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.