The first time someone tries reloading it can be a bit intimidating. Not everyone has a family member or mentor to guide them through the process. When you first crack open that reloading manual and see all the warnings and page after page of photos and captions detailing the steps, it can be enough to make you want to take up a simpler hobby like needlepoint.
But don’t fret. At first blush those steps seem obscure, but soon they’ll be second nature and before long you’ll start refining your technique and be on your way to mastering the skill.
To dampen the learning curve, we’ve put together these tips to help the new reloader overcome some typical issues you might encounter or questions about reloading basics that often arise.
You’ll still need to work your way through the steps outlined in your reloading manual, but this information will accelerate your journey. (If you don’t already have a reloading manual, you can download this manual from RCBS or check out the company’s online guide.)
Top Beginner Reloading Tips
Be methodical when weighing powder charges and charging cases.
None of these tips are hard to grasp — but that’s the point. Reloading, at its core, is simple. Yes, we measure the components down to the thousandth of an inch and we weigh our powder in one-tenth of a grain increments (or finer) but we have tools that make that easy.
Ultimately, all reloading comes down to reshaping the fired case to its original dimensions (or nearly so), and then using it to hold the three other components needed to form a ready-to-fire cartridge: the powder, bullet, and primer. That’s it.
When figuring out which recipe to employ, use a trusted source. One of the best is Hodgdon’s online reloading data center. This is a powerful (and free) tool that will help you zero in on a powder, bullet, and primer combo for the cartridge you plan to reload.
The Speer Reloading Manual No. 15 is another good resource. RCBS includes a copy in many of their reloading kits, though you can also purchase it separately.
With that out of the way, here are the top tips:
Stay Focused and Distraction Free
Good (and safe) reloading starts with the right mindset. You might be a wonderful multitasker in your daily life — or have the attention span of a squirrel in a peanut factory. In either case you need to set aside everything else when it comes time to reload.
Don’t talk to your buddy on the phone, doom scroll the internet, cook dinner, or do anything else when reloading. That’s how mistakes are made. Cases get too much powder (or none at all). Primers are seated upside down. Or a key dimension is out of spec.
The only thing you should be thinking about when reloading is the specific task at hand.
It pays to keep your work surface clean and well lit. A bit of prep work in this regard goes a long way.
Double (and Triple) Check Your Work
Seating bullets to the overall length suggested by the load data is often best.
Whenever you begin a new reloading process — whether resizing cases, seating primers, throwing powder, or seating bullets — take time to visually inspect and measure what you’re doing for at least a few repetitions.
So before resizing a bunch of cases in a batch, take the first few cases and run them through the action (or sizing gauge) one at a time to be sure they will chamber. The same goes for seating your bullets. Measure the overall length of your loaded cartridge to ensure it is in spec before going into rapid production mode where you seat multiple bullets without pause.
Apply this technique to every process and you won’t end up with a batch of unusable, or potentially unsafe, rounds.
Never Force Anything
Reloading requires a good sense of feel as much as anything else. The feedback you get from the press as you run the ram up and down tells you a lot. The main point is this: If something doesn’t feel right, stop.
This is certainly the case if something requires extra force, but also applies when something suddenly requires significantly less resistance than it did before. Both are warning signs that shouldn’t be ignored.
When this occurs, stop whatever you’re doing and take time to figure out what is amiss. It could be any number of things. A piece of .380 brass might have snuck into your batch of 9mm. A primer could be flipped on its side. Your primer pockets might be loose, or have a crimp. A screw or die might have backed off.
A common culprit is not using the right amount of lube, which we’ll get to next.
Use the Right Amount of Lube
When it comes to lubricating cases, you don’t want to use too much or too little — but if you’re going to err one way or the other, applying more lubrication is preferable to having not enough.
When you have too much lube on a case you can get dents in the shoulder or body of your brass. These are formed by the excess lube having nowhere to go when you size the case. Because of the pressures generated by the sizing die something has to give, and it is the brass that does so.
That’s annoying but not nearly as pesky as using too little lube. When that happens the press becomes hard to run and you might end up with a case stuck in a die, which is a real pain.
There are a few different ways to lube cases, but the most straightforward is with a spray bottle. A few squirts around the outside of the brass and some directed into the neck will do the trick.
If you neglect the inside of the neck your expander ball can drag, potentially pulling the neck upwards and messing up your shoulder bump. This can make the cases difficult (or impossible) to chamber.
Setting the Right Shoulder Bump
To cut to the chase, when you resize your brass with a full-length resizing die, don’t mess around with shoulder bump. Screw the die down so it makes solid contact with the shell holder and creates a bit of cam-over when the press handle is run through its full range of motion (assuming your press operates under this principle, which most do).
This resizes the brass to its fullest extent and avoids a common issue where the base of the brass is too wide and makes chambering the round difficult.
Here’s why that problem happens:
When we fire a cartridge, the brass expands to fill the chamber and creates a seal that prevents the gasses from going backwards into the action. In the fraction of a second that follows, it shrinks back down, but not all the way.
This is why we resize. If we didn’t do that, the neck would be too wide to properly grip a bullet. But other key dimensions on the fired brass might not need to be touched at all. Specifically, the new position of the shoulder (which has been pushed up and forward) and the width of the body.
Because these new dimensions (the slightly wider body and pushed-forward shoulder) are more snug in our chamber, reloaders have traditionally not wanted to reset them because we might be giving up some potential accuracy gains with this tighter fit.
