AutoTrickler V3 vs ChargeMaster Lite...Surprising Results!

hey everybody four gun guy here uh today i wanted to do a video on my new powder measuring system it's the auto trickler v3 from adam mcdonald and it's paired with the amd fx120i scale for precision powder drops now i've been using my trusty charge master light for about nine months now and it's been really good uh for me uh i did want to get a little more accuracy if you look at some of my other videos i'm kind of a stickler on let's get things as tight as we can so if there's any issues at a match it's me and it's not my equipment or or anything like that that's a great quote from my friend jeff if you know my videos then you'll know that i do a lot of research and for me this auto trickler v3 was the best value for the money when you get to this level of scale and powder system now what we're going to do in this video though is compare these two i'm going to drop two 10 round strings 110 round from the auto trickler 110 round from the charge master light we're going to measure things like the the weight accuracy of both of these we're going to measure the speed of the drops uh this is faster but is it that much faster than the charge master light then we're going to go to the range we're going to shoot those two strings and we're going to see how things turn out from an accuracy standpoint and i don't mean from a grouping standpoint i mean what difference in those power drops in those 10 round strings how big of a difference is that going to make out at distance so once you get out to six seven eight nine a thousand eleven hundred yards what is the difference between the powders that's that have been dropped from these two chargers so without further ado let's get into it well let's talk about what we're going to cover the first thing we're going to cover are the benefits of the auto trickler and really this is just a overview comparison of say the auto tricker as opposed to like a charge master light or even a beam scale then we're going to look at the auto trickler v3 overview and how i've set up my auto trickler for use on my bench then i'm going to do some initial powder throws i'm not going to get into super detail on calibration and all that that's all in the book so but i'll show you some initial powder throws and some things to watch out for we'll get into weight measurement between the auto trickler v3 and the charge master light then we're going to look at a loading speed comparison how much time do you really save if any with the auto trickler v3 finally an accuracy comparison so an accuracy here i'm talking about velocities sds esses and how that translates to shots at distance so i'm not talking about groupings on a 100 yard target and then finally is it worth it is this auto trickler v3 worth it to you and for what you need to use it for or would an rcbs charge master light or two of them be sufficient so let's get to it let's talk about why you might be looking at the auto trickler v3 or any other higher end powder measuring equipment if you're measuring your powder using a balance beam for example then you realize that you're sacrificing speed for accuracy and most balance beam scales will give you a plus or minus 0.1 grain accuracy you may want to increase the speed of your reloading without sacrificing too much accuracy and move into the electronic powder measuring world now using something like the rcbs charge master light that i've been using you'll get plus or minus 0.1 grain accuracy but with a much faster drop you may get to a point like i did where you want to remove as many outside influences on your reloading process as possible in order to minimize the effect of non-optimum round development on the accuracy of your shots now i'm going to pause here notice i said minimize not eliminate the effect of non-optimum round development on the accuracy of your shots you will always have some inconsistency in your loads folks period but as my good friend jeff has said he wants to eliminate as many inconsistencies as he can so that if he misses the target it's most likely on him and not on his equipment or his loads and i've really adopted that line of thinking so i'm using what i believe are some of the better pieces of equipment and a good process as you've seen in my other videos to prep my brass uh and i've been using the charge master light for about eight months and i've been really happy with it with good sds and es's in most cases but i wanted to remove that one last piece of possible cartridge inconsistency the charge weight which is why i went to the auto trickler v3 to get a little more accuracy now i know that some of you will be asking about the new rcbs my matchmaster and others like the sartorius scale all i can tell you is that the pros that i shoot with and believe me i'm not a pro just the guys that i shoot with use the auto trickler vx setup with the fx 120i scale honestly for the money uh you know it's it really compares much better in my opinion to the matchmaster uh i feel that you're getting a better setup with the fx 120i and the auto trickler v3 now others are going to comment on the virtues of continuing to use a beam scale and while i appreciate that belief i'm talking about reloading 300 to 400 rounds of 6.5 creedmoor ammunition every month which is what i do to maintain my practice regiment and have around 120 rounds for matches