Thread: What are you using for pressure estimation in your handloads.

Originally Posted by grandpamac

Greetings all,
It was all warm and horrible outside this morning so I thought I should find out what three of my oldest manuals had to say on pressure estimation. They were Reloading Simplified by Cyril Waterworth 1961, Speer No 9 about 1975 and Reloading Manual for Rifle and Handgun by Nick Harvey 1980. All included primer leak, hard extraction and case head expansion as signs (Speer also included primer appearance). All three did not consider primer appearance to be a reliable indicator of pressure. Interesting.
Regards Grandpamac.

Yes I was thinking you really need to know what you are doing using the primer as indication of pressure.....headspace is the determinator of primer flattening as well as hot loads. Too much headspace will "top hat" the primer even at minimum loads so primer shape is not going to be reliable....!

Quickload is a means to calculate the pressure but that will need to be reverse engineered from muzzle velocity. Relaoding manuals are quite conservative a probably where a new shooter should begin.