Handloading Introduction
Hi everyone, the first order of business before I start the Beginners Guide to Reloading is a handloading introduction that contains a little personal background and disclaimer. I’m 37 years old and I’ve been an IT professional for 20+ years. I realized there isn’t a good website for the beginner handloader that has tips to get into this hobby. I consider myself a novice. I’m far from an expert. I want to document my handloading experience and what better way to do it than on the Internet!
I have about 20 videos planned in the initial series. One video for each step in my process. I have this blog set up (obviously) along with videos to compliment it. I’m sure I’ll get a lot of comments from people telling me that I’m doing something wrong, or that I’m giving bad info, etc. I welcome all comments good or bad. It will only help fill in the gaps or points that I might have missed. If there are any areas that feel are a huge gap I’ll probably post a blog and video that talks about it in detail. This material should turn out to be a great resource for beginners.
Next, a little bit about my personal firearm history. I’ve been shooting guns since I was about 18 years old. My first gun purchase was a Marlin bolt-action .22WMR. I didn’t spend too much time shooting, only a few times a year shooting woodchucks at my buddies farms; I wasn’t into hunting. About five years ago I decided to get into whitetail deer hunting. I went out and bought a new Browning 30-06 X-bolt, scope and all the gear that goes along with that. About $1600 for gun and all accessories. I had some people tell me that 308 was better than 30-06 and visa-versa. But, in the end I decided on the 30-06.
A few years passed and I wanted to find out what the big caliber debate was. I started reading about it on websites and realized that I didn’t know about how the inner workings of guns actually function. Being the hands on guy I am, I decided what better way to learn how a gun works than build my own AR-15.
A friend of mine had already built multiple AR’s so he was my “go to” person for questions at first. I always thought coyote hunting sounded fun so I figured I would build a varmint rifle in 556. I realized there was lots to learn; things like barrel twist, length of the barrel, style of barrel, bolt,
My Custom AR-15
etc. As I researched these things the articles that I found lead me to reloading forums and detailed discussions about it. Topics that were way over my head.
I found building that rifle was very rewarding. I started to get interested in handloading and wanted to create custom rounds for my AR. I felt that I had a huge knowledge gap in this area and wanted to learn more. So I started to research handloading just like I did when I was building my AR.
I realized there was one thing in common with all my research, start with a known published handloading guide. Here is my advice: Read it once and write down all your questions. Go research those questions on the internet and write down everything you find as a possible answer. Read the guide again. Look at the questions and answers that you find and see if they make sense. Repeat as many times as necessary until you understand it. Most of what you will read on the internet are personal opinions and you shouldn’t trust them. I think the golden rule is follow the guidelines in the
Lyman Reloading Handbook
published material but be aware of other the other methods that people use to accomplish a task. At the end of this blog, I’ll post links to handloading manuals I’ve used or know about. I ended up using the Lyman guide because it had a lot of data from all vendors. I followed the guide exactly when it came to handloading methods and reloading data. Once I was comfortable reloading a certain caliber I looked for handloading data from trusted sources on the internet. Never trust any data on the internet unless it comes from a trusted source. For example, Hodgdon reloading: http://www.hodgdonreloading.com/
I’m just guessing, but I probably watched over 24 hours of YouTube videos on different topics. I learned there are many tools and different methods to accomplish a task. Based on this (and product reviews) I started purchasing my gear. I didn’t want to start with low-end gear; my thought here was that I might get turned off on the whole hobby. I also didn’t want to go with high-end gear which can get extremely expensive. I settled on picking a tool for each task that would fit my needs the best. I wanted to reload primarily for personal knowledge on the topic, then accuracy and finally to benefit from the reduced cost of ammo. As I make these videos take my goals into consideration.
Like I said earlier, with each blog post I’ll gather links to all the gear that I used or reference. In the part of this series I’ll discuss my cleaning process, tumbler and media that I chose.
Equipment discussed in this post:
