Precision Reloading Supplies for Accurate Ammo

First and foremost, if you’re new or have limited experience reloading, remember to take your time and to always start below the maximum load. With practice, you can work up to more exacting performance by understanding how your firearm handles variations in ammunition. Consistency in reloading supplies and measurements are the keys to reloading ammo accurately.

Consistency Counts

For the avid shooter, striving for accuracy is a lot of fun because it gives you a reason to go shooting. Besides improving consistency, reloading for accuracy requires tracking how different loads perform in your guns. While you can purchase ammo; fine-tuning your reloading supplies and measurements to your specific rifle is how you obtain extreme accuracy. The right combination can turn a 1 minute of angle (MOA) rifle into a ½ MOA, or possibly a ¼ MOA rifle. A MOA is 1/60th of a degree. One MOA deviates about 1? per 100 yards (for accuracy - 1.047"). If you get a rifle down to ¼ MOA, you can expect accuracy of about 0.525 at 200 yards.

Reloading Supplies

Begin with your brass selection. It should be intuitive that the more uniform your brass is, the more consistent your final ammunition will be. You will improve accuracy by sorting your brass (and there is major savings in re-using your brass). Select and sort by weighing each case to keep them within ½ grain of the mean weight. There is an advantage to using fired brass because when fired, it expands to a best fit with your rifle’s chamber size. This also means you’ll need to do a minimum amount of resizing.

The first step of case preparation is cleaning the case. Many people tumble clean cases but polishing cases with steel wool or a plastic scouring pad is so much faster. Next, square up the primer pockets for an even depth and deburr the flash holes. Competition resizing dies should be among your reloading supplies for accuracy.

Primer and powder come next. Most hand-loading manuals have the correct combination of primer and powder load to achieve the accuracy and velocity you want. Unless you’ve been reloading for accuracy for a while, begin with minimum loads. It might not be what works best with your rifle but this is the place to start. Use a hand primer to firmly and consistently seat the primers. Primer depth has a significant effect on igniting the powder. For consistency, powder charges should vary by no more than one-tenth of a grain.

Take notes on each step you take and keep reloaded ammo separate from any other ammo. Further, take notes on the performance of the reloading batch and any variation that you try. It is good practice to only change one variable per batch so that you know exactly how that change affected accuracy.

If for any reason you are not satisfied with the accuracy, try a different seating depth. Test that before making other changes. Then try a different bullet and if the results still are not satisfactory, try a different primer. The last variable to change is usually the powder. When component changes improves accuracy, keep that variable constant while changing other variables as you dial in your recipe for the best accuracy.