The ExhaustNotes Blog

Random Sunday Thoughts….

I’m up early before I head to the rifle range, poking around a bit on the Internet, checking the news sites and reading the latest propaganda from both ends of the political spectrum (is anyone objective any more?), and generally just catching up on things. This is another random walk through an ever-increasingly random place (i.e., my mind). Bear with me; here we go…

One site I’d like to alert you to if you don’t know about it already is Bator International:

Check out the vintage iron for sale at Bator International.

Bator International popped up in my Facebook feed. I knew of it, but I didn’t know much about the place, so I clicked and wow I was impressed. The photographs of vintage motorcycles are awesome, and I saw more than a few I’d like to own. Bator International is in Ojai, California, and I know that makes for a nice motorcycle ride. Take a look. You can thank me later.

The sticker business is going well. Gresh had a great idea with this stickers, and we’ve been getting lots of signups for our automatic email update notifications…

You can get your ExNotes sticker by signing up here…

We’ve had requests and your two Joes have been talking about organizing the Baja staff ride we mentioned earlier. We’re thinking maybe a 7-day ride to see the whales in Scammon’s Lagoon, and that puts it sometime in the first quarter of next year. You’d have to have your own motorcycle, of course, and you’d have to be on our automatic email update list. If you want to go, let us know, but only let us know if you’re willing to commit. You know how that goes…you say you want to do a big ride, 200 guys say they’re going, and the morning you roll, it’s you and one other guy. So if you say you’re in, please be for real. And those whales….wow!

So I’m leaving for the rifle range in a little bit, and I’m pumped up. I bought a box of once-fired vintage .300 Weatherby brass at a gun shop in Lamar, Colorado a couple of weeks ago, I loaded it last week (we’ll be doing a series on reloading rifle ammo in the near future), and I’m going to send lead downrange through a rifle I bought a decade ago but never fired. It’s a Weatherby Mk V I saw on a Gunbroker.com auction at the height of the Great Recession. A gun shop in the upper Midwest was going under, and this one was a real find. These photos are from that Gunbroker ad…

A Weatherby Euromark in .300 Weatherby. Check out the wood!

The price was right, the caliber was the quintessential .300 Weatherby, and I pulled the trigger (figuratively speaking). I just never got around to firing it, and today I’m going to correct that character flaw. I’ll post more photos of the Euromark later this week, and we’ll add a feature on this fine rifle to our Tales of the Gun page.

And that, folks, is a wrap for today’s ExNotes blog. Stay tuned; we’ve got more good stuff coming your way.

Wild Conjecture: BMW R18 Concept

BMW’s R18 Concept is that rare thing in the motorcycle world: a BMW that doesn’t look like the contents of the junk drawer in your kitchen. Most of the GS series have a rubber band, plastic-handled corkscrew and expired AA batteries look about them. Cluttered and stolen-valor-military-ish, the big GS’s take a concerted effort to look at without smirking and feeling superior. Except for the very first ones. The early GS800 was much cleaner and actually was pretty good off road.

Concept bikes are a great way to get the reaction of the riding public without spending a bunch of money on a bike nobody likes. It’s smart to ask your customers first. Personally, I love the thing. It has a vibe that goes all the way back to the beginning of BMW. Back when they were still trying to kill us all.

The engine is huge and air-cooled because that’s what cruisers are supposed to be. Liquid cooling on a cruiser is a negative. Four cylinders on a cruiser is two too many. The whole point of a cruiser is laid back and relaxing. This is not to be confused with comfortable.

The seat on the R18 is a concession to the Brat trend that is slowly but surely vandalizing Honda’s entire production output from the 1970’s. I would prefer a dual seat more like the old R69 came with. It seems a waste for such a long bike to neglect the pillion accommodations. The long reach to the bars is another styling cue that will probably make it into production. Motorcyclists have proven time and time again that they will put up with any silly riding position as long as it makes them cool.

And you will be cool on the R18. It’s long and low and black, all these are good things to be. I hope the exposed driveshaft makes it past the product liability wonks at BMW. I like a dangerous spinning bit on a motorcycle.

The front end has about 1-inch of travel, generous for the cruiser segment. I hope BMW replicates that crazy-huge, aerodynamic skeleton key when they design the keyless proximity fob for this bike. Come to think of it all those keyless entry thingies are too big to fit in the skintight leather rockabilly pants you’ll be wearing on the R18. Maybe a plain old key would be better. The headlight nacelle looks great if a bit Royal Enfield Bullet-ish. Hey, that’s ok.

My biggest concern about the R18 is not the bike itself but the manufacturer. BMW puts entirely too many electronic doodads on their modern bikes. The excessive reliance on E-trickery to protect the rider from himself has created heavy motorcycles. BMW used to pride itself on lightweight motorcycles. It was in their advertisements! The damn things may be safer as long as they don’t land on you but reliability has suffered with the additional complexity.

Here’s hoping BMW can pull their heads out of their…ahem…you know, and build a strong, simple machine that won’t cost a fortune to buy or maintain because it would be a crime for such a pretty motorcycle to be restricted to Starbucks parking lots and BMW service centers.

ScooterScribes.news and more…

Ah, lots of good news and a few things to catch up on. For starters, I was alerted to another top notch motorcycle site, and that’s Terry Roorda’s ScooterScribes.news site. You’ll like it.

Terry is the former Thunder Press editor, and there’s lots of cool V-Twin stuff on ScooterScribes, and you don’t have to be a Big Twin dude or dudette to appreciate it. It’s good. Trust me.

More good news…the ExNotes stickers are in, and the extensive Direct Mail arm of the ExNotes empire is busy sending them out.

We sent an email requesting your address if you signed up, so watch for it and shoot that info back to us. We promise that as soon as we get your snail mail address and confirmed that you’re on our email list, we’ll shoot them out to you as soon as we get around to it. Want to help us more? Hey, share our site and get more folks to sign up for our automatic emails, or just get them to visit www.ExhaustNotes.us. We think we’ve got a good thing going. Guns, motorcycles, scooters, opinions, dream bikes, resurrected bikes, books, articles, Baja, and lots, lots more. Let us know what you think by posting your comments here on the blog. We get all kinds of inputs. Folks want more on Harleys, they want less on Harleys, they want more political commentary (seriously?), they want less political commentary…hey, let us know. There’s no guarantee we’ll take any of it seriously, but you never know.

Yet more news…several online pubs are breaking the news that Harley is working with a Chinese company to offer a small HD.

Hey, we saw a Chinese manufacturer making parts for Harley a decade ago. But the recent news is this is going to be a complete small bike, just over 300cc. I’m surprised Harley didn’t do this several years ago, but then, Gresh and I were in the catbird’s seat on the small bike thing from the gitgo. CSC and Zongshen were way ahead of the curve on this one. Dollars to donuts says that the small Harley will find its way to the US, and that’s a good thing. I’ve seen the photos and I think it looks good. I’m waiting for the inevitable jokes and the anti-China rants to start, but Harley, if you’re reading this, ignore those folks. The only thing worse than a smartass is a dumbass, and anyone who criticizes a motorcycle based solely on its Chinese origin is most definitely in that latter category.

One last bit of news…make sure you pick up the latest issue of Motorcycle Classics magazine. It’s got my feature story on our Enfield Baja trip, and my Destinations piece on Tecate. Good stuff, Motorcycle Classics is.

A Pair of Prancing Ponies…and that first No. 1

Good buddy Python Pete and I went to the range a few days ago to let loose with a pair of prancing ponies (that is to say, Colts), in both revolver and automatic flavors. The auto was my tried-and-true bright stainless Colt Government Model 1911; the wheelgun was Pete’s stunning 8-inch Colt Python. Both are stunningly beautiful and both are good shooting guns.

A custom bright stainless Colt, with Baer barrel, Millet sights, and a few other nice touches.

I bought the 1911 you see above at a pawn shop brand new back in the mid-1980s for just over $500. Colt no longer offers bright stainless steel guns, so I guess you could say mine is collectible, and when you see bright stainless Colt 1911s come up for sale (which doesn’t happen very often), prices start at $2,000 and go north from there. I guess you could say I made a good investment (except I won’t ever sell it).

A few years ago the front sight popped off my 1911, so I took it to a local gunsmith to have it restaked. That repair lasted all of 50 rounds, and I realized I needed to see an expert. That’s when I hooked up with TJ’s Custom Guns, and I had TJ revamp the Colt. It’s got a Les Baer match barrel, an extended one-piece guide rail, an engine turned chamber (I love that look), high profile/high visibility Millet fixed sights, and TJ’s exclusive high reliability tune. That last little bit means that my Colt 1911 will reliably feed any bullet configuration (semi-wadcutters, hollow points, etc.) and it will work no matter what. Folks, I’ve put tens of thousands of rounds through my 1911 since TJ massaged it, and it’s never had a failure of any kind (no failures to fire, no failures to feed, and no failures to eject…it just goes and goes and goes).

On to the Python. I’ve known good buddy Pete for more than 30 years (we sort of grew up together in the aerospace industry). Pete owns a Colt Python, a gun that is arguably the finest revolver ever made. His is the super-rare 8-inch model, too.

Revolver royalty…the stunning Colt Python. The Colt Python is perhaps the finest revolver ever made.

Colt no longer makes the Python, probably because they were too expensive to produce. The fit and finish are superior, and the feel of the thing is just sublime. It’s a .357 Magnum, one of the world’s all time greats, and a cartridge that dominated the police market before 9mm became all the rage. Colt revolvers were hand-fitted and involved lots of custom assembly, and I suppose it just didn’t in with the need for low cost manufacture in a market dominated by black plastic 9mm handguns. No, the Python is from another era characterized by highly polished blue steel and finely figured walnut, an age in which I felt more comfortable. Seeing a Python on the firing line again was a treat, and when Pete asked if I wanted to try the big Colt, he didn’t have to ask twice.

Pete and I had four handguns with us (the two mentioned above, plus a SIG 9mm and my Rock Island Compact 1911). I shot my two 1911s offhand for a while, and then I tried my luck with Pete’s SIG and the Python. It was fun.

You can argue about a good automatic being as accurate as a high-end revolver, but you won’t convince me. The Python is a tack driver.

I fired 5 shots of “nothing fancy” factory ammo with the Python, and the accuracy was superb. The targets don’t lie, folks.

I’ve owned two Pythons in my life, and both were back in the 1970s. When I was in Korea, I found out I could order one though the Base Exchange at a substantial discount. I couldn’t believe what the nice lady was telling me at the Kunsan AFB Exchange, so I ordered a 6-inch blue steel Python for something like $150 (it sounded too good to be true). Incredibly, it came in the mail to me in Korea. Before I rotated home, I had to submit a form through the Army to get permission to import the revolver back to the US. I did that, and a few weeks later I had a letter signed by the Director of the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Bureau allowing me to bring my Python home. It went into my duffel bag, I produced the letter when I went through Customs in San Francisco, and that was that. Better times.

You know how it goes with these things. When I was back in Texas shortly after my stint in Korea, I saw a Ruger No. 1 single shot rifle in .30 06 I couldn’t live without, and I traded the Python for it (the guy at the store through in a couple of boxes of .30 06 ammo, too). Then I felt a void in my life because I no longer owned a Python, so I ordered another one (this time a 6-inch nickel-plated model) through the Fort Bliss Gun Club. It was under $200. Then I traded that for something else (I can’t remember what). Ah, the mistakes we make. But maybe they weren’t all mistakes. I’ve sent a lot of lead downrange with the Ruger No. 1 over the last 45 years, it’s one of the most accurate rifles I own, and it has stunning walnut.

The Ruger No. 1 in 30 06 I traded the Kunsan Python to get. It’s a 200th Year Ruger. I miss the Python, but I love my ’06 No. 1. Some day I’ll do a blog on this rifle.

Today, Colt Pythons typically sell for something in the $3,000 to $4,000 range. Pete’s would command even more, because it’s the 8-incher, which is a rare item. I’ve asked Pete if he wanted to sell his, but all I got in return was a smile. That’s probably just as well; I couldn’t afford it at today’s prices.

