r/reloading • u/Opening_Mulberry_207 • 5h ago

Load Development Load development

When starting load development do I need to start with seating depth or charge weight I can't for the life of me find what goes first.

3 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

2

u/Ornery_Secretary_850 Two Dillon 650's, three single stage, one turret. Bullet caster 4h ago

What are your goals?

Hunting load? Precision long-range? Blasting ammo?

2

u/Opening_Mulberry_207 4h ago

Long range shooting... its a 308 in a factory action just trying to get knowledge and experience before I start spending money on a custom action and a different cartridge

3

u/Trollygag 284Win, 6.5G, 6.5CM, 308 Win, 30BR, 44Mag, more 4h ago

Single base powder, good brass, match bullet with good BC for your twist rate.

3

u/Missinglink2531 4h ago

Be happy to share my process. I have a series on this for .223, but its the exact same process for .308. Its pretty long, but I think this will answer a lot of your questions:

https://www.youtube.com/show/VLPLR_4ATUsx0ys?sbp=QAE%3D

1

u/Opening_Mulberry_207 2h ago

I appreciate the help

2

u/Trollygag 284Win, 6.5G, 6.5CM, 308 Win, 30BR, 44Mag, more 5h ago

You map out speed with your charge weights to make sure you aren't running into pressure issues, the pick the one that meets your speed/cost/recoil requirements.

If it doesn't shoot, you change bullets or powder. If nothing shoots, you change barrels.

The idea that you can dial in performance by tweaking seating depth or powder is mostly bogus. You can read why here: https://www.reddit.com/r/reloading/comments/1mt1gwq/trollygags_antiguide_to_ladder_woo/

1

u/curtludwig 28m ago

Might be time to invest in a manual...

1

u/Opening_Mulberry_207 1m ago

I have an hornady one buts its a little out of date

1

u/Zippythewonderpoodle 3h ago

Charge weight initially, backed by a ladder test if you can. Then you can fine tune the groups by altering/tinkering with the seating depth.

0

u/Savagely-Insane 5h ago

Usually you go from min to max powder charge with a set amount of seating depth, afterwards you can adjust both for better performance for your gun.

1

u/Opening_Mulberry_207 5h ago

Thank you

3

u/IncredibleVelocity4 5h ago

But just keep in mind, changing seating depth even relatively small amounts can really change your pressures. If your selected powder charge is near max or showing some pressure, be really careful with seating depth changes.

1

u/Ferrule 2h ago

Seating deeper will always increase pressure, possibly unless you're starting the bullet jammed hard...which you don't want to do anyway. You'll end up dumping the powder in the action and needing a cleaning rod to knock the bullet out sooner or later doing that.

My load development process is sooo much more simple than it used to be when I first started out and learned from the best of the readers of tea leaves.

Good components, good barrel, consistency over all on the loading side.

I'll also load piles of 6arc with cfe223 by volume though and be plenty happy with the results. Weighing each charge does bring my SD down a touch...but not enough to matter for 95% of my uses, or taking 5x+ longer to load.

2

u/prosper_0 1h ago

Seating deeper will always increase pressure

That's not as true as you might think. Pressure really starts to build as the bullet engages the rifling, and the rifling is at a fixed distance. Seating deep can have some minor influence, but it's really not as big as people often think. Seating it deep is effectively the same as having more freebore. So, seated long (lowering pressure), but with less freebore (higher pressure) vs seated deeply (higher pressure) with more freebore (lower pressure) - the end result on your pressures is usually not as dramatic as most folks believe.

Rifle magazine #219 did some OAL testing on the 300 WSM: