I enjoy all aspects of hand loading (even including neck turning) with the exception of hand weighing each charge. When I first got my Hornady Case Activated Powder drop, (which I use on a Lock N Load progressive press) I tested it to see how accurate it was with charge weights between 19 and 24 grains. It wasn't bad producing charge weight errors between .8% and 1.6%, depending on the powder being tested. Some meter better than others do. Still that's a precision of slightly worse than plus and minus a tenth of a grain, on average.
I found that VV-140, CFE-223, and IMR 8208 XBR all give results consistently less than plus and minus a tenth of a grain, so those powders are what I use most.
From time to time, I re-examine my reloading process just to make sure I don't have one wheel in the ditch. This week I re-tested my Hornady Powder drop, which, by now, has dispensed about 5000 charges. I'm happy to say it is getting more accurate. I weighed about 35 consecutive charges with a target weight of 22.6 grains, on my digital scale, which has an advertised resolution of .02 grains.
The first dump after loading the powder drop is always over, and then the next few dumps vary in weight enough to warrant dumping them back into the jug. However, the machine quickly settles down and after that a sample of 10 consecutive charges produced a maximum error of 0.53%; i.e. plus or minus .06 grains. The standard deviation was .0377. I'd call that pretty darn good. I loaded 50 rounds of .223 Sierra Match King Moly 69gr bullets.
As a control, I charged a second batch of 50 rounds slightly light and trickled them up to the target weight. I accepted loads of 22.60 or 22.62 (.02gr scale resolution) and rejected all others by dumping the load and starting over. This is a bit tedious because it is easy to trickle four kernels of powder rather than one or two and the first thing you know, you overshoot the target weight. This kind of time consuming fiddling is what I really hate about hand loading and it took almost as much time than all the other hand-loading procedures put together.
I shot a round-robin style comparison test of these 100 rounds with my Howa 1500. It is a nice range gun for fun, but it's hardly a precision competition target rifle. Nevertheless, it shoots pretty well. My test results showed no significant difference between the two loading procedures. I scanned and measured the targets using On Target software, so my conclusions are not based on the size of a coin or measuring group size with a carpenter tape measure.
Actually, the machine loaded 5-shot groups, all shot at 100 yards from a bench, were very slightly better averaging .430 MOA vs. .490 MOA for the hand weighed charges. The best group of .249 MOA was with a machine loaded round, but in fairness, the hand weighed rounds came out a tad better in some instances. Bottom line: The two versions were statistically identical when it came to group size, mean radius, and group height.
Therefore, unless I can find some kind of performance advantage to hand weighing each round, I will continue to use my Hornady powder drop. Unlike me, it keeps getting better with age. The older I get the more I hate fiddling around with trying to hand-weigh a charge to the nearest .02 grain. As long as all my 5-shot groups are less than 1/2 MOA with an occasional 1/4 MOA group on most visits to the range, I'm sticking with automatically dispensing my powder.
I found that VV-140, CFE-223, and IMR 8208 XBR all give results consistently less than plus and minus a tenth of a grain, so those powders are what I use most.
From time to time, I re-examine my reloading process just to make sure I don't have one wheel in the ditch. This week I re-tested my Hornady Powder drop, which, by now, has dispensed about 5000 charges. I'm happy to say it is getting more accurate. I weighed about 35 consecutive charges with a target weight of 22.6 grains, on my digital scale, which has an advertised resolution of .02 grains.
The first dump after loading the powder drop is always over, and then the next few dumps vary in weight enough to warrant dumping them back into the jug. However, the machine quickly settles down and after that a sample of 10 consecutive charges produced a maximum error of 0.53%; i.e. plus or minus .06 grains. The standard deviation was .0377. I'd call that pretty darn good. I loaded 50 rounds of .223 Sierra Match King Moly 69gr bullets.
As a control, I charged a second batch of 50 rounds slightly light and trickled them up to the target weight. I accepted loads of 22.60 or 22.62 (.02gr scale resolution) and rejected all others by dumping the load and starting over. This is a bit tedious because it is easy to trickle four kernels of powder rather than one or two and the first thing you know, you overshoot the target weight. This kind of time consuming fiddling is what I really hate about hand loading and it took almost as much time than all the other hand-loading procedures put together.
I shot a round-robin style comparison test of these 100 rounds with my Howa 1500. It is a nice range gun for fun, but it's hardly a precision competition target rifle. Nevertheless, it shoots pretty well. My test results showed no significant difference between the two loading procedures. I scanned and measured the targets using On Target software, so my conclusions are not based on the size of a coin or measuring group size with a carpenter tape measure.
Actually, the machine loaded 5-shot groups, all shot at 100 yards from a bench, were very slightly better averaging .430 MOA vs. .490 MOA for the hand weighed charges. The best group of .249 MOA was with a machine loaded round, but in fairness, the hand weighed rounds came out a tad better in some instances. Bottom line: The two versions were statistically identical when it came to group size, mean radius, and group height.
Therefore, unless I can find some kind of performance advantage to hand weighing each round, I will continue to use my Hornady powder drop. Unlike me, it keeps getting better with age. The older I get the more I hate fiddling around with trying to hand-weigh a charge to the nearest .02 grain. As long as all my 5-shot groups are less than 1/2 MOA with an occasional 1/4 MOA group on most visits to the range, I'm sticking with automatically dispensing my powder.
