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Chapter One

WHAT YOU NEED

What you need is simple: empty brass of the correct caliber for your needs/firearms/gear, and appropriate bullets, powder and primers. Then, you need equipment to process that empty brass and stuff a suitable amount of powder between the bullet and primer.

Here is where the decision-making comes in. You see, reloading is exactly like automobiles in that you have choices. Once you have exceeded the basic threshold of function, it all comes down to “how fast do you want to go?” Which, translated, becomes “how much do you want to spend?”

A Yugo (provided it works at all) will get you someplace in pretty much the same time frame as a fully tricked-out Mercedes (we’ll ignore the transit time in a Lamborghini, for the moment). It just does so at a different level of comfort, style, safety and reliability.

Reloading equipment of all levels can and will turn out entirely suitable ammunition, but some will do it faster, and some will do it for a longer period of time before needing a rebuild/overhaul.

One aspect of reloading for handguns that you should be aware of is volume. It is not unusual for a rifle reloader to sweat the details on a couple of boxes of brass and handcraft perfect little jewels of brass cases. When loaded, those 40 cases can last several hunting seasons. Benchrest shooters are even more extreme; they may sweat the details on 100 cases, winnowing down this or that near-microscopic “fault” until they have twenty hand-crafted, identical in every aspect that can be measured, perfect cases.

You must have a scale, even though you won’t be weighing each and every powder charge you drop.

Handgun shooters, however, tend towards volume. As in a couple of hundred rounds in a weekend’s practice session. Even just plinking, it is easy to go through that much. If you’re shooting in competition and trying to improve your skill, that every weekend is the minimum norm. 200 rounds a weekend, every weekend, is only 10,000 rounds a year. In a lot of competition circles, that is barely enough to keep your skills level and not slipping back. It is not unusual for those wishing to move up in the world to shoot 20, 30 and even 40 thousand rounds in a year’s practice session, and extra ammo in regular matches.

Those striving to reach the pinnacle of practical shooting may consume on the order of 75,000 rounds a year for a couple of years in their quest for Grand Master and National Champion status.

So, you have to balance capital investment against production capacity, keeping in mind just how much time you will have to shoot. Now, volume production does not always mean you are planning to be awash in ammo. You see, with a bit of practice and proper notes, you can produce ammo quickly, even if you do need buckets of it.

Not to jump ahead, but let’s take for example a single-stage press and a progressive press. The single stage press will have a final production rate of perhaps 50 rounds per hour. For the riffle loader, that means he’s spending an hour a week in the basement (many reloading locations are in the basement) and have an embarrassment of ammo, ending the year with 250 rounds. (I’ve known successful hunters who have not fired 250 rounds in decades of hunting.) However, a single stage press used to load your 200 rounds of handgun practice ammo means not less than four hours down there during the week. If your wife (or husband) is happy with that, fine. If not, then a progressive press will produce that much ammunition in less than one hour.

With the progressive press, you’ll spend the time of one TV show that he/she likes and you don’t, loading ammo. You spend a bit of money and find the time, and thus preserve domestic bliss.

So, when you consider equipment, consider not just what it does but how quickly it does it, and what effect that will have on your total throughput.

The minimum equipment you’re going to need falls into the following categories:

 Brass prep, to make sure your brass is clean and ready to load.

 Loading gear, to mash all the various parts together. This will include the measuring tools you’ll use.

 Component storage, because you can’t just let all the ingredients spill across the floor.

 Recordkeeping, because if you load more than one load in one caliber, you have to keep track of it all.

 Failure to do so in an efficient manner can lead to more than embarrassment, it can lead to busted guns and/or shooters.

 And finally, a place to do all this. Ideally, a dedicated space, one that can be secured against prying eyes and busy hands.

You may be tempted to scrimp on gear, to “make do” with a compromise or a something of lesser quality. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m solely advocating the purchase of gold-plated equipment, but keep this in mind: you’ll most likely be the one holding the firearm that will be firing the ammo you loaded.

The controls on any scale are clear. Pay attention to what it is telling you.

LOADING ROOM

Archimedes famously said, “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I can move the earth.” When it comes to loading, you can be too comfortable, but only because the room or its contents distract you.

Clean, warm, dry and well-lit is a good place to start. And since you’ll need a place to load, we’ll cover this before the actual gear or loading.

I must confess a fondness for Hornady dies.

