- To hand load or not to hand load, that is the question. Forgive me, Shakespeare,
but that's the best I could come up with.
Hey, Ron Spomer here, and I always get questions
about hand loading. Is it worth the trouble? Boy, I think it is. We've got 10 good reasons why
you might want to hand load. Stay tuned to this episode
of "Ron Spomer Outdoors." (western music) Okay, 10 good reasons
why you should hand load, plus one extra benefit
for a round number of 11. Number one, all these tools. What handyman doesn't want more tools? Here's your excuse to buy a bunch of them. We'll go over those eventually in some of our videos on rsotv.com where we're going to
get into a whole primer and probably an in-depth
demonstration of hand loading and we're gonna cover the presses and the scales and the powder measures and the trimmers and the neck trimmers and the calipers and all
the tools that we get to use to create our own custom ammunition. And that brings us to our a top 10 list. Number one, save money. Can you really save money
by hand loading? Absolutely. Right now it's around 50,
some say as much as 60% but of course it always depends
on where you buy your stuff. You've gotta have components to load. That means primers, powder,
and bullets primarily. You get your brass, every time you shoot you get your brass, you
don't throw it away. There's your big money
savings right there. So number one, yes, you should be able to save
about half on your ammo costs. Now that really won't pan out
because you're gonna end up shooting twice as much
because it's so much fun. And you've got your hand loads, I mean, it's just really special. I equate it tying your
own flies for fishing, it just is extra sweet to catch
a fish on a hand-tied fly. And let me tell you, taking
a big buck with your own handmade ammunition is
pretty much a treat, too. So the second really good
reason, it's just probably a better reason than the saving money one, and that's improving accuracy. The thing with factory ammunition
is that one size fits all. You buy that particular
round for your rifle and it has to fit every
other rifle out there. And there are always subtle differences between chambers and barrels in rifles. So your rifle might have a
little bit tighter throat than the next guy's or a tighter chamber,
et cetera, et cetera. They have to make this cartridge minimal so it fits at everyone's. Well, when you hand load you can tailor the way
you resize your cases, trimming your necks, trimming
the length of the case, getting the tension for your
bullet seating pressures, tailoring the best primer for the particular load you're building. You'd be amazed at how a
primer can make a difference in accuracy as well as velocity, and then of course the
bullet and the powder, you put it all together and
you can make some really incredible strides to
improving your accuracy. Trust me, I have easily cut in half the group size by hand loading. And many folks will say, you know I had a rifle that would
only shoot two inch groups, and I played around with hand loads and I'm down to half MOA.
That's pretty impressive stuff. So if you are looking to really
shoot some fine precision you might want to hand load. Number three, greater bullet selection. You know, I don't want
to denigrate today's ammo manufacturers because
they are absolutely doing a better job than they
have ever done before. They're offering so many
more options in bullets that you can generally find
what you need, but not always. There are some boutique
bullet makers out there. Some new brands coming
online that really make some exceptional bullets like
hammer bullets right here. I don't know of any manufacturer
loading hammer bullets, but boy, after playing around with them and testing 'em on deer, I should be looking for some
because they really work well. Cutting edge bullets, Black
Hills, no, I don't know if Black Hills has any,
but Badlands Precision and in Yankton, South Dakota has some. I mean, there's just all
kinds of new bullet people coming out with some grand ideas and plans and they might work out
beautifully for your style of hunting or target shooting
or just your particular rifle. So you've gotta hand load to
get a lot of those bullets. Great. You can create ammo for obsolete cartridges and hard to find. Now, anybody out there
shoot a .284 Winchester? Don't find a lot of
loads for that, do you? I think Winchester offers 1
150-grain load the last I saw, and it was a PowerPoint bullet, which isn't exactly cutting edge. But a lot of guys are using the
.284 now with longer bullets for precision target
shooting at long range. And they all have to hand load. But if you've got a beautiful old, say, a Winchester .88 rifle in .284 Winchester, great hunting rifle if you can
find good ammunition for it. And of course, back to the bullets again, if you want to use some
of the best bullets today you're probably gonna have
to hand load that one. You can go on down the list of
all these obscure cartridges 6.5 millimeter Remington
Magnum, .350 Remington Magnum, and the list goes on
and on, .225 Winchester. There are so many cartridges
that are either obsolete or on the fringe of becoming obsolete that you just can't find good ammo for it. But you can if you hand load. Now you can load Ackley
Improved and Wildcat cartridges. You can find a few Ackley
Improved cartridges on the market. I'm specifically thinking of the 280 AI, that one has been sort of
commercialized and legitimized. But most AIs you cannot. And if you like to play around with rifles and create a little
bit improved cartridge, Ackley Improved is an easy way to do it because you can use your standard rifle and just have a gunsmith
ream the chamber out to fit the new AI brass. Take the factory AI brass,
shoot it in that rifle if the head space remains
the same, tell your gunsmith and then you've got your brass to load. And the big thing about AI is that the brass will last longer. You'll get more reloads out of it because there's less neck stretching and you don't have to trim as often. And yeah, you'll pick up a
little increase in velocity, usually 50 to a hundred feet per second. But the big thing I think
for most AI shooters is that longer case life. Wildcat cartridges. Obviously
you have to be a hand loader if you're gonna mess around
with those because no factories are gonna be cranking out
ammunition for Wildcat cartridges. That is pretty much guaranteed. If you've got a Wildcat
cartridge and rifle chamber you're gonna be a hand loader. Now, more velocity, too many people think they
want to get into hand loading so they can really increase the velocity of their cartridges. Generally you can't,
