Are you the type of person who prefers attempting to make homemade Coca Cola according to the age-old apothecary recipe, rather than just giving in to the corporate overlords and making them even richer by buying a bottle from the store?
No matter how much your wife screams at you for ruining the Formica kitchen island with sugary water, semi-legal coke leaves, and leftover ingredients again, you know that no homemade concoction is going to make itself and that crafting takes time and effort.
Do you also like shooting at objects and animals? (And hopefully not as much at humans?)
Well, if the answer is ‘YES’ to both of these, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, we will talk about how to arm yourself with plenty of ammunition while expending as little of your hard-earned buck as possible.
Have you got what it takes?
Makin’ big caliber ammo ain’t no child’s play!
Hope you got your big boy knickers on for a rollercoaster of gunpowder, dusty workshop air, and sheer manliness, unadulterated by the big ammo interests!
(A quick note: If you’re a casual shooter, we will advise you to just buy a couple of cartridges here and there, but that’s beside the point.)
Without further ado, here are our five cents about ammo reloading.
What is reloading ammo?
If you’ve ever played Fallout: New Vegas, you know the feeling of immense joy and satisfaction of gathering bullet casings after a firefight just so you can repurpose them and turn a heap of seemingly useless metal into another batch of Super Mutant-killing armor-penetrating bullets.
The western style of the game just adds to the feeling of frontiersman ship that you cannot experience in the real world anymore.
Anyway, gaming aside, the feeling of freedom and the joy of practicing your hunting skills, or even placing a couple of shots on a distant unfortunate paper target in your backyard – is something that is well-worth the hassle of weapon maintenance and ammo acquisition.
Now, when it comes to weapon maintenance, keeping your guns clean and safely out of reach of kids and other people is essential, whether you’re a professional hunter, or a casual gun-owner who likes to engage in some target practice every now and again.
Regarding ammo acquisition, however, you have a couple of options of how to obtain ammunition.
As a general rule of thumb, the amount of ammo you use should inform you of whether or not you should reload your old rounds and get the table and the machines and everything, or simply purchase a couple of boxes of 5.56mm from natchez reloading supplies or a similar online store.
If you hunt professionally, or you simply use a lot of rounds in your shooting practice, reloading ammo can be a great way to reduce costs and secure for yourself a certain degree of ammo-making self-sufficiency.
On the other hand, as a casual user who only likes to place a couple of shots at the center of a bunch of concentric circles printed on a piece of paper here and there, the process of reloading might even consume more time and money than if you simply bought some supplies from a gun store.
In the passages below, we will talk about the pros and cons of ammo reloading, so you can have a better idea of what approach to pursue if you’re still not sure.
Benefits of Reloading Ammo
Reloading ammo requires a steady hand, a good eye to detect defects, and plenty of patience for performing a repetitive task with a bunch of small, fidgety tools. A kind of a potentially annoying situation for a person with large hands and not much patience to get all touchy-feely with a bunch of gunpowder, small pistol primers, and other small-scale objects and lever-operated contraptions.
That said, if you don’t mind repetition and find creating copious amounts of the same thing – reloading ammo can be a great pastime for a gun aficionado.
Here are some of the more notable benefits of reloading ammo at home.
Saving Money
If you own a machine gun and like to use it profusely, or you own just one Glock but you’re discharging it around the clock, reloading ammo can be a great way to reduce what would otherwise be steep ammunition costs.
Depending on the type of ammo you’re reloading, its availability on the market, and its overall price, you can save up to and more than 50% of what you would have spent purchasing boxes of ammunition from a gun store.
To be fair, reloading ammo does mean spending some money up front on the reloading equipment. Here are some of the pieces of equipment necessary to set up a little private ammo-reloading lab in your garage or basement:
- Reloading brass,
- Reloading bullet cases,
- Reloading case prep tools,
- Reloading dies, as well as
- … a number of other apparatuses and ingredients including powder, presses, primers, scales & measures, wads, and other accessories.
Better Performance
This entry is kind of a two-way street, to be entirely fair. A lot about it depends on just how handy you are with the tools and how well you know your powder mixtures, primers, casing shapes, and other nuances of concocting a finished bullet.
Factory ammunition will typically be as efficient as the specifications on the box say. This makes them fairly reliable and leaves little to no room for error.
If you make your own bullets, on the other hand, you can either aim to make them as close to the factory version as possible, or aim to improve on the initial design by adding a slightly more powerful mixture of powder, for example.
The potential downside, of course, is that you may fail miserably and end up ruining your weapon’s barrel, or even hurting yourself during a routine test firing.
If you want to attempt to enhance an already-existing type of bullet, the word of advice is to start with minute changes and work your way up to more complex designs as you gain more experience.
No Ammo Shortage Issues
It’s probably happened to you already once or twice.
It’s the height of the hunting season, everyone’s out to get a canard, and you’ve just run out of ammo. You head to the nearest gun store and lo and behold – the canard-killing rounds stocks are depleted. Now you either have to order ammo online, get in your car and drive to the other county, or simply wait for the next shipment by the time of which all the ducks are either dead or flown away.
Making your own ammo prevents this annoying turn of events.
Sure, sitting by the reloading press and completing the old repetitive task over and over again can be boring. But once you enter the hunting area armed to the teeth like Rambo, high on your own supply in terms of the number of bullets you can muster for the upcoming hunting expedition – you’ll see that all the lever-pressing was worth it.
Downsides of Reloading Ammo
Even though we’ve probably already hinted at some of the most immediately visible downsides of ammo reloading, here’s a section where we will explain in depth why such a practice may not be as useful as you thought initially.
(Again, this mostly goes for the folks who engage in hunting or shooting, in general, more casually and less often.)
Time Investment
Ammo reloading is not nuclear science and anyone can pull it off with some practice.
That said, there is a rather obvious bottleneck when it comes to the whole reloading idea. It takes time and there’s no way around it.
Well, a way around it would be to obtain better equipment, so if you have the means to get better presses and other tools, that will surely shave off a couple of hours from your monthly reloading work hours.
Lots of Space Required
In terms of how much space you need to reload ammunition, the answer is – not much at all.
That said, not having much space to work with will inevitably mean spending more time making finished bullets. There is a sort of funny space-time continuum related to reloading ammo – both of these dimensions play a major role in how fast you can churn out these little projectiles.
The more space you have to work with, and the better equipment you have to fill it with, the faster you can complete reloading ammo.
Think of it as a restaurant kitchen and the prospect of dishwashing after a heavy shift. You can do the job with just one sink, but having three so you can scrub the excess food in one, lather the dishes in the other, and rinse in the third will make the entire process considerably faster and more efficient.
Conclusion
All in all, whether you like to shoot deer, ducks, boars, bears, badgers, skunks, moose, or indeed the elusive Malay chicken, being able to create your own ammo from scratch is a superpower that you don’t want to miss out on.
For a more casual visitor of shooting ranges, simply buying a couple of cases of your favorite ammo might be the better course of action.
The bottom line is, if you have a constant need for high-quality ammo, making it yourself would probably be the best way to ensure you’ll never run out of it when you need it the most.
