This falls under the “better late than never” category. Late last year, when things actually did slow down a bit over the holidays, I decided to do a little reloading. In addition to 800 rounds or so of .44 Magnum (oops, now I’ve gone and declared I have an “arsenal” according to the Democrats!), I got a burr under my saddle to reload something a bit more exotic. And I did so!
I have an old 37mm launcher. Not very practical but high on the cool factor. It has been mounted under my AR-15’s barrel before, but currently stands alone with its own stock and set-up. Rounds for this are NOT cheap, so I went browsing on the web, and found both reloading components as well as YouTube videos. I decided to try reloading a few of my own.
I did acquire some good aluminum cases, but started with the plastic ones I had that were from “store-bought” (okay, gun show-bought) rounds previously fired. Here’s a picture of both case types:
Again, I am no KirkD. I also know many of my photos are a bit blurry. Hard to tell when you have cataracts, which I did when these were taken.
I cannibalized a tube-launched firework for the payload.
For the charge, I used 60 grains of Pyrodex, per recommendations from various parties on the internet (we know how trustworthy those internet types are.) Most recommended some form of “charge concentrator”, so I created one with a piece of PVC that held the charge exactly, hot-gluing it into place:
I decided to fire this one and a couple other prototypes around midnight on New Year’s Eve, figuring (correctly) that the sound of this would be masked by the many fireworks going off all around me (I love living in South Carolina!).
I learned a bunch from this first round of experiments. In the aluminum-cased rounds, I used a piece of foam pipe insulation to hold the PVC charge tube in place, lightly gluing it down. It worked wonderfully. The insulation and PVC disappeared with the round, but who cares? That stuff is cheap.
I learned to make sure the charge fuse is long enough! One blew up way to close to Y2K and I!!!
I also learned what did not work. Hot-gluing the PVC tube in a plastic case resulted in a “dramatic failure” of the case!
As you can see, the base separated from the walls, and the wall cracked all the way down the side!
Oh well. No one got hurt, and I now know better!
