Turbulent Turtle
F-TR competitor
I have 500 Lapua cases in the rotation, all from the same lot. I use 5 boxes and each group of 100 cases stay together for the duration.
Yesterday I hade a small loading marathon getting ready for some events coming up and loaded 2 boxes with the CM1500 dispensing the load and finalizing the charge on the Fx120. The CM burped early on and I had to reset it so I lost the round count.
My methodology is to load 50 cases with powder then seat 50 bullets and restart. I am usually waiting for the CM to finish dispensing or very close to it and so I find that I produce one cartridge per minute on the average; that's 50 minutes to dispense the powder and then seat the 50 bullets.
At the end of the session (4 groups of 50 cartridges,) I could not reconcile the CM's round count with what it should have been after accounting for the burp. It seemed to be one short. Now, I inspect all charged cases with a flashlight to make sure they are all loaded in the tray, and I check the powder level when I pick up a case to seat the bullet. But even with all that, it's possible a case could have gone through uncharged.
So I decided to weigh all 200 cartridges figuring that a difference of 40 some grains would be apparent.
It started as just a pain having to weigh 200 cartridges, but it turned out to be much more interesting.
I did not keep track of the weights and the A&D scale has a feature to do that, but I forgot to enable it. Most of the weights displayed were 401.something, that something seemed to be in the .30-.50 range. I saw a couple of 400.something and that was always a high number, .70 to .98. I saw very few 402.very low number.
I did not know what to expect in terms of variations, well not at first anyway, but this was an eye opener. After the first 10 or so, I was fixated on the 401, after the 20, I was fixated on the decimal point.
Needless to say, I did not find a case with no powder. My hypothesis is that I picked up a load from the CM before it recorded the count. As I said, I was usually waiting for the CM or we would be ready at the same time.
So after weighing all the cartridges I was thinking about the numbers I saw. All afternoon I was fixated on the decimals loading the powder and that fixation carried over to the completed cartridge. Then I reflected thusly: at 400 grains, a single grain variation is .25%, a quarter of one percent. If I just rounded the values I saw to the nearest integer, there would have been no 400, two or three 402s and the vast majority 401.
BTW, these were 6X fired cases, trimmed, annealed and full length sized.
Yesterday I hade a small loading marathon getting ready for some events coming up and loaded 2 boxes with the CM1500 dispensing the load and finalizing the charge on the Fx120. The CM burped early on and I had to reset it so I lost the round count.
My methodology is to load 50 cases with powder then seat 50 bullets and restart. I am usually waiting for the CM to finish dispensing or very close to it and so I find that I produce one cartridge per minute on the average; that's 50 minutes to dispense the powder and then seat the 50 bullets.
At the end of the session (4 groups of 50 cartridges,) I could not reconcile the CM's round count with what it should have been after accounting for the burp. It seemed to be one short. Now, I inspect all charged cases with a flashlight to make sure they are all loaded in the tray, and I check the powder level when I pick up a case to seat the bullet. But even with all that, it's possible a case could have gone through uncharged.
So I decided to weigh all 200 cartridges figuring that a difference of 40 some grains would be apparent.
It started as just a pain having to weigh 200 cartridges, but it turned out to be much more interesting.
I did not keep track of the weights and the A&D scale has a feature to do that, but I forgot to enable it. Most of the weights displayed were 401.something, that something seemed to be in the .30-.50 range. I saw a couple of 400.something and that was always a high number, .70 to .98. I saw very few 402.very low number.
I did not know what to expect in terms of variations, well not at first anyway, but this was an eye opener. After the first 10 or so, I was fixated on the 401, after the 20, I was fixated on the decimal point.
Needless to say, I did not find a case with no powder. My hypothesis is that I picked up a load from the CM before it recorded the count. As I said, I was usually waiting for the CM or we would be ready at the same time.
So after weighing all the cartridges I was thinking about the numbers I saw. All afternoon I was fixated on the decimals loading the powder and that fixation carried over to the completed cartridge. Then I reflected thusly: at 400 grains, a single grain variation is .25%, a quarter of one percent. If I just rounded the values I saw to the nearest integer, there would have been no 400, two or three 402s and the vast majority 401.
BTW, these were 6X fired cases, trimmed, annealed and full length sized.
