Reloading? worth it? dangerous?

[Chunky Monkey]

Just do it, you'll enjoy it and save money and you'll never look at factory ammo again. If a monkey can do it so can you!

45 acp
44 mag
243
25-06
270
30-06

[mauser]

Originally Posted by Xringshooter

Smokeless powder will not explode, it just burns very fast. In fact the way to dispose of old powder that you are not sure is good any more is to take it outside and dump it in small piles and light the piles. DO NOT DO THIS WITH BLACK POWDER - BLACK POWDER IS EXPLOSIVE.

Another way to dispose of gun powder is more productive, but not as much fun. Use it for fertilizer. Sprinkle it on your lawn or garden. The nitrate is great fertilizer, but it's kind of "hot", use it sparingly. I sprinkled some on one of my wife's garden spots behind the house a few months ago. about a week later she was wondering why the Marigolds over here were doing so much better than the ones over there. When I told her what I did she wanted me to do it to the rest of them. Best looking flowers she ever had.

[Hawk]

Reloading has to be a hobby for it to be worth the cost savings. No one ever calculates their own labor into the price per round. If they did, they wouldn't like the figures.

I reload 12 guage shot shells for trap. 10 month's ago I could reload a box (25) for around $3.00. Now, with the price of lead shot more than doubling, It costs close to $4.50. Store bought is about the same price but I shoot a custom load that can't be bought in the store. I may stop reloading if the price of lead shot doesn't restabilize.

Hawk,

[markheck1]

Originally Posted by mauser

Another way to dispose of gun powder is more productive, but not as much fun. Use it for fertilizer. Sprinkle it on your lawn or garden. The nitrate is great fertilizer, but it's kind of "hot", use it sparingly. I sprinkled some on one of my wife's garden spots behind the house a few months ago. about a week later she was wondering why the Marigolds over here were doing so much better than the ones over there. When I told her what I did she wanted me to do it to the rest of them. Best looking flowers she ever had.

yeah...can't get "Good" fertilizer anymore, damn kooks keep using it to blow shit up!

[VeryPrivate]

Originally Posted by Hawk

Reloading has to be a hobby for it to be worth the cost savings. No one ever calculates their own labor into the price per round. If they did, they wouldn't like the figures.

As a hobby, the labor is free. It does not cost me anything for my time hand-loading. Now if one was obsessed enough to skip work for a day hand-loading, then it would have a labor cost.

[Chunky Monkey]

Originally Posted by VeryPrivate

As a hobby, the labor is free. It does not cost me anything for my time hand-loading. Now if one was obsessed enough to skip work for a day hand-loading, then it would have a labor cost.

Honest! I was really sick last Tuesday!

[Xringshooter]

Mauser,

You're right about using it as fertilizer, I forgot about that (and I have done this before). You MUST use it sparingly, it is very strong. I haven't had to do this lately (get rid of powder) as I've been doing a bunch of reloading in my off time to get my ammo levels caught back up.

[toadyoforangeville]

reloading is safe and fun most of the time recently i've stopped shooting my fathers and uncles reloads to me there dangerous max loads and other things only trust mine

[Cheeseybacon]

To repeat a little bit of what has already been stated, when you factor in the initial cost of equipment (press, dies, scale, etc) to get started, as well as the continuous cost of consumable supplies (brass, primers, bullets, powder) you'll find that you really don't save any money, you just simply get a lot more ammo for the money compared to buying factory ammo.
Just an example to throw out there (I’m pulling these numbers out of my ass, BTW), but lets assume it might cost you about $100 in material costs (powder, primers, cheap bullets, and reusing recovered brass) to load 1000 rounds of FMJ 230-grain .45 ACP. By comparison, $100 might get you 7-8 boxes of CCI Blazer Brass rounds (or about 350-400 rounds).

