by vmaxaust » 09 Sep 2018, 6:50 am
Yes mate like i said i weigh my charges to the granule (still doesnt seem to help me much) but it can be done.
Sorry to go against the grain. I bought Gempro, Frankford Arsenel, RCBS and a few other digital scales over the years. NEVER found one that doesn't drift. Of all I've bought and used the RCBS was the most consistent and drifted least. I had an RCBS beam balance to verify results from every scale over the years. They were all within a tenth of a grain with the Gempro showing 2 decimal points for even more precision. The Gempro unfortunately died after only 3 months use and I was not happy so my final and current scale is the RCBS which has been the most consistent, lowest drifting scale and as accurate as I feel I need.
I still only load on the Hornady LNL Progressive presses using the case activated powder drop. I have a powder drop for each calibre and they perform flawlessly. Every time a new loading session happens I prime a case, zero the primed case on my scale and then drop up to 10 loads into it and weigh them. You have to sometimes do minor adjustments to the powder drop to come back to the prescribed load required. In other words if I leave the powder drop set on say 36.2gr for my 303's when I go to load nine out of ten times it will drop within one tenth of this figure. One step I find important is to fill the powder drop to at least 3/4, toss the powder up and down while holding the powder drop in my hand to settle it and then manually operated the drop about 15 times into the powder bottle so it has a chance to settle and fill all voids.
For me this process gives me very consistent powder loads. I've spent much time verifying this by putting my zeroed, primed test cases and running them through the case activated drop...weigh the load, properly empty the case, run it through again and again to see the variation with at least 50 drops per calibre. The worst I've had was .2gr and that was in my 45ACP and .223 rifle powder drops. I pulled the drops apart, cleaned them thoroughly and reset the dimensions Hornady provides and they came good to vary no more than .1gr each time I use them.
I realise .1gr is not acceptable to many who are benchrest or accuracy people but for me the chronographed results are pretty consistent and since I'm not a high precision rifle shooter I don't care. For my handgun calibres, the accuracy my guns can shoot is amazing on a Ransom rest with my loads. In my hands and with my old eyes the results are reasonable but nothing brilliant so measuring powder manually for me would never happen unless I had a specific important reason.