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View Full Version : Old school Sheriffs Range. Reloading Video (1936)



HCM
02-21-2016, 04:55 PM
Found this on bookface. It's a video of a 1930's Sheriffs office casting bullets and reloading practice ammo. If one of y'all can find it on YouTube or otherwise embed it I would appreciate it.


https://www.facebook.com/hotloadbench/

Hauptmann
02-21-2016, 05:06 PM
That's pretty awesome. I know that most departments used to reload, but I had never seen anything like this to document it.

LSP972
02-22-2016, 05:14 PM
We were still loading our own practice .38 wadcutters when I was selected to join the FTU in 1987.

We had two Camdex machines and one Ammo-Load machine. Brass was cleaned in a small concrete mixer, using a rouged corn cob/walnut hull mix. Bullets were Speer 148gr hollow base wadcutters, purchased in bulk. They came packed in plastic tubes, 25 or so per tube, that could be emptied into the machines' tubular bullet feed system. Using one of the Camdex machines, on a good day when nothing choked, two of us could load up to seven or eight thousand rounds. You just didn't rush that procedure. The Ammo-Load, as I recall, had a bit slower production rate, but was less prone to choking/jamming. Interesting times…

Not long after I got involved with all of that, a new guy took over and decided he didn't want to be bothered with it, so we started buying practice ammo. That timing was good, because it was just a year before we began exploring semi-autos… and the one time we had to use commercial reloads in 9mm, it was an unmitigated disaster. Granted, they were loaded by a team of Bubbas and Cleeti; but we found out, real quick, that bottom-feeders are NOT tolerant of low-quality ammunition.

There's another video out there, made some years after this one, by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Office, that covers range operations in general- with a short blurb on their reloading practices. Probably the same agency; that range looks familiar.

.

Hambo
02-23-2016, 07:45 PM
I think our department sold the Camdex in the same era. I don't know if they loaded practice ammo and bought duty ammo, or reloaded one round for everything.