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Reloading Ammunition

WARNING! AUTHOR REJECTS ALL LIABILITY FOR THE USE OF THIS LOAD DATA OR ANY OTHER INFORMATION FOUND ON THIS SITE! ALWAYS RELOAD USING ONLY PUBLISHED LOAD DATA AND PROCEDURES FROM RELIABLE INDUSTRY SOURCES! EMULATE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

See my YouTube Channel for tutorial videos as they become available.

I've received a lot of charity, some of it shockingly spontaneous, from the Gun Culture. I therefore felt motivated to give something back, so I created these pages, showing how (and why) I reload ammunition.

See also.

The main reason to load your own, especially for rifle cartridges, is to save money; when I first started shooting competitively in 2003, I was using either Berdan- (and corrosive-) primed surplus ammunition in my Mosin M44 carbine, or expensive factory ammunition in my VZ24 Mauser. In a match in February 2004, I won a gift certificate for a set of Hornady reloading dies at a Vancouver-area gun shop; I chose 7.92x57mm ("8mm Mauser") for what was at that time my best rifle, the VZ24. At the time I calculated that, ignoring the capital cost of equipment, tools, and used cases, and counting only the cost of consumables (bullets, primers, powder), I was paying about 30¢ per reloaded cartridge, vs. 75¢ for factory rounds. So there's your motivation.

Other reasons to load your own are to control the precision of the end product, for better accuracy than the factories produce; and, to make a load that the factories don't offer, like the superlight 12 gauge shotshells I make for my antique side-by-side shotgun, to vastly reduce both chamber pressure and recoil (which are not necessarily connected to each other).

Two books I found particularly useful when I first learned to reload were The ABCs of Reloading, by Dean Grinell from DBI Books, 5th edition, 1993; and the Lyman Reloading Handbook, 45th edition, 1970. These books give detailed, illustrated, step-by-step instructions of the entire reloading process. My local public library happens to have a copy of The ABCs of Reloading, and any gun show should have an old Lyman manual on someone's table for a couple bucks:

I strongly advise carefully studying either or both of these books (or different editions thereof, or similar books) before starting to reload ammunition. You'll also need some load data books. Powder makers generally offer theirs free; many can be downloaded as .PDFs (links here). The bullet makers sell the big expensive books, like the Sierra 5th edition (2003) shown here, but one of these at $30-odd will serve for many years. Older manuals, like the Speer 10th edition (1979) below the Sierra, can be found cheap at shows. You can't have too much load data.

You'll need many tools: a press obviously, dies for each cartridge of course, a scale absolutely, a case trimmer for nearly any rifle cartridge, and you will find a use for one of these bullet-pullers - you place the cartridge's rim or extractor groove in the universal collet and screw it onto the reservoir, then strike it a few times on something solid. This allows you to recover the components from the incorrectly-loaded cartridges you will make:

There are also die-style pullers that fit in presses, but the RCBS pictured here is inexpensive and handles nearly all common cartridges.

Things you need, in approximately the order you will need them: