Weighing Finished Rounds

[getsome]

Does anyone else weigh their finished rounds? I suppose I'm paranoid about a double charge but last night I was weighing 100 rounds of .44 mag mixed brass using 240 gn bullets and 8 grains of universal...

Most of the Winchester and Remington rounds weighed around 358 grains +/- 3 grains either way but then I weighed a Hornady brass round and it weighed 369 grains and I thought woops here is a double charge so I pulled the bullet and weighed the powder and it was 7.9 grains so it wasn't a double charge after all...

After weighing all the finished rounds I found about 7 that weighed in the 368 grain range so I pulled them all back down and still didnt find any powder charge problems and I noticed all the brass was Hornady so I suppose their brass is sometimes heavy but not all were but 10 grains difference in brass weight seems like a pretty big spread to me...

After it was all said and done I spent a good bit of time tearing down and reloading but I had rather be safe than sorry...My question is has anyone else noticed such a big brass weight difference from the same manufacturer?.....Thanks again everyone...

[94zcar]

I have not weighed any complete rounds or empty brass, but I have weighed some bullets and they usually vary a bit in weight. I do not think weighing finished rounds is worth doing because of all the variables involved. Would be nice if all the components were consistant, then that would work.

[wyntrout]

There's too much variation in the bullet/case weight and when you start talking about accuracy... maybe +/- 10% or whatever, a few grains one way or the other doesn't mean much. That's one reason I used a loading block... two rows... made my own... so I could drop powder and then check that all were about the same. Of course, I manually loaded the primers using an auto-feeding Lyman hand-primer and checked the seated primers visually and by touch... anal.

I never had any malfunctions, though, using a lee turret press to aid in changing the dies.

Wynn

[Ikeo74]

Empty brass varies in weight between manufactures. You are only scareing yourself by weighing a finished round. If you are determined to weigh brass do it when they are empty and then seperate the empty brass by weight into groups. However it is a lot easier and safer to forget about the brass weight and concentrate on your powder measurer. Weigh the second drop (throw the first one back in the measurer) and about every 10th or 20th as you continue to load. If you do that it doesn't matter what the brass weighs. The charge will be correct. Then do a visual check on each tray of 50 before you load the bullets. If they all look like they have an even amount of powder in them you didn't make and double charges or missed ones. I always use 2 loading blocks 1 full and 1 empty and move the cartridge over to the empty one as you do each step. Move them back again on the next step. You can't make any mistakes that way.

[getsome]

Thanks guys, I do use a loading block and load 50 at a time....I will charge all 50 and then do a visual, I also use a dowel with a line where the case mouth is be to double check that the charge is where it should be...

I suppose I'm being anal but after seeing a previous post about all those blown up guns after a Ka-Boom it almost made me give up reloading but I decided to just be extra careful because I really enjoy loading almost as much as shooting....I have no life...

[wyntrout]

Most of those come from too little or no powder, causing a squib in the barrel and then another round being fired without checking the barrel for an obstruction! Some are double loads of powder, though. When working with light powder charges, a double might be hard to detect with a glance.

I've only had problems like that with shotguns, using a "progressive" loader. Usually there's a "TOOTH" sound as the primer blows the wad and shot out of the barrel, but you definitely need to check the barrel anyhow, even if you did see all of that stuff go downrange. With pistols in a noisy range, you may not hear the primer fire.

Wynn