

The sidearm platform for 9mm testing was a Springfield XD .40 with a 9mm conversion barrel. The same spring is used for OEM 9mm and .40 in this pistol but

  • this conversion barrel is built heavier than a regular barrel (thicker walls to fill up the .40-sized frame); and
  • it’s longer than stock (5.5in)

the added weight means that it would run factory 124gr and 147gr fine but not reliably cycle 115gr. I found that soft plinking handloads in 124gr and 147gr wouldn’t cycle all the time either. During testing I moved down through the spring tuning kit and found that the 14lb recoil spring ran everything I threw at it.

my first squib!

While testing some plinking loads (158gr Berry’s THP over Titegroup) I had my first squib. At first I thought it was a bad primer or light strike because I didn’t hear anything but the hammer falling. But when I pulled the case out there was no bullet in there. At first i figured I failed to extract the prior round, but I checked the ammo box and they were all accounted for. I was very confused for a minute then tried to look down the barrel. Ahh.

The squib just made it out of the case so I think it was a no-powder error on my part. As I learn things my processes improve, but at the time I loaded that ladder I might not have done a flashlight test. Later I started doing that reliably, and now I’ve installed an incandescent drop light for clearer views of the press and into cases.

Note: after I got home I listened to the audio recording and even then it just sounds like the hammer falling. I would have thought a primer going off would be louder than that. Maybe it was muted because it was in a 16” carbine.

home again, home again, jiggity-jigg

First business was to clear the squib. Because it was my first it took a bit of fiddling and YouTube video watching and cussing to extract it.

The I opened up my spreadsheet in LibreOffice, the audio recording, and the Athlon app. I was able to make sense of about 90% of it. It was a good lesson to teach me to call out at least one velocity per ladder step to help match chrono data with ladders. Or I could just annotate the range data sheets as I go? That’d probably make more sense. I have a mini-clipboard that would hold the sheets without taking up too much space.

Today’s business will be cleaning everything that went to the range, with special attention paid to the .357 carbine in case theirs any crap left in it from the squib festivities.

amended wishlist

  • ability to name a session from the phone while it’s live.
  • more stable audio readout, if that was actually a problem. I couldn’t hear the voice through my hearing protection so I didn’t know until listening to the recording that it was working at all.

Srsly: do not take my word (or anyone else’s) on matters of reloading. Get some manuals, start with light charges and work up, etc. You are responsible for your own loads as I am mine.

Also see the BSK reloading calculator announced in this reddit thread.

  1. because of the squib (spoiler!!!) I only had 51 sessions. Without the squib it would have been 59 because I had the last row of .38 and 8 ladder steps of .357 magnum to go. ↩

  2. all pulled projectiles mentioned here are from American Reloading ↩

  3. for slightly lower velocities CFE Pistol worked fine, too. But the bump in velocity with Longshot means about +50FPE. ↩

Updated:

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