Benches

Benches, as many as you can fit, should be at a good working height and secured either by mass or by being bolted to the wall. You’ll be working a lever that will be squeezing brass, so you need mass or bolts to keep from ending up with a bench that “walks” its way around the room as you load on it. Some of us load sitting, some load standing, and the bench height will have to be correct for you. If you have never worked at a workbench, get out and get some practice. Offer to pull the handle on a friend’s loading press to see what height works for you. I could offer elaborate measurements, based on OSHA standards for ergonomic compliance, but in the end you’ll have to figure it out for yourself.

The benches should not be full-sized tables or other such furniture. I have found that any benchtop more than two feet deep simply collects “gear drifts” at the back. By keeping the bench relatively shallow, you have to put stuff away. Now, if you are not prone to the gear-drift phenomenon, then fine, make them the way you want them. But for me, no more than two feet deep, and I have some that are even less.

Ideally, you will have a “loading bench” that holds only your loading press and the components of the session. Less ideal is a bench that holds a press and, say, a vise, drill press or other non-loading gear. With a dedicated bench, you can keep things clean and sorted out.

If you have a press (and how can you reload without one?) you must stock spare parts for the items easily lost, bent or worn.

Reloading allows you to not only do alot more shooting for the money you spend, but also to tune your ammo for your handgun and the matches you shoot.

A progressive, like this Dillon 550B, will produce a lot of ammo for a long time.

Now comes the important part; the loading bench should have all the bullets you own on the lower shelves, and nothing else stored there. No powder, no primers, no brass. The powders, primers and brass should be stored on other shelves or benches across the room. The idea is to make it a conscious effort to re-supply powder or primers. That way, you are very much less likely to make a mistake. If your powders are right there, within arm’s reach, you’ll be tempted to grab the next bottle of whatever while you continue to do whatever it is you are doing. That is a great way to grab the wrong powder (if you have more than one on hand) and end up loading with the wrong powder.

When it comes time to refresh your powder measure, you use the bottle/canister on the bench, the one you’ve been using all along. If you run out, you have to walk over, look at the shelves, and grab another of the same kind (ideally, one from the same production lot).

Also, do not keep a supply of primers on the bench. When it comes time to reload primers, you have to walk over and get more. The walking is good. You have been loading, either sitting down or standing in the same spot. It is a good thing to move now and then to keep from getting tired.

Lighting

Nothing makes reloading more miserable than a gloomy place to load. Loading by the light of a single, 60-watt bulb (and it is always in the wrong location) is asking for trouble. I did it for years and hated it. When I had the chance I installed banks of fluorescent lights to flood the new, white-painted room with light.

If you stand to load, then the Dillon strong mount makes the press more rigid and puts it higher.

The Redding GRx die sizes your Glock brass, one at a time.

Glocks are hard on brass, especially in 40. These have been bulged from being fired in a Glock.

Ventilation

A musty, damp or moldy location is not just bad for your dies and tools, it is bad for you. Scrub the place clean, dry it, paint it and keep it dry. I have a dehumidifier running in my loading space, and keep it down at 50 percent relative humidity 24/7.

Quiet

You can have a radio going if the music is background music and not distracting. No TV, no videos, no DVDs of something else running to catch your eye and distract you.

No smoking. Not only is smoking bad for you, but there is a lot of flammable stuff you’ll be dealing with.

No food, either, to preclude lead ingestion.

When you load, start with a clean and spartan bench and loading press. Then, bring only the components to the bench that you need for that caliber and load. Nothing else. Load until you are done, then put the components back, empty the powder measure and put things away.

A little effort at the beginning to keep things neat will keep you out of trouble for a long time, perhaps forever.

BRASS PREP

Sorting

Unless you are buying your brass new and unfired, it will have to be cleaned. Brass picked up at the range (if the range allows it, some do not allow “brass mining,” you can pick up only what you shoot) will have powder residue and dirt/sand/mud/whatever on it. You must clean the brass or your loading dies will suffer heinously from the dirt. So, first things first: sort.

Sort by caliber and by cleanliness. The various calibers should go into whatever containers you use – cardboard boxes, plastic bins, used tofu containers, whatever works. Your brass will be grubby, so the containers will get grubby.

You can pluck each empty off the die if you wish. Not efficient.

Also sort by cleanliness. At the top will be brass that fell onto dry, clean soil or grass. No need for extra work. Next is the muddy stuff, and last is the chocolate-colored brass.