i'm sorry but i'm not going to reload that many rounds that often using a beam scale i just don't have that kind of free time or quite frankly that much patience so please remember you know what i say in all my videos this is what i'm doing not what i'm telling you to do so now let's look at the upgrades i made and some set up operational tips for the auto trickler v3 well here's the setup so this is the auto trickler v3 with the fx 120i scale now note that the fx120i scale it's not built for powder reloading okay this is this is built for scientific use so you'll need to get used to the buttons that really don't mean anything to you but still have a purpose for powder loading so you know one of the first things you'll do is probably come down here and do what i did put some some labels to these uh the instructions are fairly clear but look don't just set this thing up and then start throwing powder uh you will regret it you need to just get used to it throw a few loads put them back in the hopper and just get used to how this thing works with your phone and uh the trickler the the auto throw once you get used to that then then things will come come fairly easily and quickly now let's talk about the foundation here so here's what i did i took a piece of wood and i just built this this little platform this is like three quarter inch plywood i have some medium uh medium foam feet on it uh and then i put i got kind of a thicker mouse pad to put the scale on and this to me kind of gives a level of isolation and insulation uh from the rest of my rest of my bench now then this is sitting on an anti-static mat that is grounded to a wall plug so when i wear the wrist strap that i'm wearing right here there's a wrist strap when i wear that wrist strap i'm grounded so as not to damage any of the electronics in the scale or in the auto throw now one more thing that i did do is i did get a electrical box or electrical stabilizer so this is just a box i'll put all this uh uh on on the video but this is where the ground is plugged in and it's just a plug right it's just a well you'll you'll see when i put it in there but this uh this box stabilizes uh the electrical current that comes to the scale so these are some things that on top of the cost of the scale you're going to want to think about when you look at this scale as far as upgrades go really the only upgrade that i made was this clear plaque plexiglas top from area 419 and you really do need to see this because you really need to see everything that's going on in here because you could have one kernel of powder spill out onto this platform and that's just throwing you off by anywhere from two to four one hundredths of a grain so with all that said let's talk about warming it up well before i get to warming it up i did want to kind of go over the instructions these are pretty good instructions adam's done a good job how you're going to put it together how you're going to connect everything what everything means how to use the mobile device operation we're going to get to that in a second what all the buttons mean so you can see that yes these are the ones that i put the labels to just as he recommends some troubleshooting and then adjusting the flow rate and and whatnot so good book the uh a and d uh book is uh written by typical engineers and uh it's it's pretty clear but you're gonna need to know uh what sections to use for what purposes and there's really just one section in this book and we're gonna get to this in a second and that's how to calibrate the scale using an external weight so this is on page 30. so if you're if you're going to get one of these things just pay attention mark it down right now go to page 30 in this book and how to calibrate the scale but overall instructions are pretty darn good well let's talk about warming uh the human unit up calibration and then setting zero so look if if you're gonna use this like if i know i'm gonna drop some powder on tuesday i'll set this up just as it is right now on monday so i'll plug it in uh i may not turn it on but i'll at least plug it in for a few hours and then tuesday morning i'll go ahead and turn it on and let it sit all day these scales are really designed for lab use and they're designed to be on for long periods of time so make sure you let this warm up the instructions say 30 minutes but friends of mine who use it have said yeah let it warm up for a few hours at least so so there's that and then from a calibration standpoint you can see that it's saying uh uh grains right now so what i'm going to do is i'm going to hold down this cal button and we get this call out and then uh it displays cal 0 so then what i'm going to do is i'm going to hit print and it's going to show 100 i'm going to put a 100 gram weight on it that's not grains that's grams and then i'm going to hit print again and it should give us the all clear it says end which means it's all clear i'm going to take this weight off and now notice that it switches back to grains now i'm not going through the entire setup here i'm just showing you some quick and dirty stuff the other thing you want to notice is that there's a level here i'm not going to just zoom in on it but you want to make sure that this is level and the other thing is as you're leveling don't be in a hurry turn these these leveling wheels you'll see a leveling wheel over here you see another one over here you turn these very slowly because it takes a while for that bubble to move in there it's not like a level you're used to so with that being said now we set the zero so i've got the cup that comes with it and this is a really nice cup now some other people are ordering the 419 powder cups and those are good they're taller they're aluminum um but they're also like a hundred dollars or 150 bucks or something like that i'm sorry i'm just not going to spend that much money on them so what i'll do is i will set the cup on there and a couple things you want to make sure of is that there's nothing else on the platter you've got the cup set and it's clean right and now it should read or it does for me six point three two i'm going to hit re-zero or three zero and it's now zeroed with the cup okay i want to show you something about the scale itself and how um how sensitive it is so right now it reads zero i'm going to step about four feet over here that was me blowing on the scale from about four feet away with just a very light breath so you can see it's going to take it in a second or two to come back to zero these are very very sensitive machines that is why when you set this up and my buddy gave me this advice when you set this up put a plaxi plexiglas piece on the front leave this side open okay that's because when you're standing in front of the scale you're naturally going to breathe and it's going to pick that up all right so just uh just some tips there so basically how this works is we're going to fill this up with some powder right here's the the bin for the powder we're going to open this there's a little x there and we're going to turn this to open it's going to pour some powder down into the auto throw this is the auto throw section we adjust the auto throw with this little adjustment screw here and this whole whole setup here is to drop that initial load so if i'm loading 41.7 grains of reloader 16 i'm going to probably set this to to drop about 39 and a half grains and then the auto trickler here will take over and this will trip it's just a trickler like a manual trickler but it's set up with all the electronic components and this trickler will then trickle in the rest of the powder quickly or however quickly we want it to trickle in up to your target weight that's really how it works it's not a really excuse me complex setup you just have to remember some things like number one uh when you're loading your powder keep this closed when you go to unload your powder at the end of the loading session close that up because if you don't you're going to pull this thing out and powder is going to spill everywhere okay so it's little things like that and then we're gonna uh so i tell you what let's go ahead and uh set up the uh the phone and then we'll uh i'll show you how that works and we'll do some sample throws all right so here we are uh we've got the auto throw set we've got the speed on the auto trickler set and that adjustment is on the back of the device here and again it's all in the instructions i'm not going to go through all that but i also then have a small glass cup with some loose powder in it now you guys are going to be i'm just a freak about this stuff so i don't even go i don't even deal with the 0.02 accuracy i want it even more accurate than that so i tend to drop kernels some people do some people don't i'm not going to do it today just to for our comparison purposes because i really do want to see how this is going to turn out but what i do is i have the powder in there i'm going to now open this up you can hear a little bit of the powder uh drop and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to open the mobile app and i'm going to throw some powder so let me let me bring that up all right well here's the mobile device for the auto trickler and as you can see right now now this is on my ipad you can use this i have this on my android phone as well but since i'm filming with my phone i thought i'd do it on the ipad right now it says disconnected tap to stand so uh scan so i'm going to tap that it says auto trickler found so i'm going to say connect and now it's going to say enter a target wave now before we do that remember back here at the scale everything is zeroed out i've loaded powder i've opened up the powder bin so the powder is flowing into the auto throw the auto throw is set for for what i want it to be set at and then we have the auto trickler but now what we need to do is to make sure everything's going to function properly so what i'm going to do is come over to the mobile and i'm just going to say cycle auto throw now when i do that the auto throw just cycled i'm going to hit it again and really this is just to make sure that the powder from up here in the bin has filled everything down here in the auto throw that needs to be filled with powder okay so there's the first part of what i'm doing now i'm going to come back over here to the device and i'm going to say start motor now this is going to start the trickler and you can see that it's trickling out powder i'm going to hit stop so now everything is set for my auto throw right so i'm going to empty that i'm going to make sure that it's empty i'm going to put it back on the platter everything reads zero and now i'm going to come over here and i'm going to enter a target weight target weight is going to be 40 1.7 okay