The first Bullet ever made

Its really nerve-wracking, that moment at the range when you just slapped in a magazine full of bullets, and your sighting down the alley at a paper bad guy, about to shred him to pieces.  You know that the bullets in your gun are the very first ones you made yesterday on your reloader, you think and wonder if you did all the right procedures, followed every step and obeyed all the rules.  Your finger sweeps across the trigger, hesitating as you recall the vivid pictures of failed reloads and what they did to the gun and the shooter.  Am I about to blow up?  Should I take a last look at my fingers?  I really want to keep them….

Flash back 2 weeks, I just got that UPS delivery, a really huge box from Dillon Precision.  Unpacking it yields all the items necessary to reload 9mm ammo, well, except gunpowder.  And no primers either, or brass casings or actual bullets.  But I had the machine and all the tools now to do it!  I am a typical guy, I love mechanical things, love to fix (and break) objects just to figure out how they work.  All these items are amazing and wondrous to behold, a virtual world of levers, gears and rotating things.

I am a MAN, I don’t need no instruction book!  I can set this up just by looking at it….  

5 hours later, after consulting the instructions many times, I finally have the Dillon Square Deal B reloader attached to the bench and set up, scale calibrated, tumbler filled with walnut, separator put together, and I’m kicking back reading the reloading manual.  I think I have a good handle on the process now so it’s off to find the components!

First stop is Shoot Straight in Apopka.  I knew they had reloading supplies, but never paid them much attention before.  I manage to get everything I need, a can of Alligent Green Dot powder, Small pistol primers, 250 lead bullets, but cannot find any brass.  I ask the guy at the counter if they sell any brass and he tells me no, they don’t.  So I head into the range area to scavenge brass, which there is not a lot of at this time.  I manage to gather about 100 or so shells and on my way out the guy at the counter comes over with a HUGE bag of 9mm brass.  He mentions he ‘found’ this in the back room and if I wanted it I could have it for $20.  Yeah, I bought it all.

I take it all home, and get setup to make some rounds.  Dump the powder in the hopper, pick up the primers in the pickup tube and dump a good amount of brass into the tumbler.  Clean, polish, separate.  Takes a lot longer than I expect, but I am patient.  Finally, with my brass prepped, I am ready to start loading.  I have consulted the load data in the book, and have my powder measure calibrated to put out 4.5 grains of the powder.  In goes the first shell, pull the handle.  Then the next shell, and so forth. By the 5^th pull I am starting to spit out a completed round.  I make as many rounds as I have components for.

Really, I’m very surprised looking back 20 years ago that I did NOT blow up.  My knowledge of reloading is far superior to what I thought I knew then.  I never really inspected the brass, cleaned primer pockets, cleared all the cleaning media, or even knew what OAL was all about.  I really should have never loaded what I did with such poor instruction.

I squint at the target, line up the sights and steeling myself pull the trigger on my very first reloaded round.  A loud bang, cloud of smoke, and I look to see what happened.  I missed the target.

You never forget your first gun....

I like to think back, 30 years ago, to my first gun purchase.  I had no idea what I was doing, or what I was buying.  All I knew is that I wanted to own a gun so I could shoot at the range without having to constantly rent a gun.   I was shooting down at Shoot Straight, (way back when there was only one Apopka store) and I knew I would not be able to buy there, but I had a friend at the local drug store (Walgreens I think, not positive) who told me to look there for a gun.  Yes, the local drug store back then sold aspirin, ace bandages, housewares and firearms.  Go figure….

Well I looked and fell in love with a gun there, was only $300 and was used, looked like a 1911 clone.  I bought it (honestly don’t think there was even a background check then either) and took it straight to the range to kill some paper.  That’s when I found out it was a 38 Super and how it worked.  Hey, it was my first gun and I was completely a noob.  Bought some rounds, and loved every minute of it.

After the novelty wore off, I realized that there was no way I could afford to keep up with my hobby as much as I wanted to.  $15 an hour at the range + $12 a box of rounds (x4) was pushing me over my budget every week, so I was faced with cutting back or trimming the expenses.  Shooting less rounds at a time was not an option, nor was shooting once a month.  So I began to look into reloading my own bullets.

After much research I found out that my beloved 38Super was actually rather expensive to buy ammo for and was not as cheap to reload for either.  What was cheap was reloading for 9mm.  So time to move to another gun.  I could not afford to actually own two guns, so I sold my 38Super at a $100 loss, and bought the only 9mm I could afford from Shoot Straight, a 9mm LORCIN.

WORST GUN EVER.  This thing was heavy, had no hammer (not sure it was striker fire either) and looked like it should be on sale at Toys-R-Us.  But it only cost $225 so I could actually own a 9mm for only $25 more than I sold the 38Super for.  That’s the only reason I bought it, price.  I truly regretted it after the first time I shot it.  It worked just fine, but accuracy was something this gun did not have.  Fixed sights and could not make a group at 7 yards to save my life.  I never took it back to the range a second time.

Months later, after saving and scrimping, I took this LORCIN back to shoot straight, traded it in and picked up a CZ-101 9mm.  Yeah, I only got $75 for that trade, and the CZ cost me $499.  I was not happy about that. 

But I was ecstatic about this new 9mm!  This had a great feel and shot really really nice.  It was fairly accurate in my hands and the more I shot it, the better I got using it.  By this time I was still feeling the pinch of the cost of shooting, so it was time to move into my next plan:  Reloading my own bullets.

This was about the time I had moved to using an IBM PC, and stopped using my AMIGA 3000 computer.  I had one great salvation; the AMIGA was still popular and I managed to sell my entire AMIGA system for $750.  I had already done my research and knew exactly what I was going to get: A Dillon Precision Square Deal B kit. (Only $712 !!)  So I bit the bullet and spent the cash on it.

Well, that’s all I care to contribute to this wall of text for now, Starting to reload as a beginner is a whole nother topic :P

Hey, look! It's a new blogger writing about guns!

Ahhh…. Smell that?  That’s right, the scent of a brand new BLOG being opened, nothing quite like it in the world.  So now you’re here, prolly drawn in by the name of the Blog, Casual Bargain Shooter.  Well that’s exactly what I intend to talk about, the great sport of shooting guns at a bargain price. 

Face it, not everyone that like to shoot has unlimited funds to buy all the things that you need to enjoy this sport.  I know I simply do not have a thousand dollars just to spend on a weapon, or the ability to load up on 1000 rounds of Federal ammo.  If I had a blank check, I most certainly would go nuts, spending about $8,000 in 20 minutes at a gun shop, but I don’t.  So now you get to read all about my trials and adventures in attempting to gain a foothold in my newest favorite sport: Shooting!

If your new to this Blog (You have to be, the blog is only 22 minutes old…)  I’ll spell it out for you:  This is about shooting guns, collecting weapons, reloading ammo, and the love of Firearms in general.  If you do not like the subject matter, then may I suggest you try http://hellokitty.blogspot.com as an alternative that you might like.

I love to shoot, its fun, exciting and I want to do it a lot.  I wish I could, however my funds are not unlimited, so finding ways to do this are harder to manage.  I will try to detail as much as possible over the next few posts, so bear with me, I can only do so much at one time J