bladeracer wrote:Unless you are shooting professionally, why would you put a price on your time?
Do you charge yourself by the hour to go and kick a ball in the park, or spend a few hours on a beach?
If you are shooting for pleasure, the shooting _is_ the value. Reloading your own ammo just adds to the time you spend shooting.
If you've ever built your own engine you would know the pleasure that comes every time you fire it up, even years later, I find reloading to give that same sort of pleasure. Being a part of the machine rather than simply an end user.
I do build engines, and I very much enjoy rocking up to the drags in my 11-second Charger and saying "I built that".
But I don't fool myself that it cost nothing in time and that it was pure pleasure. Never mind the fact that learning how to build that engine in the first place took time and money . . .
I didn't take time off work to build that engine. Would you take time off work to reload?
So it all comes down to how much you value your free time.
In the above example, if I was a lawyer earning $300 an hour and had no idea how to build engines, then I'm better off earning $300 an hour and paying someone $50 an hour to build something for me.
In terms of reloading, you're competing with a machine that reloads thousands of rounds an hour or whatever at fractions of a cent per round (energy and tooling cost).
If you're going to spend hours of your time cleaning, weighing and trimming cases, deburring flash holes and uniforming primer pockets, depriming, sizing, neck turning, weighing charges, loading, seating and checking OAL and concentricity, then you're fooling yourself by saying you're "Saving money".
You're not - it's a false economy.
Arguing that it's time well spent because you enjoy it or that it's part of your hobby does not address the fact that you really haven't saved anything in fiscal terms, because if you spent that time earning money and buying factory ammo, you'd be way ahead.
I reload because yes, I do (in some masochistic way) enjoy the process, and because I get pleasure and reward from loading consistent and accurate ammo that's reflected in my scores at the target range.
But I certainly don't reload to save money. And I always have to balance time spent reloading against what other pleasurable activities I could be doing in that same time.
It's your time - spend it how you will.
The laws of physics do not apply to politics.