the second i tap this it's going to throw that target weight so let's watch tap there's the auto throw throwing about 39.5 grains and now the trickler is trickling and it's going to stop here in a second and what do we stop at 41.7 so you're usually getting within .02 of your weight now what's going to happen is when i take this off and if i was going to load it into a case i'd drop it into a case but here i'm just dropping it up above i come back down notice that the weight is the weight of the cup i'm gonna put this on it's gonna go to zero and the second it goes to zero it throws again okay so with that being said it's uh it's pretty fast at what it's doing you can see that the weight is getting up there six six six eight and we end up with uh 41.68 now if you're like me if i'm gonna load match then i would take a very small grain of powder maybe and i would drop it in there and we would see it go to 41.7 right if you're that crazy about it you can do that um if you read uh adam's story or blog i think it is on uh how much drop there is in a kernel of powder you probably won't do it right you'll get within the 200s of a grain and you'll call it a day which is what i do with all my practice stuff but like right here 4170 okay so it looks like we're dialed in so with that being said let's move on to the next section well here's my charge master light that i've been using so we're gonna check the accuracy of this i've always wanted to do that so let's go 41.7 which is the charge i hit go we're off to the races 41.3 4 5 6 7 okay 41.7 all right well i just wanted to uh kind of give you the idea of what it's like to sit there and wait on the charge master light and look it's a great machine it's been really good to me uh over the past nine ten months but it is slow i even know guys who have two of them so they have them both going you know uh in in tandem so they can load faster but look all that aside speed aside i want you to look at this graph i want you to look at the 15 loads i just dropped with the charge master light and the auto trickler v3 what i want you to see is if you pause this you will see the big spread with the charge master light that a standard deviation with the char's master light was 0.05 the standard deviation with the auto trickler was 0.02 less than half of that of the charge master light the spread though that's what i want you to focus on down there in the lower right the spread of the charge master light was two tenths and the the spread on the auto trickler was six hundredths okay so those those are big differences folks um if you look at the numbers you can see that yeah these are big differences and look in close do these differences make much difference probably not as i've said before if you're a hunter and you don't need the speed of reloading and you're shooting out to 250 and and in which most you know deer hunters do now if you're going up into colorado rockies or into canada and you're doing big elk hunting and all that and you've got 600 yard shots i get it but for just deer hunting would the light suffice probably so but if you're in competition and you're gonna shoot out to a thousand twelve hundred yards you can really see the difference here on this chart and in that data between these two pieces of equipment all right well let's look at the real process here so i'm set up the way i would normally be set up to reload i'm going to put my powder cup on there we're coming up we've got 41.7 on the button take this off dumping my powder putting this on that over here here here loaded by the time i'm done i have another load ready so i'm going to show you this with these three so we just did five cartridges and i'm gonna leave the i'm gonna leave the cup off so it doesn't pour some more these are gonna be my five cartridges that i take to the range to match on okay let's look at just a couple then using the charge master light all right let's go through the same process here using the charge master light got it set to auto i'm dialing in 41.7 and off we go 41.3 and this is generally and look i'm only going to probably do two of these because this is really painful uh this is generally the biggest issue so we've got 41.7 which we're not really sure that that's 41.7 but we're going to trust it that back on it's going to reset now now i'm going to bring this over bullet see this is where that 8 to probably 12 seconds for each case starts to add up right and so you know next thing we're going to look at here is the accuracy between these uh two strings and uh so let's go ahead and look at that and then we'll have some final thoughts all right that's 10 shots with the auto trickler or with the charge master light we have an sd of 5.3 velocity of 27 69 and an es of 16. so not too bad all right there we have sd of 4.4 average 2773 with a 13 yes that's what the auto trickler loads let's do some analysis well let's look at this analysis here uh it's it's pretty interesting so what i did is i took 10 rounds remember we loaded 15 but for speed but i took 10 of those 15 rounds a random 10 took them to the range you just saw me shoot them and these were the results now i'm i'm using these results from excel calculations so if you look at the charge master light the sd 508 es16 and the average speed or velocity 2770 auto trickler sd of 4.21 an es of 13 and an average velocity of 27.74 i'm kind of shocked at these