Me personally, when I first got into reloading, I wasn't sure how much or how often my shooting was going to increase as a result of reloading. At the time I was “sort of” a frequent shooter, probably nowhere as frequent as a lot of you guys, but I usually made a conscious effort to get to the range for an hour or two at least 3 Saturdays out of the month. That was often enough that I soon began to feel the sting of factory ammo costs. I was looking at the cost of reloading and understood that it wasn’t any cheaper, just that I got more ammo for the same money. Even still, I had my doubts that I could really justify reloading, given my fairly low frequency of shooting at the time. At the advice of some others I bought myself a standard Lee 4-stage auto-indexing press setup. It was told it a pretty good compromise between an expensive, fully automated progressive press and cheap, basic single-stage press. It wasn't too significant of an investment (and therefore less of a loss if I found that my shooting didn't increase to justify the cost of reloading) but it also wasn't the most basic of reloading setups, so I knew I wouldn't be tempted to upgrade immediately if my shooting and reloading activities really took off.
Well it turned out that my shooting frequency DID increase for a good while. Spending an hour or so at the press for two boxes of .45 ACP was a lot better than ponying up $20-$25 100 rounds of Blazer Brass or Winchester White Box. If you do decide to reload, factor time into your costs as well, especially if you definitely know you are already a frequent shooter. With an auto-indexing 4-stage press I can load 2 boxes (100 rounds) in about 1 hour, 20 minutes. A lot of people have told me that is really slow, so you can probably do better, but I find that when I rush things, I tend to screw up, so I take my time.
Lately my shooting has actually dwindled a good bit as a result of the time it takes to reload. I knew it was beginning to become a problem when I found myself running over to Wal*Mart just minutes before meeting a buddy at the range, simply because I just didn’t have the hour and a half to dedicate to reloading. As a result I am now shopping for a progressive press (I think the Hornady Lock-N-Load AutoPress is going on the Christmas list). While a progressive press is probably what I should have started with, I had no idea that my shooting frequency would be increasing at the time. Hind sight is 20/20 though, and I can’t honestly say I regret having bought the more basic Lee press to start out.

The way I see it, if you are a very frequent shooter already, definitely go straight to a progressive press, especially if you shoot a lot of pistol rounds. It costs more to get started, and longer to recoup that money, but the amount of time saved can be just as valuable, if not more valuable than the money saved, IMO.
However, if you are slightly less fanatical about shooting and don’t get out to the range quite as often, you’d probably be better served to start with a simpler 4-stage press like I did until you can get a better feel for how far you want to take your reloading. 4-stage and/or single stage presses are also preferred if you want to produce extremely accurate, precision rifle loads.
Finally, if you’re a very casual shooter and just like to occasionally plink every few months or so and are certain you won’t likely increase the frequency of your shooting, you’ll probably find that the monetary AND time investment that is involved with reloading just isn't worth it. Just some things to think about.

[PA Rifleman]

There's a lot of good info here, and worth the time to read it.

In my case, I priced the cost per round of every round I used, and compared it to the sum of the component prices. If there was a large enough discrepancy (read-savings), I reloaded. If it was about the same, I bought the dies just in case. In the 1970s & 80s military surplus ammunition was close to the cost of factory loads. 7.62x54R was a dollar a round, 7.62x39 was extremely difficult to find at any price, and was often unwelcome in some gun shops because of negative Viet Nam/communist association.

Sometimes I reloaded for special purpose ammunition, most often tracing or subsonic loads. What I discovered was the capability of making an incredible range of special purpose ammunition.

I didn't have an Elmer, so most of what I knew in the beginning I deduced from drawings, disassembling live rounds and a lot of patience. Thank God I never had a squib load or catastrophic overload. This was pre-internet, so my only resource was a local library with an aversion to guns [8^(. I never had a problem or a bad round, for that matter. Now all my precision rifle rounds are exclusively reloads, most have never had a factory round chambered in them.

I would add that making ammunition is -very- detail oriented, and a distraction can be destructive or deadly. If you have trouble focusing, you're easily distracted or impatient, I don't recommend it.