I do not load any ammunion, or ever have. But it is a subject I have read up on and studied over the years quite a bit, so my knowledge of it is all booklearned stuff. But I well remember the warnings in the older Hornady reloading manuals and the one by Speer about you should NEVER shoot anybody else's reloads and you should not expect them to shoot yours. And the printing dates on some of these books was back before we became what we are today, society wise, with all the lawsuits and such.

I have only fired someone else's reloads once, and that was enough to convince me. A guy I worked with had a pre-1964 Winchester Model 70 in .30-06 caliber and he was always trying to come up with hopped up loads in it. He once loaded some 220 grain Remington Core-Lokt round nose bullets in front of some powder that I don't recall now, but he said it was a very compressed charge, so to examine every bullet in the magazine before chambering it to make sure it has not come unseated from the case. He said they would not chamber in his Model 70, so, like a dummy, I said I would try them in my 1918 Rock Island 1903.

Yeah, they chambered fine, but when I touched them off, it was like firing a .458 Lott! The old stump we had for a target that simply absorbed other .30-06 rounds literally exploded when hit with one of those bullets. But the worst part was that I nearly had to get the tire jack handle out of the pickup to pry the bolt open! And that 1903 has the slickest operating bolt of any bolt action rifle I have ever seen, as dad had it polished when he had the rifle sporterized back before I was born. When I did manage to get the bolt open, the cartridge was quite difficult to extract, and it took some assistance with a ramrod down the bore to knock it out. The other cartridges in the magazine had the bullets about 1/8" of them sticking out past the cannuleur. So I unloaded them and simply pulled the bullets out by hand and poured the powder on the ground and set a match to it.

I made up my mind right then and there to NEVER shoot anyone else's reloads again after that. I figure if I needed something bigger and more powerful than a .30-06, then I would buy one of the magnum calibers.
Curt