Bullet and case trays speed things up. They are easy, inexpensive and no-maintenance. Bullet and case feeders speed things up even more, but they have a lot of maintenance and setup required.

      If it isn’t, find out why. The measure may be mis-set, you may have grabbed the wrong powder off the shelf, you may be looking at the wrong page or bullet weight in the loading manual.

      Dial calipers

      Good digital calipers are now so inexpensive that you cannot claim poverty to avoid owning one or two. Calipers let you check loaded over-all length, crimp diameter and bullet diameter, and you simply must own a set. Digital is best, and while you’re at it, get spare batteries for it. Nothing makes a loading session more pointless than waiting until the last minute and then finding out your calipers are dead, and you have to start the process by buying batteries. If you are loading at 10:30 p.m. on a Friday night for the weekend’s match, good luck finding the batteries you need.

      Case gauge

      While they are called case gauges, most of us use them as loaded-ammo gauges. The idea is simple; the case gauge is a chamber reamed, to the absolute minimum dimensions allowed by the blueprints, into a plain steel cylinder. You also use it to set up your sizing die; size your first piece of brass and drop it in to ensure things are copacetic. But most of us use it for loaded ammo, too, and either gauge-check one round in ten or twenty, or just sit there in front of the TV, late at night, gauge-checking every single one of them. (Well, as bachelors, we do, or did. Now that we’re settled down, and have a better handle on the loading process, we just spotcheck ammo.)

       LABELING, STORING AND RECORDKEEPING

      Loaded ammo has to be labeled and stored. Getting things mixed up will not just ruin a days plinking or scratch your match entry in a competition, but could lead to busted guns and injured shooters. Once loaded, ammo should be stored in clean, sealed containers and labeled. What containers you use, and what labeling system works for you, is up to you. And as I said earlier, if you load more than one load in one caliber, keep track of it all with a recordkeeping system to avoid problems. I have some guidelines, but if mine don’t work for you, compose your own. Just do it.

       A scale is so important that having a storage case for it is not a bad idea.

Chapter Two

      BRASS

      WHICH BRASS?

      Brass is brass, right? Not at all. There are some brands of brass that will not only make your life miserable, but complicated. And, some treatments the manufacturers subject brass to will make you cry. The big one is crimped primer pockets. Basically, once the primer has been seated in the manufacturing process, the manufacturer stamps around the rim of the pocket, kicking up a ledge that locks the primer in place. Your decapping die will probably press the primer out (but not always) but when you go to seat the next primer, things will come to a crashing halt. Sometimes the decapping pin will press it out, but the old primer is “speared” onto the decapping pin, and gets pulled back to the case. Things get stuck, you get out of sequence, and it takes a minute or two to disassemble the press, solve the problem and get back to work.

      Once the primer is out, you can swage or cut the crimp. In the early days, I’d read of writers who suggested that a common pocketknife could be used to cut the crimp. They were sadists, or were not dealing in any kind of volume whatsoever. When I was really into volume loading, some friends and I built a contraption that locked a case deburring tool into a power drill, and affixed a shield over it. The whole thing was basically an electrical motor in a box, and you worked it by sitting down in a comfy chair, nestling the gizmo in your lap, and pressing the primer pockets of deprimed cases against it. You used the nose end of the cutter to power-ream crimps off at the rate of 30-40 a minute. But, the thing was so loud, at several thousand rpm, that you had to wear eye and hearing protection. The Dillon 1050 press has a station for swaging crimped primer pockets, but if you don’t load on one, you don’t have this option. (We did it because we couldn’t wrestle whatever brass it was into the 1050, I forget which. Probably .308.) For most of you, sorting the crimped brass out to be batch-processed later is the only option.

       Brass cleaning can be quick and automated. The Hornady power cleaner makes them shiny.

       The Hornady Sonic Cleaner allows you to set time and temperature.

      Does mixing brands matter? Sometimes. If you are loading right to the limit, yes. In that instance you want all your brass to be the same. If you desire the absolute highest accuracy, you’d be well-served to use just one batch of one brand, and that would be the one your gun tells you it prefers. If you are loading to the maximum safe pressure, yes, you want to be using all the same brass.

      If you are not doing any of those, then whatever you pick up, find at your gun club, shoot and save, will be useful. Now, there will be “brass” you won’t want. All the steel and aluminum stuff , toss in the trash. If you are scrounging up a motherlode of empties at the gun club (and your club allows it), look at the headstamps as you start grabbing. If it doesn’t look familiar, turn the cases around and look inside. If it is Berdan-primed, ditch it. Boxer-primed brass has a central flash hole, and your decapping pin will punch the old primers out. Berdan-primed brass has two or three holes, off -center, and cannot be reloaded. Well, at least not with the common tools you’ll be able to acquire. Given the price of scrap brass on the metals market, it might be worth picking it up anyway, but not for reloading.

      Other than specialized needs, you don’t have to do much sorting. One that I do sort is the Remington (or R–P headstamped) brass out of my .38 and .357 bins. One of my re-The Hornady Ultrasonic cleaner buzzes through dirty brass. volvers uses full-moon clips (yes, in .38/.357) but it only works with Remington brass. The other brass doesn’t have enough of an undercut in front

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