results i thought they would be way different between these two and this small of a difference doesn't it it just surprises me so anyway let's look at accuracy okay so what i did was i plugged in these numbers into the shooterscalculator.com ballistic trajectory calculator so i took the numbers from the auto trickler and the numbers from the charge master light and then i plotted them on this graph now this doesn't really show much so let's go ahead and switch to the numbers well the numbers are very interesting aren't they uh let's start with the auto trickler v3 on the left if you start uh so this is what i did i put the low lowest velocity and the highest velocity in the calculator so really what you have on the top is the lowest velocity so you can see that let's take 500 yards for example at 500 yards your elevation uh you're losing 48.29 inches in drop right that's your drop uh for the lowest velocity for the lowest for the highest velocity at 500 yards you're losing 47.76 which is a difference of what about a half half an inch let's just jump right out to a thousand yards at a thousand yards with the lowest velocity from the auto trickler you're losing you're dropping 295.7 inches with the uh highest velocity from the auto trickler you're dropping 292.48 inches uh folks that's about what three three inches three and a quarter maybe okay that's not bad okay well i screwed up a little bit on this because on the charge master light i put the uh low velocity on the bottom uh and the high velocity on the top so i apologize for that but look if you look at the 500 the difference between those two is about a little over half an inch about .6 inches and if we go to the thousand yards on those it looks like the difference is on the low velocity negative 297.33 high velocity negative 293.28 so the difference there is about what four inches a little more than four inches so again not that big of a deal between these two you know if you just look at these at these drops it's amazing now one other thing i just want to point out is when you look at the elevation adjustments right for these so let's go out to a thousand yards again on the auto trickler v3 the difference between the elevations at a thousand yards is eight point one two and eight point two one so you're right there at about a tenth of a mill right on the charge master light you're a little more than a tenth of a mill but still that's they're both about the same my point is you'd be off a tenth of a mill on both so you know i don't know it's just not uh wow it's just not that it's not as big of a difference as i thought it would be and i'm just trying to be honest here in this uh comparison so let's go ahead and go to final thoughts well i don't know about you but i was pretty shocked by the results you know really i can't say anything bad about either one of these powder measuring systems like i said i've been using this charge master light for about nine months now i don't feel bad because i bought it from my friend for a hundred bucks so i didn't pay the 289 that it usually costs uh this charge master this uh auto tripler v3 on the other hand as i said in the beginning this thing is about four times the cost of a charge master light when you get everything said and done like i had in the video right the mat conditioner uh the plastic cover up here is it worth that much more i'm going to leave that up to you i'm not going to tell you one way or the other i have to say i love the speed of this thing the accuracy makes me feel good when i know that i'm within .02 grains every time i drop the powder in here now let's back up and say did we see that that made that big of a difference man out to 1100 yards a little bit but not that much so look let me just say this if you're in competition and you want to try to get the best you can be in long-range competition you'll probably want to go with something like this if you're in competition and you just want to go out there and shoot and have a good time you know what you could do yeah you could get two of these babies just like my buddy dawn does put them side by side and run them side by side you'll still end up with about the same time as this maybe even a little faster and are your results can be that much different i don't think so so i leave it up to you if you're into the high-tech stuff this is a great tool to have if you just want something to load some some cartridges and shoot decently in a match then i think this is a great value for your money so there you have it i want to really thank you for sticking around for this but i know it was a long video i didn't want it to be this long but i also wanted to include all of the numbers all of the readings everything that i thought was important to making this decision because it is a big decision four times the cost of this that's a big jump so again hope this helped and please if you liked it please like and i'd love it if you could subscribe to my channel because i have a lot more coming up hey thanks everybody i really appreciate you watching shoot straight [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: The 4GunGuy

Views: 33,866

Keywords: AutoTrickler V3, Auto Trickler, AutoTrickler, ChargeMaster Lite, Charge Master Lite, ChargeMaster, Powder Measurement, Reloading

Id: -TawWi5US7I

Length: 38min 7sec (2287 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020