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The Crimes Men Do

Glenn sent me a few photos from the old days and one that got my attention was a shot of us building a Sportster in the living room of the shack we used to live in. Having a living room to work in was a luxury because prior to renting the shack I was homeless. I had an old Chevy truck with a bench seat that I could stretch out enough to get some sleep and I had a job that let me take a dry bath in the restroom after work. But when Admiralty Marine closed its doors for the evening I was on my own until the next morning. The boss let me know that the situation couldn’t go on forever and that I really needed to find a place to live.

It wasn’t so much lack of money. I was working a lot of hours, but I was only 19 and landlords didn’t want to rent to a greasy, punk kid. I can’t blame them. I would do the same thing myself. Finally a co-worker who was a full-fledged adult vouched for me when his landlord had a vacancy next door. I shaved, dry-bathed, put on clean clothes and did everything I could do to look like a respectable young man with a future. I’ll be dammed if it didn’t work. I was in after paying first, last and a deposit. Cash.

After waiting for the dust to settle the first thing I did was to rebuild my Sportster in the living room. When I bought the 1968 Sportster I was kind of shocked at how archaic the motorcycle felt. It was cool and all but the front end was so wobbly it felt like silly string and the front brake might as well have been deleted and an AM/FM radio installed in its place for all the stopping it would do.

The engine seemed to run well but I was going to ride across country on the thing, so a freshen-up was in order. I don’t know if it was a good idea because the 900cc V-Twin had some strange things going on inside and I was destined to do even more stupid stuff to the poor bike.

Someone had replaced the stock Harley intake valves with huge, unknown-origin valves. The valves were so big they had to cut the seat into the dome of the combustion chamber. Once the giant valves were removed the old seats were revealed along with the stock porting. The only advantage I could see to the big valves was a bump in compression ratio due to the valves occupying more space in the combustion chamber and the circumference increase giving slightly more flow when the valve first popped open. Once into the lift though the stock ports would probably be the limiting factor.

I wasn’t having any of it. I bought standard Harley valves and guides and set about putting things right. Admiralty Marine had a Sioux valve grinding kit so I could do all the work myself. After the seats were re-cut to fit the new valves the installed height was wrong so I had to trim the ends of the valves and shim the springs. The heads were a mess.

The Sportster’s high dome pistons were ok so a quick hone job and a set of rings finished off the top end. After that you’d think I’d leave the engine alone but I had to have a tin primary cover like the XR750 flat trackers ran.

Opening and consuming a whole ‘nother can of worms, I had to get rid of the crankshaft’s spring and ramp style compensating sprocket. The compensating sprocket absorbs the 45-degree V-Twin’s power pulses before sending smooth, less spikey power on to the clutch basket, gearbox and rear sprocket. This vital part stuck out way toofar for my tin primary so into the trash it went.

A solid front sprocket was fitted to the crankshaft and the tin primary would still not fit so I had to make a 3/8’ aluminum spacer the same size and shape as the primary cover gasket. The ’68 XLH was electric start but I wanted to eliminate as much weight as possible. At an independent Harley shop I swapped the starter motor, big battery box and oil tank for a kick-start shaft, gears and kick lever. You can anticipate the next problem: the electric-start primary case had a square-ish hump on the back to accommodate the starter Bendix. I had to weld a flat metal part onto the tin primary to cover the hole.

Without an XLH-style starter motor there was another gaping hole on the other side of crankcase. I blanked off the hole where the electric starter fit with a large chunk of angle aluminum that doubled as a battery box for the much smaller kick-only battery. Now the engine was ready to slot back into the frame. And that’s yet another can of worms I’ll write about later.

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German Military and Police Motors: Part II

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Our last blog on German Military and Police Motors: Part I ended with a photo 0f good buddy Ben’s his personal bike, and I thought a good way to start Part II would be with another photo from Ben…one showing a vintage Swedish police BMW…

Nothing slowed these guys down…check out this Swedish ski-equipped BMW!

