Has anyone here ever reloaded 7.62x54 for mosin nagant? where did you buy the products ? thanks ric
Printable View
Has anyone here ever reloaded 7.62x54 for mosin nagant? where did you buy the products ? thanks ric
Yes, quite a bit.Quote:
Originally Posted by optionwiz
Need to do two things:
1. Determine if your rifle can use standard 0.308" diameter bullets, or if it requires 0.311" (± .001" or so) bullets. ) This will determine where you buy your bullets, and how much you pay for them.
0.308" bullets are very easy to find, and in many different weights. I've read about folks using .308"/150 grain bullets in 7.62x54R loads without problems. Generally the heavier the bullet, the closer it should be to the proper size for optimum accuracy. Note that some former communist bloc weapons have a little variation in bore diameter, Mosin-Nagant rifles are notorious for this.
.311" bullets are more difficult to find, but not impossible. .303 British & 7.7mm Japanese use similar bullets, but may be a little heavy.
2. Determine what type of priming you'll be doing, and this will be determined by the cartridge priming format. It comes in two flavors - Berdan & boxer.--------------------------------------
- Nearly all the military surplus 7.62x54R is berdan primed, and requires special equipment to remove the old priming cap. In short, it isn't worth the effort as long as the cost of reloading materials exceeds the price of assembled ammunition. The last time I sat down and added all this up (more than ten years ago), the thresh-hold was 25 cents. Below this number, it costed more to reload than simply buying more loaded ammunition. Here's another catch: find berdan primers for bulk purchase. I bought scads of them in the 80s, but I don't see them for sale anymore. They came from Germany (RWS?), and I still have a fair amount of them in my shop.
- Boxer priming is mostly commercially loaded ammunition. Thus, it's more expensive. The upshots are longer brass life and ability to use standard reloading equipment and primers.
If you're shooting military surplus now, you might be better off sticking with it. Save reloading for after you've accumulated a fair amount of boxer primer 54R brass. Two of the commercial loads in 54R right now is Sellier & Bellot, Remington (might be S&B reboxed) and Norma. None are cheap.
If you need premium accuracy, consider buying some 7N1 ammunition (details). 7N1 is the Russian equivalent to our match grade ammunition, and is the preferred round for their SVD series rifles. There's a guy on Gun Broker that has multiple auctions running at the same time, it's almost as prevalent as plain 54R ball.
Also note a lot of eastern European 54R is steel cased ammunition, Russian in particular. I have reloaded a lot of steel berdan cases, and I've found that it's important to very carefully check for case neck cracks first, and use a lot of lubricant as steel requires substantially more force to resize.
Here's another article that might be helpful: >Link<
http://acsww.org/reloadmosin.doc
I agree. Right now, surplus is just cost effective for me. And it comes in wide and weird varieties.