The reality is, reloading your own ammunition allows you to either practice for less, or shoot more often for the same amount of money.
If you do your research you can find powders that work for both pistol and rifle and thus use them interchangeably. Research is a PITA though. There are far more bullets, primers and powders than most companies want to do the research for so reloading manuals have only at best a moderate listing of each for any given calibre.
Here are some links to help you though -
Hodgdon Powder provides data on quite possibly the broadest amount of data and does it for free on their site.
Yeah that's about it for free on the web that we've found.
You can also pick up reloading books by Lyman, Hornady, Speer, Hodgdon from places like Amazon.
I'd strongly advise printing out the data from the Hodgdon site AND picking up at least one reloading manual, two would be better. Remember, 3 is 2, 2 is 1, 1 is none. You don't want to 'guess that's right' with ammunition.
Depending on the calibre and the gun you can reload the ammuntion for far less than you can buy the finished product for retail. Smaller calibres, especially pistol, aren't as a big a savings, but larger pistol and most rifle are a lot cheaper to reload for.
We went with the Hornady Lock n Load Progressive reloading unit. We ended up getting it on Ebay because all the vendors were out of stock but got a good price on a NIB unit and free shipping. It comes with 'almost' everything you need. We chose it based on reviews and specifications. Your research might lead you to a different conclusion.
The cheapest online source we found, but out of stock, was at Natchez Shooters Supplies.
Some of the nice things about it are:
It's fast, in theory anyway. You can crank out a couple of hundred rounds an hour easy and if you're uber as many as 500 an hour.
5 positions on the turret which we have filled. Many others are four position only so you either must double up on one position or leave out a pretty important one like the Powder Cop die which gives you a visual indicator of how much powder you have in a cartridge.
You can go to a powder through expander die which apparently lets you both size the case at the same time that you put powder in it and thus recover one die position.
You can go with the base model which means for every cartridge you have to insert an empty shell manually into the starting position and a bullet into the almost completed shell. You can buy an automatic empty case feeder and eliminate that step. And as I understand it you can also buy a bullet seater that will drop a bullet into the case for you. All you have to do then is just pull the lever and keep your eye on the powder cop to make sure you don't over/under charge a bullet.
Some of the bad things and issues we ran into:
Out of the box the indexing was off, it wouldn't consistently index or rotate the shells into the correct position with each pull of the lever. Research on the web finally pointed me to the 'pawls' or the teeth that run along the index tray under the bottom of the unit. The left one was really loose and had apparently shifted during transit just enough to make it not work. With a little turn (actually a big turn because I didn't know what I was doing) it worked. What I actually did was think that the hex screw was supposed to hold the metal tooth looking thing in position. So I cranked it down. Now it didn't work at all. Well [bleep]. So I backed it back up a couple of turns and tested it and miracle of miracles I accidently hit the right spot with that ham fisted display of turning and go it set right to index. What had been a frustration was now indexing like a swiss clock.
You do NOT get a primer flipper tray. Seriously WTF? These things are just molded plastic that can't cost more than a couple of quarters to make. Why not include one with the $400 reloading kit?
The powder measure is wildly inconsistent, like a full grain off for me so far and when the acceptable range between minimum and maximum load for the powder we're using is 0.5 grains, that's ridiculously dangerous.
I've broken the thing down twice now and thouroughly cleaned it per the videos on youtube using the recommended product, Hornady One Shot to no avail. I can sometimes get a string of charges that are within 0.02 of each other. And then one will shoot up .5 grains or drop by .5 grains.
FYI you NEED a scale capable of weighing these small amounts. There are a number of them on the market specifically for this but in researching them, the mechanical beam scales, they all apparently suck since around 2009 or 2010. About the time they started being made in other countries. Check out the reviews on places like Midway USA. Great reviews up to around 09/10 and then consistently bad ones after that. After a lot of digging I eventually found some recommendations for a scale that's not designed specifically for weighing powder but rather gemstones.
Jennings Mack 20 scale.
It has a resolution of +/- 0.02 grains and is reasonably cheap. Like anything electronic it's subject to variance but by making sure that it's zeroed out for each weighing it's very repeatable. I keep a empty casing that weigh exactly 62 grains for testing loads. I weigh the cartridge to confirm we're on mark and then TARE it out to 0 and then fill the casing and weight it again to see how much powder is going in. I then dump the powder and at random weight the casing again to verify it goes back to 0.
I'm still looking for a good beam scale, the internets consensus is get something made by Ohaus scales in the USA from 5 or more years ago. So I'll be lurking on ebay for something like that. Digitial is great, as long as you have power to run it.
Work on the inconsistency is still pending. Armed with more internet knowledge I'm going to try the following:
- Clean it for the third time.
- Rub the inside of the powder measure, top to bottom, with a anti-static dryer sheet.
- Spray it with graphite spray lube to make the powder less likely to stick.
- Insert the baffle that came with the press but without any instructions or indication as to what it was for. It's just a oval piece of metal that's bent in the middle and apparently it goes inside the powder measure with the hump at the top. This prevents the weight of the powder from changing the pressure as the powder goes into the charging meter.
Oddly though I've also found posts that say the meter doesn't work as well when it's less than 1/4 full. And with the baffle in place it's always going to be the equivilent of less than 1/4 full.
I'll follow up this post with the results of that.
I'd be remiss if I didn't include links to sources for cheap components based on my extensive research (we're cheap bastards) and after doing business with some -
Midway USA - Not the cheapest but they have stock on some stuff when no one else has and they're prices aren't the highest.
Powder Valley, Inc - Good cheap source of components. Recommended in several places by reloadings.
Natchez Shooters Supply - Fast shipping. The site mentioned by NutnFancy of youtube fame.
Graf & Sons - Also mentioned/recommended on several reloading forums.
Once Fired Brass (A subsidary of Tech Equipment Sales) - Fast cheap shipping, they use USPS with their 'if it fits, it ships' boxes. The brass was exceptionally clean and obviously tumbled to shiny state.
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