When I wrote the Complete Book of Police and Military Motorcycles, I guess the word got out and I received a number of police motorcycle photos. As you might imagine, many of these photos were of police BMWs, as BMW has been a dominant force in the police motorcycle world for decades. BMW has offered several engine configurations over the years, and nearly all are represented in their police motorcycles.

BMW’s early K-bikes used 3 or 4 cylinder engines (the photo below shows a 4-cylinder model) that were oriented in an unusual manner. The crankshaft was parallel to the frame, and the engine was oriented with the pistons moving in a horizontal plane (the engine laid on its side). The cylinder was on the bike’s left side. BMW tried to enter the US market with these motorcycles, but they made little progress until they offered the 1100cc boxer twin.

An K1100LT BMW formerly in service with Belgium’s federal police. Ruud Willems sent this photo to me.

Another cool photo from Ruud, this time showing an 1100cc BMW boxer twin formerly in service with the Belgian federal police.

The photos came in from all over the world. Here’s one from good buddy Ian in the UK…

A cool photo from Ian showing police BMWs in Birmingham, England.

And another from my old stomping grounds in New Jersey…

An F650 BMW police bike with ABS in service with Egg Harbor Township in New Jersey. The Egg Harbor PD likes this bike’s ability to go off road. They also use the larger R1200RT-P BMW, which you can see in the background.

One of Egg Harbor’s Motor Officers on the F650 BMW providing an escort to the Police Unity Tour.

Here’s a great photo from my CBX friend Ian Foster of Hong Kong showing two BMW R1100RT-Ps and two Honda VFRs in Hong Kong. How about that…Honda VFRs as police bikes!

Hong Kong police motors…Beemers and VFRs.

A Hong Kong BMW in Causeway Bay, sent to us by Ian.

And good buddy Danny send us a several photos from the Netherlands…

A cool shot of a 1200 cc BMW police bike in the Netherlands from my friend Danny Hoek.

Danny also sent this shot, along with detail photos below of the Netherlands-based BMW police bikes.

An 800cc twin BMW police bike in the Netherlands from Danny Hoek.

And Danny’s shot of the BMW R1200RT-P police bike in the Netherlands

When I wrote Motors for Rider magazine back in 2009, I took a bunch of photos of police motorcycles. Here’s a cool shot that made the cover of two BMW-mounted Motor Officers in La Verne, California…

A pair of La Verne, California’s finest…on their BMW R1200RT-P police motorcycles in 2009.

When police BMWs are retired from service, they are picked up by civilian motorcyclists. Although the bikes may have a few miles on them, they have usually been meticulously maintained, and they in excellent condition. Converting a police BMW to civilian use is straightforward…the blue and red strobe lights, the police radio, and the insignia come off, and it’s ready to go. Most civilian riders also remove the police BMW’s extra battery to save weight.

This is a photo of my good friend Bob staying two steps ahead of Hurricane Norbert in Baja, Mexico, on his “demilitarized” R1150RT-P.

So that’s it for now, folks. Our next bit on police motors will feature Kawasakis, but that’s another time and another blog. In the meantime, if you would like to see our other police motorcycle articles, please check out the ExhaustNotes Police Motors page!

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Sticker Shock

We’re trying to enlarge the subscriber base for the ExhaustNotes.us website. Our marketing efforts so far have been focused on sharing links on Facebook and posting links on various chat sites. It’s a hit and miss method that works okay and you can boost sponsored posts from Facebook but an email subscriber list may work even better. A subscriber email list would be by definition readers who are interested in our content.

In their heyday motorcycle magazines used to give away all sorts of cool gear plastered with logos. It built loyalty in an era when motorcyclists had many magazines to choose from. Today, with the zillions of websites to choose from will that kind of marketing work again?

I guess we’ll find out. The first rough draft of the exhaustnotes.us sticker was a simple design using the popular, exhaust-pipe-streaming-off-a-letter style. This is not a new innovation but then neither is a motorcycle blog. The design needed to work with T-shirts and other future swag projects. We wanted it hand-drawn because Berk and I are old school and we are not wasting your time trying to appear otherwise.

Next we applied a little color to the design, not too much to keep costs down later on in the life of the logo. The chrome reflections and sky blue harken back to the Cycletoons/Cartoons magazines we read as whelps.

After we agreed on the layout the design was tightened up. The “E” fitted to the pipe better and the pipe was fatter and curved down more. We eliminated quotation marks on the motto and straightened out the lettering a bit.

Now the real work began: Inking the outlines and making every bold line pop out. We needed to make the design strong enough to survive shrinking in size or enlarging. A cheerful children’s watercolor set brightened things up without being hard to duplicate on clothing, stuff bags or tramp stamps.

The final design was sent to www.JimmyMacDesigns.com for more refining, clean up and changing the whole jpeg mess into a vector file to prevent loss of data when resizing. Jimmy is a true artist. Go to his website to check out his fantastic metal and wood creations. You won’t be able to tell from these low-res blog photos but Jimmy got rid of all the tooling marks, made the letter edges sharp and resorted them to be more even without losing the hand-drawn look. He also made it fit into a standard oval sticker and added a ragged outside line on the oval.

Here’s the deal: Sign up for ExhaustNotes.us email alerts and using a well-regulated yet self-funded government letter carrier we’ll send a brand new sticker suitable for framing to you for your effort. Just like in the old days except you don’t have to cut out box tops or coupons and crap. We only have a limited number of these to give away so you’ll need to get on the list before January 1st, 2054. You can email your snail mail address to Berk or me at info@ExhaustNotes.us after signing up. Sure, it’s a clunky process that will take a few weeks, but this is ExhaustNotes.us. If you want smooth and professional you should subscribe to the real magazines.

Indianapolis

Happy Father’s Day, folks!

On occasion, I’ll read a book that is so good I’ll post a blog about it. I thought I would share a recommendation here on Indianapolis, a book my daughter gave to me for Father’s Day.

I received Indianapolis a couple of weeks ago, and it’s one of those books I couldn’t put down. It’s really many stories wrapped into one book: The story about the mission to deliver the uranium used in the atomic bomb that ended World War II, the story about the Japanese sub that sank the Indianapolis, the story about the ship’s sinking, the story about the delayed rescue and the shark attacks on the men in the water, the story of the recovery, the story about Captain McVay’s court martial, and finally, the story of his posthumous exoneration. Trust me on this one, folks. Indianapolis is worth your time.

I have two or three other recent reads I’ll recommend, too. Stay tuned…those will be in future blogs. And for all you Dad’s out there…again, enjoy the day.

Sierra Mountain Passes

A photo from a ride through the northern Sierra Nevadas. That’s my old Triumph Tiger.

Hey, here’s an alert to a cool new moto blog from good buddies Val and J. It’s focused on an area that is arguably one of the best riding locales in the US, and that’s the northern Sierra Nevada mountains. The site is appropriately titled Sierra Mountain Passes and it’s impressive. My advice is pay it a visit and add it to your favorites list (it’s now on mine).

Sierra Mountain Passes grabbed my attention for a couple of reasons. One is that I did an article for Motorcycle Classics magazine on the area a few years ago (Five Sierra Nevada Passes), the other is that J and I will be hunting deer in Idaho later this year. That’s going to be fun.

Reloading Part III: Expanding and priming

In our prior two blogs on reloading .45 ACP ammunition, we discussed the equipment and components needed, and the first steps (cleaning the brass, case resizing, and depriming). If you’d like to catch up on those two steps, you can do so on our Tales of the Gun page. In this blog, we’re going to continue the reloading process.

So here we are, with 150 cleaned, resized, and deprimed .45 ACP cases neatly arranged in three reloading trays…

We’re now going to use the second die in our three-die .45 ACP set. It’s the die in the middle of the photo below…

The center die is the one we’ll be using this time.

The die is the expander die. It has an insert that opens the case mouth to the required diameter. It also flares (or bellmouths) the forward rim of the case to accept the .45 bullet.

Note the expander plug inside this second die.

The drill here is to thread the die into the press.

