Originally Posted by
Pawildman
A great synopsis of why a chronograph is definitely NOT a NEEDED piece of equipment for a reloader who is starting out. Worry more about getting it tight on the paper first.
I started out with the old "Lee Loader", which is still on the market, by the way. Never comfortable with the safety of the "scoops", I bought a scale (RCBS 5-0-5) not long afterward. That'd be an investment of about $150 in today's dollars, which I could probably make it pay for itself in less than 100 rounds.
Truth is, no one NEEDS anything beyond very basic tools if all you're doing is resizing the neck, replacing the primer, replacing the powder, and replacing the bullet. But we WANT....
We want speed. We want volume. We want easy.
A single-stage press gets us quite a bit more speed and volume for not a lot of money. I switched to an RCBS Rockchucker Kit in 1987 and still use many of its components yet today (sold the scale that came with it). For quite some time (almost 20 years), it was all that I NEEDED... I was getting 1 to 1-1/2 inch groups, hunting at less than 200 yards, ...
Until I wanted accuracy (enter the prairie dog town).
There are a LOT of tools and operations associated with putting together precision ammunition, and I probably spent another $700 on those tools before I landed on the one data element that had escaped me from the very beginning - velocity - which was provided by the chronograph. Once I'd corrected that omission, all the pieces of my reloading bench started falling into place and working together. Had I bought the chronograph earlier?....
There are a lot of guys out there who are perfectly happy lobbing premium projectiles at game and thinking they're saving money reloading them over buying them from a pretty box. As long as they don't assume their premium projectiles will achieve the same accuracy as the pretty box rounds, there probably isn't a reason in the world for them to do anything differently.
Reloading is a lot like an internal combustion engine. Yeah. It'll run with things not quite working together, but it's not going to be efficient and may not get us where we want it to go all of the time. Tuned, things are a lot different. The question is, when you're ready to tune it, do you buy the right tools or do you replace the stereo?