The top brass goes right to the next cleaning step – into the tumbler. The other stuff needs some attention. The muddy brass is easy; drop them into a bucket (wait until you have enough to warrant the effort) of water as hot as you can get it from the tap and some dishwashing soap. Stir it with a paint stirrer or similar tool until the brass does not have caked mud clinging to it, then decant the soapy water into the laundry sink (filter, to avoid brass in the drain trap) and rinse with hot water right from the tap into the bucket. Decant again and then spread the brass on an old bath towel in direct sunlight. Leave there until dry. Do not be impatient, or clinging moisture will spoil your fun later.

The chocolate brass is oxidized and requires chemical cleaners. Birchwood Casey makes a chemical cleaner, and I find my supply of “chocolate” brass is so small that using it once a year or so is all I need. I mix it twice as strong as the directions call for and soak the brass twice as long. I then decant, and treat the brass to the same hot-water process as above. Indeed, you can, if you stockpile enough brass in a caliber, make it an annual mud-and-oxide cleaning session.

Brass cleaning is most often the bottleneck that slows down loading.

You can also use a power cleaner. Hornady makes a couple of powered cleaners. They use chemical solutions and heat to accelerate the cleaning process. Depending on your range conditions, you may find that power and chemicals works better than just sorting and a tumbler.

Cleaning

On to the tumbler. Curiously, even cleaners that vibrate and swirl the brass are called “tumblers.” Basically, you pour dry and ready-to-be-cleaned brass into the bowl, add a cleaning medium and some polisher (some people skip the polishing goo) and then seal and turn on. The vibrating/swirling action rubs the media against the brass, scrubbing off the dirt. The polish scuffs the oxidized layer of brass off, leaving you with brass gleaming as if it were new.

How big a tumbler should you get? As big as you can afford and have bench room for. This is not the place to economize, as brass cleaning is most often the bottleneck that slows down loading. When I started reloading, I had a tumbler (that actually tumbled) and it cleaned 200 empties in two hours. It was just too bad that I could load 200 rounds in about 35 minutes. I was running that tumbler day and night, even when I wasn’t loading, just to keep me in clean brass. Something like the Dillon 2000 (and you know how they named it) will clean brass in two hours, but at the end you have up to 2,000 clean, empty handgun cases.

The tumbler usually takes ground corncobs or walnut hulls, but I have heard of people using rice. It just goes against my grain to use a food product to clean brass, so I’ve never tried it, but there are those who swear by it.

The polish is easy; just dump a capful or so into the mix before you start it up, and your brass will be cleaner.

While we’re here, let’s take a moment to discuss lead. It will be in many of the components you’ll be using. It is the densest common metal, and on the periodic table it is noted with the symbol Pb from the Latin plumbum.

Some will tell you lead is evil, and nearly as lethal as plutonium. No. One of the first things we learn in chem lab (and, apparently, med school) is the old adage “dose makes the poison.” Lead, being a metal, washes off. It is not absorbed “through the pores of your skin” and it certainly (as I was solemnly assured by an FBI agent) does not pass through your skin and directly into your brain if you used your hat to collect brass at the range.

You get lead into your body in the simplest and most prosaic way by ingesting it, usually from your hands or food/drink. Or you inhale it from fired powder smoke or on the cigarette you smoked at the indoor range. The bullets you handle and the brass you are cleaning will probably have lead on or in them. So, don’t eat while you load, don’t suck your fingers while you load, and after you wipe the tumbler clean, wash your hands. Smoking? Smoking is verboten for this, as well as, another reason; you’ll have powder and primers close at hand, and a burning anything is contraindicated while reloading.

Once you’ve cleaned your brass, place it in clean containers, not the same boxes the ammo came from, that is not at all useful. You’re going to be loading hundreds of rounds. You do not want to be individually placing fifty empties at a time in a box. The only reason to save the box is if you plan on flying to a match, and then you’ll need “factory ammunition boxes” in which to schlep your ammo in your checked luggage.

RELOADING PRESS

Presses come in two flavors: single-stage or progressive. Each have variants, but for the moment we’ll consider those two. The single-stage press only holds one loading die (the cylindrical tool that performs some operation in the loading stream) at a time. So, to size all your cases, you screw the sizing die in, and pull the handle down-and-up once for each and every one of them. You then unscrew that die, screw in the next one, and continue.

With a unit like this, to reload a single round requires that you pull the handle (down and up) on a single-stage press five to seven times, depending on just how many steps you can double-up in dies. For instance, the sizing die can also de-cap, that is, press out the expended primer, and seat the primer in one step. So, 100 rounds means 500-700 handle cycles.

Police departments do not reload, if you have an “in” you can quickly acquire a lifetime supply of brass.

If you shoot Glocks, or your buddies do and you often end up with their brass, get this die.

