Surprising 9mm Reloading Cost Calculations

[LittleLebowski]

Why am I just now finding out about this? I have a stainless wet tumbler and buckets of brass, and that is a great deal.

This.

Also, belaboring the point but range pickup brass and coated cast lead bullets of your choice (I use Leatherhead 125s but there's several good choices available).

[GuanoLoco]

Sweet baby jeebus you are doing it wrong. . Then again for me it is all about quantity. I want to shoot 20-40K 9mm/year and not think much about it or so pend more time than I need to loading. Your needs will likely be different, but even in modest quantity like a few thousand rounds a year you should be able to do this:

#1: Brass - $$$ savings vs Starline. Go find a match and/or ranges where you can shoot and pick up discarded brass afterwards. Hand sort at first then get some shell sorter plates. Learn to clean and QC your brass. Magnet check it. Get a 40 cal MTM case. Pour handfuls of brass over it and shake. Case will mostly fall case head down. Flip those that don't. Eyeball case height from all 4 sides and pull 380's etc. Pull badly dinged case mouths, obstructed cases, etc. You will dog cuss and learn all sorts of things about mixed brass - but it will be WORTH it. I load and shoot 10's of thousands of rounds of mixed range brass and just finished 'pre-processing' well over 60K cases that I paid a grand total of $0 for.

#2 Bullets - Bayou bullets all day long, pick you fav weight. I like 135gr, $0.0725/bullet delivered all day long in case qty. About 10% less in bulk. 124gr is nominally cheaper than 124gr but takes a bit more powder and has a different feel.

#3 Powder - You should be able to get close to $0.01/rd with a good fast pistol powder. $20/lb, 7000 gr/lb, < 4gr/charge.

#4 Primers - $0.03 +/- delivered depending on quality/price/shipping/hazmat.

So - easily ~$0.12+/rd without getting at all crazy on bulk. Spend money on equipment that makes reloading more time efficient, spend time learning, and produce ever-better quality ammo.

[FPS]

Sweet baby jeebus you are doing it wrong.

Fortunately the Starline purchase was a one time thing I was trying with 1,000 cases. I used to do range pickup, cases from remanufactured and CCI Blazer Brass. Now that I have some great suggestions to mitigate the problems I was trying to resolve with the Starline, it is going to be a short lived experiment

Wanted to say thanks to all that contributed, excellent thread with great tips

[LittleLebowski]

1,000 wet tumbled brass cases for $33 delivered.

http://ammobrass.com/2001-9mm-brass-clean-1-000ct/

Swaged or crimped sorted out?

[Hambo]

Swaged or crimped sorted out?

Removing crimps is another thing I don't do. There have been some crimped cases I couldn't prime without removing the crimp, but not many. Offered with my usual disclaimer that you'll be killed or wounded should you try this.

[Edwin]

Here is my current load.

[nycnoob]

Why does no one talk about the Mark VII Auto Reloader?

http://www.markvii-loading.com/

I know nothing about reloading, but its robotic automation of the process has a high cool factor.
I understand it does improve quality of output as well.

All I know about this I learned from Ben Stoegers Podcasts and from the company's YouTube Channel.

[jeep45238]

Mostly due to price and teething issues on 1050. I really want one, but it's a lot of upfront cash. For me it would allow simultaneous casting while ammo is getting loaded, but I haven't seen the 650 model running with a bullet feeder yet - or if they've even released the first batch.

It's on my radar, but for my piece of mind I want to put this on a 1050 after it's been proven rock solid. There's a lot of piece of mind to add a swager and powder checker with the automation - steps that get skipped on the 650 when running a bullet feeder.

[45dotACP]

I have a turret press, so the time commitment to load 9mm is not worth the squeeze. I'll load .45 though. I buy once fired brass and then primers in bulk. Powder still hasn't shown up around me in 8lb jugs, so I get what I can.

I need a progressive press.

I started handloading because 41 mag is expensive as fuck.

Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk

[Flintsky]

Why does no one talk about the Mark VII Auto Reloader?

http://www.markvii-loading.com/

I know nothing about reloading, but its robotic automation of the process has a high cool factor.
I understand it does improve quality of output as well.

All I know about this I learned from Ben Stoegers Podcasts and from the company's YouTube Channel.

If you have perfect brass, then a fully automated machine works fine. However, with range pickups you never know how they will feed in your equipment. Some have crimped primer pockets that need to be swagged out, or just tight primer pockets in general depending on the brand. Brass has different alloy compositions, or may be +P, or some other variable that can slow down your equipment and if you force it, it can jam things up or break something. Either you need to do a full brass conditioning before put them in an automated reloading machine, or you need to use new brass. Personally I don't shoot enough to justify anything more elaborate than a Dillon 550b.