Now is the time to start hand loading for your Mak.

[M2 Carbine]

With cheap blasting ammo becoming expensive and hard to find, now is the time to start rolling your own.

Usually when the subject of reloading comes up it immediately turns to expensive reloading presses and equipment that will put a serious dent in a thousand dollars. This immediately turns off shooters that are hard pressed to work a few boxes of ammo and range fees into the budget once or twice a month.

When I first started to do a lot of shooting, 38 Special, a friend put me on to cheap reloading. I bought a Lyman 310 hand tool (nutcracker) , a can of $3 Bullseye powder, a $6 brick of primers, and a $7 500 count box of cast and lubed bullets.
For a powder measure I soldered a 22LR case to a little brass handle and was on my way to wearing out that Lyman tool by loading many thousand 38 Specials rounds.

To load just one or a couple pistol calibers it takes little equipment and cost.

For a reloading press you might find a used "C" press at a gun show for $20-$30. I bought a good one for $20 a couple months ago.
Or you can get something like a new Lee Reloading Press or Lee Hand Press for under $30. With these two Lee presses you need a separate hand priming tool I believe.
http://www.leeprecision.com/html/catalog/rlpress1.html

Then you need a $25 set of Lee dies, which also includes a little plastic powder dipper and shell holder.

If you don't have a stock of reloadable 9x18 brass, trimmed 9mm works fine. To use 9mm brass for the Makarov you will need a Lee case trimmer, which can be used with a hand drill to trim the 9mm cases to 18mm.

Now buy a $15 brick of SP primers, a $15-$21 can of pistol powder and 500-1,000 lead Mak bullets from Midway for $14.99.
http://www.midwayusa.com/eproductpage.exe/showproduct?saleitemid=319163

And stop worrying about the Mak ammo shortage.:)

An added perk is you'll probably find that your lead handloads are more accurate than the (formally) cheap stuff.

[North Bender]

Thanks for this post M2!

I've got to get going on reloading. Gun show coming tomorrow - I think I'll go look for some of the items you mention.

[wrangler5]

You need a little more control than a 22-case powder dipper will provide, but with a powder measure and a scale you can produce some VERY comfortable plinking loads with lead bullets for a Mak. I've run loads down to around 690fps and still had reliable functioning with a 21# recoil spring (610fps with a stock spring), although mostly I load to around 750fps. You can shoot 'em all day, and the lower power loads don't throw the cases into the next county like full loads do. (At the ragged low end of power I had loads where the cases just sort of dribbled out the ejection port and landed at my feet - sure was easy to collect the brass ;) )

If you've got the empty cases, you can reload lead Mak rounds for 6-7 cents each (Midway prices.) That's $60-$70/case, which I believe is below any of the Russian stuff even when it was available. It does take time, but I find it therapeutic and enjoyable.

If economical startup is a major factor, the Lee hand press is a VERY convenient tool, if not the fastest thing to use, and will continue to be useful even after you move on to a "regular" press of some sort. You can use it to do mindless stuff while sitting in a comfortable chair, even watching TV. (I just used mine to deprime about 500 357 cases whose primers for some reason were tending to stick in the pockets and just get a hole punched in them with my progressive - sat in front of the TV and just squeezed away. There's nothing to screw up in that process, so distractions aren't a problem.)

[M2 Carbine]

No, a 22LR case wouldn't be good for a Mak.
It only holds about 2.2-3 grains of Bullseye powder and a full load 38 Special is about 3.5 grains. It was a good 38 load for blasting in an old gravel pit/dump though.

"If economical startup is a major factor, the Lee hand press is a VERY convenient tool, if not the fastest thing to use, and will continue to be useful even after you move on to a "regular" press of some sort."

That's a good point that even if you start out with a low price slow press you may still find it's useful if you get a fast progressive loading press later on.

[North Bender]

Well, I'm not looking for the deadliest load. That 610 fps round that Wrangler describes sounds so fun to shoot! How many times can you shoot a brass casing?

[wrangler5]

Originally posted by North Bender
How many times can you shoot a brass casing? At that power level, probably as long as you can pick up the case. I've read stories of people reloading their 38 Special target wadcutter cases for years without having brass problems.

Be advised, that the very low power Mak loads that I've made are so soft they don't really expand the brass case to seal the chamber tightly. This means that there is a fair bit of powder gas blow-by that ends up (a) on the front half of the case, (b) inside the gun, and (c) in a fine line down the top of your trigger finger. All this means is some extra cleaning that you might not have with full power loads. Of course, it also means that there's practically no stress on (a) the brass case, so it should last a lot longer, and (b) your hand and wrist, so they should last longer too.