The expander die body threads into the press, and the expander plug threads into the die. The trick is to put a resized and deprimed .45 case into the shellholder, lift the press ram all the way up, and adjust both the die and the plug so that the case mouth is very slightly flared. You’ll have to lower and raise the press ram several times, tweaking the die and expander plug position each time, to get the proper amount of flare.

You’ll need to grab a bullet to assess this adjustment for the amount of case mouth flare. Once the die is adjusted so that the bullet just enters the flared case mouth, lock the die and the expander plug into position with the locknuts shown in the photo above.

Here’s a .45 bullet on top of a case that has not yet been expanded and flared. Note that it will not enter the case.

This next photo shows a .45 ACP case that has been expanded and flared.

Note the very slight flare on the case mouth.

As you can see in the photo below, the slight case mouth flare now allows the bullet to start into the case.

A properly-flared case mouth. The trick here is not to overdo the flaring operation. You want to open the case mouth just enough to allow the bullet to start entering the case. The idea is to prevent the case mouth from shaving bullet material in the reloading step that pushes the bullet into the case.

Once the flare is acceptable, we lock both die locknuts and run all of our cases through the press. This concept of doing one step on all of the cases at the same time is an important part of the reloading process. We want to do each step on all of the cases in one run to assure consistency from case to case. It’s this consistency that leads to enhanced accuracy.

Once all of our cases have been through the above operation, we can now move on to priming, and at this point, it’s time to introduce another optional equipment item. Most reloading presses come with a priming arm, which is a feature that allows inserting a new primer on the press downstroke. I don’t use this feature any more, as it never performed consistently enough for me. Instead, I purchased a separate priming tool made by Lee. It’s what you see in the photo below.

The Lee priming tool. This is an older one. The newer design looks a little different; we’ll see it when we do our series on reloading .300 Weatherby rifle ammunition. The operating principal is the same.

And we’ll need primers. There are two or three primer sources. I use whatever I have available, and for now, that’s Winchester. CCI and Remington also offer primers, and maybe a few other companies. I buy whatever the store has available. I’ve not found that primer brand makes any difference in accuracy.

A case of Winchester large pistol primers.

The box you see above holds 1,000 primers. There are 10 trays of 100 primers each…

A tray of 100 primers. The priming tool cover has been removed in this photo.

The next step is to add primers to the primer tool. We have to remove the priming tool cover (you do so by rotating it a few degrees), and then adding the primers to the priming tool…

When you drop the primers into the reloading tool, take care not to spill any outside the tray. They’ll be facing up, down, and some will be on their sides, as you see in the photo above. See those little concentric striations in the priming tray? They serve a purpose. The trick here is to jiggle the priming tool slightly from left to right, and it will make all of the primers orient in the face up position, like you see below. Don’t shake the priming tool too hard, or primers will go flying out. Jiggle it just enough to get them all facing up.

100 primers, face up. Note that there’s also a shell holder in the priming tool. Different shell holders are required for different cartridge calibers. When you buy the Lee tool, it comes with a collection of shell holders that covers most cartridges.

Once all of the primers are face up, reinstall the priming tool tray cover.

The priming tool cover, back in place over the primer tray.

At this point, jiggle the priming tool again to feed a primer into position.

A primer, ready to be pressed into the empty case. Note the No. 2 shell holder. It’s the one used for the .45 ACP cartridge. This shell holder also works for the .30 06, .308, 7.65 Belgian Mauser, 7×57, and several other cases that share a common base.

We can now insert a .45 ACP case into the shell holder, squeeze the priming tool handle, and a primer will be seated into the case.

Squeezing the priming tool lever to seat the primer.

A new primer, seated in the .45 ACP case.

And there you have it. We’re going to repeat this operation to prime all 150 cases. That, my friends, is enough for today.

We’ll complete the reloading process in our next and final .45 ACP reloading blog.

Me? I’m headed out to the range this morning, where I’ll be firing reloaded .45 ACP ammo prepared just like I described here. I’ll grab a photo or two show you, too.

Stay tuned!

Want to read more about reloading and our other cool gun stories? It’s all right here on our Tales of the Gun page!