Redding makes a storage bottle, to catch your .40 brass once it has gone through the GRx die.

A progressive arranges a full set of dies in either a circular or straight-line array, and each time you pull the handle you process and then move all of them one step. Each die performs its operation, and once the press is fully loaded, you produce a loaded round with each pull of the handle. Some progressives require that you move the rounds between handle pulls, and some (known as auto-indexing) automatically move the array at the beginning or end of each handle stroke. Start to finish, loading 100 rounds requires 105 to 110 handle cycles.

Here I’ll deviate from the orthodoxy, and suggest that you start out with a single-stage, and then buy a progressive once you know how reloading works. That might happen quickly, in a few weeks. It might take longer, even a couple of years. The idea is simple; with a single-stage press you learn each step by itself. Then when you are comfortable, you put them all together in the progressive. Advocates of each will tell you (and for various reasons) that you do not need the other. Me, I figure that the single-stage press doesn’t go bad on the shelf, and can be used for other purposes later on.

DIES

First things first. Do not succumb to the “savings” of buying uncoated, steel dies. Get either carbide dies (they have carbide insert or inserts in the wear areas) or titanium nitride-coated dies. Hardened steel dies require lubrication, or you will get a case stuck in them. Lube is messy and can add problems of its own. If, and only if, the caliber you absolutely have to load is not available in either carbine or TiN, consider a plain steel die. And then think about it seriously. That would be one use of your previously “unused” singlestage die. Use it to size and de-prime your clean and lubed brass. Then re-clean the lube off, and feed the prepped brass into your progressive to load it.

Once you have carbide or TiN, then we work from there.

Sizing

The die squeezes the brass back down to proper size after having been fired. Depending how much pressure the load used generated, sizing can be easy or difficult. For instance, a .38 Special, using PPC-level loads (the classic 148 grain wadcutter and 2.7 grains of Bullseye) will require little effort to re-size. A .44 Magnum load, meant for hunting, with a 290 grain bullet and a case full of slow-burning powder, fired in a Ruger Super Blackhawk (because it would be very hard on the gun, or even break it, to shoot such a load in an S&W M29) will almost require that you stand on the handle to re-size the case, which should be a clue. A case so-hammered is not going to last as long as the one we used in the .38 Special example.

Depending on the type of match, your handgun may need ammo with more or less power. Reloading allows you to choose.

The feature of a progressive press that makes it a progressive is the rotating shell plate. Not many presses are straight-line any more.

Your reloading bench should be kept clean. And, against my advice, this bench has more than one kind of powder on it. Tsk, tsk.

Most die sets are arranged so the sizing die also de-primes. That is, it presses out the fired primer, making it possible to insert a new one. All you have to keep an eye out for are berdan cases (they don’t have central vent hole, and thus can’t be de-primed by your die) and crimped-in primers. The military insists on crimped primers so an over-pressure round won’t blow the primer out, and the lost primer tie up the weapon at an inopportune moment. (And when someone is shooting at you, almost any moment is an inopportune one for that.)

If you are loading heavy loads in the .44, it might be a good idea to not only use carbide dies in your single-stage press for sizing, but apply a bit of lube, too. Something like Hornady One Shot is easy to apply, easy to remove and will make your sizing operation a whole lot less like manual labor.

Belling

To get bullets seated without a fuss, you have to bell the case mouth. Some die sets do this as a separate operation, many progressives do it as the powder-dropping step. Belling is a caliber- and bullet-dependant setting. If you are loading bevel-based jacketed bullets, you can get by with a small amount of belling. If you are loading hollow-base wadcutters, you’re going to have to bell the cases a lot more.

Clearly mark your storage containers. Nothing makes finding the next batch of brass more of a hassle than having to open each container and peer in, just to see what’s in there.

Seating

You want bullets seated straight, square and consistently. Avoid, if at all possible, dies that both seat and then crimp.

Crimping

The belling you did a step before? You have to remove that. And, in some loads, you have to crimp the case mouth in good and tight to provide enough resistance to ensure complete powder combustion.

EXTRAS, BUT NEEDED

Some people think that having those dies is enough. Actually, you’ll need more to do a good job.

Powder scale

Some kind of scale to weigh powder is a must. Not because you’re going to weigh each and every powder charge. (That is not even the case with some rifle-caliber re-loaders.) No, you need it to make sure the powder dispenser you are using is actually dropping the powder charge you expect it to. Zero your scale, and at the start of your loading check the powder drop weight. Is it correct? Great.

Hornady Lock-n-load presses use die holders that make it easy to swap out calibers, one to another.

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.