A noob's rant on reloading content.

[yakimanoob]

I'm new to reloading, so I've been rabidly consuming every bit of advice I can find online on the subject for the past two months or so.

And I just need to say for the record that a standard deviation on three data points (e.g., velocity for a three-shot group) is utterly and completely meaningless.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

 

[BrentD]

Thank you for that Public Service Announcement.

Seriously.

 

[Brian in Montana]

Utterly AND completely?

 

[BuckRut]

Listen to mister moneybags over here who apparently has the money and time to throw 20-30 rounds out there for every iteration of the load he's working.

 

[Deleted member 16014]

Preach.
Three shot groups or velocities are useful for some things, five useful for another, ten another...

 

[MThuntr]

Unless you're shooting precision, 3 and 5 shot info is more than sufficient for hunting. A trend is a trend and you'll quickly realize that even in a 3 shot group that an ES of 75 isn't worth messing with but one with a 15 ES is worth paying attention to. That is where many guys stop but many reloaders keep messing around and rarely do reloading threads get updated with the ad nauseum of tinkering.

If you want to spend your expensive components and burn up a barrel to be statistically significant then by all means go for it.

 

[Ben Lamb]

The nice thing about reloading is you can make it as technical and demanding as you want, getting the most out of each round, and then laying them on memory foam pillows so they aren't terribly jostled, removing a monkey butt hair of coating off of a kernel of powder, or you can throw 58 grains of IMR 4350 and a 165 grain TTSX and shoot under an inch consistently and call it good enough for gov't work.

It all depends upon the tightness of your whiteys.

 

[VikingsGuy]

is utterly and completely meaningless.

And this is an utter and completely meaningless overstatement.

As said by others - different needs/uses require different degrees of precision.

 

[Carbon]

Yep, three shots groups are utterly and completely meaningless to determine velocity.

I took a brand new custom 6.5 manbun witih handloads to the range yesterday. I shot four shots over the Labradar to zero at 100 yards. I plugged the initial velocity in my Shooter app and hit a five inch circle at 700 yards with the next shot. In total, I fired seventeen rounds and the average velocity between the first four shots and the total string increased 5 fps. The SD was 6.9 fps. I expect that the velocity will continue to rise for the first hundred shots or so.

I completely attribute it to the fourth shot, because the first three were utterly and completely meaningless!

On the other hand, good rifles, with good ammo, maybe, possibly, it could mean something.

Jim

 

[noharleyyet]

I'm new to reloading, three data points, TED Talk.

Welcome to HT tinkertalk...

 

[MThuntr]

Welcome to HT tinkertalk...

That's exactly right...reloading is a never ending tinker. New brass, new bullet, new powder, new primer all in an attempt to improve or fix. I just got 150 pieces of Peterson Brass for my 280ai that already shoots 1/2" groups for no valid reason except to tinker.

 

[noharleyyet]

That's exactly right...reloading is a never ending tinker. New brass, new bullet, new powder, new primer all in an attempt to improve or fix. I just got 150 pieces of Peterson Brass for my 280ai that already shoots 1/2" groups for no valid reason except to tinker.

Ben's memory foam/monkey butt hair comment nailed it...guilty.

 

[BuzzH]

I used to worry about it more than a I do now. I throw probably 90-95% of my powder charges, maybe weigh every 10th-20th just to double check. I used to weigh every charge...just didn't see the extra accuracy for all the extra work.

I found good solid platforms solve a lot of reloading/accuracy issues.

Have that and your biggest "worry" is what handload out of several that shoot awesome you want to use.

 

[44hunter45]

Ok curmudgeons, give the OP a break. His handle says "noob" in it, after all.

Good thing he didn't say he was working on 1000 yard loads for his 6.5 Manbun.

Statistics aside, time spent making (and firing) three shots beats hell out of working.

Mrs45 says we would all be Chris Kyle or Whitefeather if we shot as much as we talked and wrote about it.

If I measured the ratio of man cave hours to trigger hours I might get depressed. I'm not an ammo hoarder, I just like making the stuff. Daylight is for being out, nighttime is for handloading.

My thing is being completely anal about case prep, sorting brass by weight, making each round dimensionally exact, absolutely concentric. Then I go shoot an elk at 12 yards in the heavy timber with my .264 Win Mag.

BTW - I saw Alliant powder on the shelves in North Idaho yesterday. Signs that the good ole days of powder supply may be coming back around.

 

[noharleyyet]

I think dial and deliver has mitigated a degree of sphincter torque...and to think there was a time when many of us likened box ballistics to the holy grail.

 

[Deleted member 28227]

Preach.
Three shot groups or velocities are useful for some things, five useful for another, ten another...

Exactly... for creating a dope chart, where I zero at 200 and then hardly ever shoot a critter out past 250 3 rounds work great.

Now, as I'm considering sending my CDS dials... might take a few more shots.

 

[yakimanoob]

Careful readers will note that I didn't say 3-shot groups are meaningless. You can learn a lot with each bullet fired.

I'm just ranting against the gross misconceptions surrounding the idea of a standard deviation. The average, SD, and ES are statistics - i.e., they are numbers meant to communicate something about the distribution of the larger data set. But if you shoot a 3 shot group with velocities of 2678, 2675, and 2604, telling me the three velocities gives me a helluva lot more information than telling me an average of 2652, SD of 42 and ES of 74. On the other hand, if you shoot a box of 20 rds, I'll learn more from the avg SD and ES than I will from staring blankly at 20 different velocities.

The point is not that you need to spend the $$$$ shooting groups large enough to make the SD meaningful. Rather, I'm saying that in most groups shot for the purpose of load develpment, we're waisting our time thinking and talking about standard deviations.

By all means, keep doing ladder tests and shooting 3-shot groups. Just don't bother calculating the SD, because it's not telling you anything.

 

[44hunter45]

Trust me - We get it.

But nobody laughs when @Ben Lamb yells, " 25!"

 

[Addicting]

 

[mtmuley]

I just point my gun at stuff and kill it. mtmuley