I bought an M15 Armalite rifle

I have bought their seconds for years and for most everyday shooting cannot see any reduced accuracy. I hunt whitetail with a .270 and have shot dozens with the 130 grain boat tail.

Sometimes you will run across an obviously deformed bullet. Sometimes when they are just starting a batch you will have some with extra little skirts of lead around the tip, or one without a fully formed tip. In many cases you can flick the little skirt off with a thumbnail and still shoot it. You may have to discard 1-5% as unusable.

Sure glad I stocked up with eveything back in 1994. I will never have to buy powder, primers, or bullets if I live to be 100!

Gene

• Hobby farm

Sounds like you got something you can have a good time with. Old gave you the short version of reloading. I've got mixed feelings about the benefits, myself. Reloading is one of those equipment intensive activities if ever there was one. In what seems like no time at all you'll have so much invested in equipment and components that the only way to have even a faint hope of breaking even is to step up your shooting to about 200 rounds a week average, and figure on keeping at it for the next 10 years. When someone says they can reload much cheaper than the cost of storebought they generally mean if they don't figure in the initial cost of the equipment and the value of their time. Also, home brew ammo is not so competitive against the steel jacketed Russian stuff you can pick up by the case at gun shows and large volume gun shops. That stuff is not competition winning ammo by any means, but if what you've got in mind is to take the rifle out for the afternoon and just mess around, maybe you don't want to be spending half a buck or more per pop to be shooting name brand ammo.

As far as accuracy is concerned, I only ever worked up one or two loads that could shoot as good as Remington, or Winchester, or Federal, or Cor-Bon standard grade ammo---forget about better. But I'm not disputing old on that one. I'll take the credit or the blame for not being able to get that figured out, because so many people claim they can do it. But mostly, I couldn't.

All the best, Stan

• Hobby farm

You just named two of the best reasons for reloading---making it possible to afford a high volume of shooting, and making it possible to afford to shoot obsolete or wildcat cartridges. Another good reason, the main reason I reloaded in fact, is that it's relaxing, something I could do to be productive and unwind at the same time. It wasn't my intention to suggest that reloading isn't a reasonable activity, but that if your only reason for getting started is to save money, there are some things you'd better think about first. For someone who was never going to shoot more than a couple hundred rounds a year of some cartridge that can be bought for very little, reloading might be a lot of things---but it probably would never be a money saver.

All the best, Stan

• Hobby farm

Would you please e-mail me at [email protected]
as I need to say Thank You.

My last e-mail to you did not go thru.

T_Bone

My 2 pesos.

Not buying reloading equipment to save money if you don't shoot in a way where it would save you money is like not buying tools to work on a tractor because they cost money? That's quite an analogy. I'd say you might want to try thinking a little harder before you commit that kind of statement to print for everybody to read---particularly when what you say is mean-spirited and your intention seems to be to make an insult out of the blue.

Stan

• Hobby farm