but sometimes you can. Here are those times. Some older cartridges like
the 45-70 and the .757 Mauser, maybe the 65 by 55 suite,
rounds that have been with us since gosh, the 1890s or even the 1880s. Those were originally built
in some pretty weak rifles. Before we really started having
the finest strongest steels and the most strongest actions, we had some pretty
shady options out there. So the ammunition is loaded down in power. So you don't blow up
one of those old rifles. factories pretty much have to do that. You just can't be selling ammunition that's gonna blow somebody's rifle up. No, there's not a lot of them but there are some famous ones. And one is that 45-70. And as an example, in this hand
loading manual from Hornady, they give recipes depending on your rifle, not just the 45-70. So this one says 45-70
government, 1895 Marlin. That's a lever action Marlin
rifle, that's pretty strong. So they increase the powder capacities and the velocity of that,
but the original 45-70 government trap door
Springfield rifle, that was the real weak one for which
it was originally loaded, and that's why the pressures
are so low on that. I think they're down around 45,000 PSI. Don't quote me on that, but it's low. Unlike some of the high
pressure cartridges today like the .270, 65,000. So there's a big difference there. And then they also have a
special category in here for a Ruger number one,
which was an incredibly strong falling block single-shot action. So 45-70 government, Ruger number one, you'd really get your velocities up. I haven't even looked to see
what the differences would be. Let's do that real quick. The original trap door
Springfield top load for 300 grain bullet you
1900 feet per second. In the 45-70 government Ruger number one, top load with, oh they didn't
even have a 300-grain bullet, they've got a 350, but even with 50 more grains in that bullet you're getting 300 feet
per second more velocity. So you can see, just a lot
more performance that way, hand loading is the way to do it. It's educational and instructive. When you start hand loading you start learning a lot of
things about guns and ammo and ballistics, pressures
being one of them, bullet seating depth being another. They're just all kinds of little details that you don't necessarily
even think about or hear about if you just buy factory ammunition. When you're loading your own you really start to
understand this relationship between the chamber dimensions
and the throat length and the rifling twist rate
and what you're building and shooting for better performance. And I mean, I don't know,
it's not probably gonna put a bigger buck on the
wall or more moose meat in the refrigerator or anything like that, but there's just a certain satisfaction that comes with knowing something, similar to, let's say an automobile. We can all drive our cars around and when they break down,
hire somebody to fix 'em. But the guys who know a few
things about automobiles and how to repair things,
back when I was a kid it was rebuild your carburetor
or put in a new tranny or a higher ratio rear end or
anything mechanical like that that gave you the satisfaction. And then if some strange
noise starts clunking under the hood, you
can assess what that is and get it right, oh you feel
like you really somebody, hey? So it's similar to that. It just is educational and informative. And actually it can help you shoot better because when you begin to
understand what makes a load, a cartridge, and a bullet shoot
better in a particular rifle you can make selections
that allow you to do that with your rifles. You might have an old rifle
that never was much for shooting and start hand loading for it and turn it into a tack driver. All right, number nine, you can become a better shot
and believe you me, you should. Because as I said earlier,
when you hand load and save all that money, you
tend to shoot a lot more. And when you shoot a lot more you tend to become a better shot. You can afford to go out
and practice and train. And even when I was, say a
kid, just learning to shoot just by sitting on the
bench and testing loads and figuring out which
one was gonna work best in my particular rifle,
I became a better shot. I got used to the recoil. I got used to the whole process. I started to learn to
pull that trigger properly and not jerk it and everything else that goes with repetition. So a lot to be said for that. Then number 10, satisfying
hands-on creations. Again, we're getting
back to that tool work. If you're someone who likes to
build things, create things, work with your hands, work with tools, boy, you're gonna have a lot of tools with which to work when you hand load. So that's the low down on hand loading. I definitely recommend it. I still shoot a lot of factory ammunition, just because you're a hand
loader doesn't mean you can't. And sometimes it's just convenient to pick up some ammunition somewhere. You get a good deal on it. Even if you, let's say you find some ammo that nobody's buying and
you can pick it up for what, maybe a half price. Imagine that in this day and age. Half price today would be like
double price 10 years ago. But at any rate, you save
a little money there, shoot those up for practice,
and then you've got brass to load up your favorite
accurate load for hunting or whatever you want to do with it. So just a lot to recommend hand loading. If you're thinking about it at all definitely first place to start is with some of these hand loading manuals. They've got all the
instructions in the front and you can look at some of these recipes and see the velocities and compare them to what you're getting with
your current factory ammunition and maybe give you some ideas
and inspire you to jump in. I would certainly recommend it. Hey, this is Ron Spomer. Thanks for watching. Do subscribe to the channel if you can and hit that like button,
sure helps us out. And we want to thank our
Patreons for their support. You'd like to join us on
Patreon, go to patreon.com, "Ron Spomer Outdoors,"
and we'll sign you up. And you can catch us on rsotv.com, where we're going to
be doing a whole series on all aspects of hand
loading, as well as other gunsmithing and shooting
and scope mounting and all that kind of fun stuff,
and some new hunts coming up so you can join us there as well. We have another channel,
it's RSO on YouTube. Those are our podcasts where we answer questions from everyone. And we'll sometimes read
old magazine articles or tell stories about the hunts
we've enjoyed over the years and believe you me, there
have been a lot of years. Hey, thanks for listening. Hunt honest and shoot straight. (western music)
