I am having trouble now locating expert articles on the issue, but I heard that some Americans allegedly save money by refilling ammo after shooting at the gun range. That makes me wonder, if ammo is made in vast quantities using optimally productive technology, how come an assembled cartridge ends up costing so much more than its constituent parts (except for the shell that gets reused) that it makes sense to do manual refill?
Is there a big government tax on ammo involved? Or are ammo manufacturers “taxing” the gun owners through exorbitant pricing all by themselves? Or what is going on?
Because most people are lazy; they don’t want to buy equipment, learn the techniques, and take the time to load their own ammo. they’re willing to pay the price that’s currently being asked by manufacturers, and that’s why the price is what it is.
The case is usually the most expensive part of a “store bought” round, so being able to reuse them does help quite a lot on the economic end of things. But most of the hand-reloaders I’ve known basically do it for fun without particular regard for whether it’s actually saving them money or not.
It’s the same with any manufactured good; the cost is equal to the components parts + labour + whatever the manufacturers feel people are willing to charge.
You can save money by putting together a lot of things from the basic components/ingrediants rather than buying them ready built after all (bikes, PCs, toolkits, baked goods, booze).
That said, I don’t like the way people describe this as consumers being lazy; I can bake my own cakes (which I do for fun) and assemble my own PC (which saved me a fair amount of money). My father cannot, however he knows full well how to assemble his own bike (which saved him a lot of money indeed) and how to assemble compound and recurve bows (which he does for a living) which I cannot do.
Fair enough. I could have left that phrase off, but the remainder of my previous post is true: most people don’t want to load their ammo and are willing to pay more for someone else - in this case, someone with an ammo-producing factory - to do it for them.
I did the math once several years ago - if you buy budget ammo, especially military surplus, it’s very hard to make an economic case for reloading. Especially if you place a value greater than $0 on your time.
If you buy high end target ammo, reloading can make sense economically. And at the very high end, people reload to get the most accurate ammo possible for their particular rifle. I’ve seen guys at the range with 4 different batches of handloaded ammo, taking notes on each one to see which gave the best results.
I don’t think there’s any laziness involved though - if you’ve get a set amount of time to give to your hobby, what’s lazy about deciding to spend more money & spend more time doing the fun part? I helped a friend do a batch one time - I found it to be mind numbing drudgery, with the added excitement that a single mistake could kill you at the range.
It really depends on the ammo. If you’re shooting a .22, ammo is cheap and not worth the time to reload. Even 9mm rounds are fairly inexpensive. But, when you start getting into the high power and larger caliber rifles, it can make economic sense.
I suspect most people do it because they enjoy doing it or because they want to customize their rounds.
I am not into guns, but have family and friends that are. if you do a lot of shooting of larger caliber, the economics are there. You do need to spread the cost of the equipment over many rounds.
Considering the increase in the cost of hulls and lead, reloading can save a lot of money. My dad bought a reloading press about 15 years ago, and we have acquired quite a few more pieces over last few years. While remodeling a house, in a shed in the back was a complete reloading setup, including a lead melting and bullet casting set. And about 150 lb of lead.
If you cast your own lead bullets using free materials, and have shell casings you saved from the last time you went out shooting at the range, the cost to reload is simply a primer, a small amount of powder, and a little time. Much cheaper than a new box of decent ammo.
This is exactly it. The more rare the round, the more it will cost from the factory due to scarcity. 9mm is very popular so they have economies of scale. not so for something like .338 Lapua or .500 S&W Magnum. Reloading those rounds makes good sense and allows you to shoot more of them should you have a masochistic streak and want to.
Also, customization is a big deal. The factory, for liability purposes, very rarely loads rounds to the SAAMI limits. If you want to maximize performance you typically have to do it yourself. For other things, like “wildcat” rounds, you have to do it yourself because the factory won’t run off a few cases of your experiment, it’s too cost-prohibitive.
