Lets say you had 100 pieces ofonce fired brass, you FL Sized them, trimmed them, deburred them, cleaned out the primer pockets, tumbled them, sorted for the most consistent neck runout for the best 40.
You then primed and loaded them and wieghted each load.Marked them with a perm. marker.
How long do you think it would take you to do all this? Me, its a total combination of about 4 hours or there abouts. Next reloading I will take the trimming and sorting out, so I imagine 2 hours or there abouts.
I loaded for someone who never figured it took that much labor to get the job done.
I"™m usually pretty organized when it comes time to reloading with everything set up but I couldn"™t do it in 4 hours. It would take me at least 2 nights after work and would say at least 3 hours per night to accomplish that task. But I always take my time to make sure everything is just perfect to my standards...
I'd say at least 4 hours to do all that, probably more as slow as I am.That's one of the reasons I don't reload as much as I once did, it just takes up too much of my time.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I take lots of care in doing my reloading and don"™t think anyone would appreciated the work. I did it last year and not again and if something goes wrong , you know where the finger will be pointing...
Trimming and deburring is about the most time consuming thing. I absolutely loathe trimming. My friends in TX has the gracey trimmers and change out their cutters to carbide. Let me tell you, it was nice using them. Very accurate trim, no cramps in your hands, and deburrs all in one step. I keep threatening to buy one, but then tell myself, its something you only do about every 3 loads.
I have a routine, when I get in some once fired or new brass, I FL size and trimm and deburr. That way that nasty job is done and all I have to do is push in primers, powder and seat if I want to go shooting.
trailer wrote,
"I did it last year and not again and if something goes wrong , you know where the finger will be pointing... "
A friend of mine will not reload for someone else unless they are there and they reload at least one round out of the batch. That way no one knows who reloaded the round if something were to go wrong. Of course, he is always very careful, as we all are hopefully, and double checks everything as he reloads.
For me, the brass work is the most time consuming. I don't even factor in the brass tumbling since I usually let that run for 4 to 6 hours, I have an old style rotory tumbler. I normally only neck size unless the brass has expanded to the point the boltbecomes stiff at which time I partial FL resize them. I do trim using the LEE trimmer with the shell holder mounted in my cordless drill, I also chamfer and deburr and clean the primer pocket at the same time. That takes about 10 to 15sec per including mounting the case. All my brass have had the flash hole deburred when I first got it. After that I prime all my cases using the Lee hand primer, maybe 10 min. Once I'm ready to start charging the cases I set up my powder measure just shorrt of the desired charge and finish it off with the powder trickler. When allthe casesare charged, I then go back through and seat the bullets. That takes maybe 3 to 4 hours total for 40 to 50 rounds, not counting the tumbling.
I use to sort the brass by weight as mentioned but found, at least for my 7mm loads, that a 3 to4 grain difference in case weight did not make enough difference in hunting accuracy to justify the 1 to 2 hours time it took to sort 100 rounds. Most of my brass were within 3 grains of each other anyway so it didn't seem neccessary. I've never checked the runout on any of my rounds so I'm not sure how long that would take. I get sub MOA groups as is, so again, I'm not that worried about it.
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David
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Groucho Marx
How long to load 40 rifle cartridges?
