Oct 11, 2018 3 min read

Now the weather is finally starting to feel like fall. This leads me to want to write about deer hunting. But the articles over the last two weeks have been about reloading and I would like to finish that up.

I told you of some of the benefits and weaknesses of taking up this lifetime hobby. Most shooters learn to reload to improve the accuracy of their loads and not for economic reasons.

This part of the story is about the factory ammo, availability and quality. Most mailers of ammo do a remarkable job of stocking sporting goods stores with ammo that is safe to shoot but works in many various rifles. The production of factory ammo must be done with consideration for the weakest of rifles made in that particular chambering. Therefore, in many cases the ammo is produced to stay within the bounds of an old design that is not strong by today’s standards.

Usually the hand loads will shoot more accurately than the ones offered by the sporting goods stores. First, the hand load is tailored for that individual rifle. If the casing was shot from that rifle, it now fits that chamber. Some shooters consider that an aide to accuracy.

Neal Jones of Saegertown says case preparation is more important than being careful and weighing to within 1/10 of a grain of powder. This means checking the capacity of each case and making sure each was close to the same length.

In the case of the bench rest shooter, everything is important. They also check flash holes and even them up. To them, quality brass is important. In reality, few of us compete in bench rest matches. We do try to emulate their shooting so is there a shooter or reloader alive who hasn’t carried a target around with him a week later? I must confess to doing just that. But is that what his rifle averages? I doubt it.

Practical accuracy is the last subject on the list. Chasing such accuracy as shooting one hole groups at 100 yards is impractical when shooting a 7 pound deer rifle. We might want such a group but the deer rifle is just not built to make getting them easy.

To save money and time, the wise person with his 30-06 should be happy with a group measuring around one inch. If the shooter does his part such a group will be adequate to bring down a deer or bear at reasonable ranges. If the rifle is capable of one inch groups at 100 yards, regardless of what you hear, the miss is the fault of the shooter and not the group.

Whatever your reasons for reloading, it is a great hobby and one that teaches much about cartridges, performance and ballistics. I hope it has been informative.

George Block writes a weekly Sunday column for the Observer-Reporter