If you do the research, you’ll find that you can load virtually anything much more cheaply, to the point that your reloading equipment can pay for itself fairly quickly. For some rounds, like the aforementioned 9mm, the savings is negligible so it may not be worth it to you. For the more rare rounds, the cost savings can be huge, with some ammunition coming from the factory at around $2.00 a shot or more (.700 Nitro Express, an absolutely ridiculous and exceptionally rare round, typically sells for around $80 a shot, and something as common as .50 Action Express, used in the famed Desert Eagle, costs $1.80 or so a shot). You can beat that with ease simply by getting the parts and doing it yourself.
do professional snipers load their ammo (or have somebody else load it) by hand for their rifle? Or do they have a more industrially organized way of obtaining the optimal rounds? Or is this sort of precision simply a non-issue on the battlefield as opposed to target shooting?
I see that many people say that certain varieties of ammo are priced so that “manual” reloading makes sense, whether due to the cost of the case or to the exorbitant markup or whatever. Well, so if this industry has such a low entry barrier that lots of men just do it fun, why don’t we see evolution of more professional ammo reloading companies that would use hired labor and equipment that may trend towards, if not truly converge, with the sort of equipment that is used by the ammo manufacturers? So let’s say you would shoot at the range, then sell the spent cases to the reloading company and buy new ammo at a lower price.
I am not a member of the armed forces, nor an LEO, but I do have an interest in the subject. My understanding is that most U.S. military and LEO snipers use premium off-the-shelf 7.62 x 51 mm or .308 Winchester cartridges such as the M118LR or Federal Gold Match. Other ammunition companies, like Black Hills, might get in on the act too. These cartridges have adequate accuracy (~<0.75 MOA), while still having the reliability of factory-made ammunition. They also avoid the headache of custom-loading enough ammunition to keep their unit in proficiency. (And elite marksmen will absolutely burn through ammunition—and barrels—in the course of maintaining proficiency.)
Of course, who knows what more elite units do? (E.g., SFOD 1-D, HRT, DevGru, Secret Service Counter-snipers, etc…). Perhaps they have the $$$, time, and staffing to allow working up a custom load for each rifle and manufacturing thousands of rounds of said load, in order to gain another 0.5 MOA?
An interesting and longwinded post on the work that goes into developing a serious hobbyists 1000 yd load may be found here. Some of the work that long range target shooters go through to develop a load can be seen at this article, particularly the “Tips from Brad Sauve, 2004 F-TR Nat’l Champion” section. Google for “benchresting” if you want to see how anal-retentive one can get in reloading.
I have never shot at 1000 yrds, but I have reloaded and the benefits and risks (and tedium!) are much as muldoonthief describes. For the economics of reloading, I again point to another post from Chris Byrne. Scroll down to the “Shots Per Dollar, or Dollars Per Shot?” section, as the whole post goes into the economics of building various levels of long range target rifles.
These folks can simply declare a rifle that does not shoot a standard load well inactivate and replace it. For the military it avoids logistical problems,leis avoid liBlity issues
wikipedia article on Handloading - Wikipedia (yay, so that’s the term of art) says that the bullet is the most expensive part of a reloaded round, and hence presumably the 2nd most expensive part of a round after the case.
So, when doing target shooting and trying to save money, could the range be so set up that bullets would survive the gunshot and be capable of recycling in reloaded rounds? Is the bullet damaged by the gunshot itself or by the circumstances of its landing at the target section of the range?
The bullet gets grooves cut into it by the rifling of the barrel. No way to reuse it. At best, you can salvage the lead and recast it into new bullets.
Also what handloaders are doing when they tweak a load is making small changes in the amount of time the bullet is in the barrel so that the bullet leaves the vibrating barrel at the peak of it’s motion when the velocity is near zero, rather than at a zero crossing when the barrel’s velocity is the highest. This minimizes the change in point of impact due to inevitable (even smaller) velocity variations.
Browning came up with an adjustable weight on the end of the barrel (B.O.S.S.) so you can tune the resonance of the barrel to achieve the same end with factory loaded ammo.