It is wise, especially when starting to reload, to avoid this way of thinking. There are different ways to control shoulder bump you might explore later, but the method that nearly every reloading manual teaches can create headaches.
These manuals instruct the new reloader to screw the sizing die down so that it makes full contact with the shell holder and then back it off a bit, an eighth or so of a turn. This lifts the die slightly and prevents the shoulder from being pushed back all the way, giving the brass a better, more custom, fit in the rifle’s chamber. (There are tools to measure the degree of shoulder bump, so this isn’t purely a trial-and-error process.)
The problem is that backing the die off creates a small gap at the base of the cartridge. And the brass can flow into that gap, adding thickness to the base of the body, making the case sticky when chambering.
So, it is best to avoid this headache altogether and just fully resize your brass.
Setting the Right Bullet Jump
This is another area where reloaders can get wrapped around the axle. How far back into the brass should we seat the bullet? For decades, the common wisdom encouraged us to set the bullet so that it is just off the rifle lands — a few thousandths of an inch or so.
This technique was pioneered by benchrest shooters, who wanted as little space as possible between where the bullet started and where it engaged the rifling. The idea being that if the gap were too large, bad things could happen between points A and B, negatively affecting accuracy.
For regular hunters and many competition shooters this turned out to be terrible advice. Running the bullet so close the rifling creates many potential problems, none of which help with accuracy.
Adding to this is the now-discredited idea of “nodes” which said a reloader should try multiple seating depths with their bullet to find the amount of bullet jump their rifle prefers. It turns out this is all bunk. The nodes don’t exist. Reloaders just jumped to conclusions (forgive the pun) based on insufficient data samples.
The answer to the issue of seating depth and bullet jump is simple. Just load your rounds to the overall length specified in your reloading manual.
Modern cartridges and modern bullets are quite happy with often significant amounts of bullet jump and fiddling with seating depth isn’t usually very productive.
Use the Right Seating Stem
Reloaders are spoiled when it comes to bullet selection. There are so many great bullets out there for different applications — big game hunting, varmint shooting, personal protection, inexpensive plinking, and long-range precision.
Compare these bullets side by side and you’ll notice the shapes of the tips are quite different. Because of this you want to make sure you’re running the right seating stem in your seating die.
For rifle cartridges, the bullets can be divided into two main camps. Those with standard, traditional tips, and those that are VLD bullets, which stands for “very low drag.”
VLD bullets have tips with longer, finer tapers, which makes them aero ballistically efficient for long-range shooting. But if you attempt to seat these bullets with a regular seating stem you often get a ring engraved around the tip of the bullet, which is obviously undesirable.
So you’ll need to swap the stem to one designed for these projectiles and figure out a way to mark it for proper identification down the road.
Handgun shooters have even more options to choose from, based on bullet type and weight. If in doubt, call or write RCBS’s customer service. They are used to answering even the most obscure questions and will steer you in the right direction.
Charge Cases Slowly and Deliberately
Keeping an organized reloading bench will help prevent mistakes.
This last tip ties in directly with the first piece of advice in the article, which is to stay focused. Doing this is critical with every step while reloading, but especially so when charging cases with powder.
These are the six main mistakes you want to avoid, in rising order of severity:
- Spilling powder
- Putting powder in unprimed cases
- Failing to charge a case
- Under charging a case
- Double charging a case
- Using the wrong powder
Spilling powder happens when you go too fast while moving between the powder dispenser and the powder funnel. It also happens when you pour the powder in a hurry. Kernels can bounce off the funnel and fly out of the powder cup. Even when charging a case directly from a volumetric dispenser you want to move in a slow and deliberate manner. This keeps your charges consistent and prevents spillage.
Putting powder in an unprimed case creates a mess, especially on a progressive press, but is more annoying than anything. The next four errors on this list all have potential to lead to really bad outcomes.
Failing to charge a case will often result in the bullet being jammed into the rifling. This usually requires a cleaning rod or something similar to be used to pop the bullet free.
If the shooter doesn’t pick up on what happened and tries to fire another round with the previous bullet obstructing the barrel, it can cause a catastrophic failure with the action and stock flying to pieces.
An undercharged load is similar but usually worse. Called a squib load, you can end up with the bullet lodged somewhere in the middle of the barrel, making it more difficult to remove. Because the gun fired, it can be an error that is more difficult to detect than having no powder in the case at all.
Double charging a case isn’t usually a problem for rifle shooters, because a large quantity of powder will spill all over the place when you add the second charge, tipping you off to the problem.
Handgun shooters, however, might not be any the wiser until they pull the trigger on a superhot, over pressured load.
Finally, there’s using the wrong powder. Like other errors here this can lead to catastrophic problems. If you use a powder with a faster burn rate by mistake it can jack pressures well beyond safe levels and cause damage to the firearm and your person.
You can avoid these problems by staying laser focused on the dispensing and pouring of the powder. If you become distracted at all, double check your charges by looking into the case with a flashlight.
When handling powder, have only one type of powder on your bench at a time and put a label on your powder dispenser indicating what you’re using. Post-It notes are good for this.
If you like to reload with multiple types of powder, it makes sense to empty the powder dispenser fully when you’re done with the session. That minimizes the chance of using the wrong powder the next time you’re at the bench.
Final Thoughts
These are all basic, but useful tips that avoid some of the common issues that reloaders, especially those new to the hobby, encounter. Use your head, go slow, keep records, and stay focused. Do all that and you’ll have nothing to worry about.