Home Forums Reloading Big Game Rifles Who uses an ogive measurey thingy?

I'm wondering if I'm doing it wrong. Or better yet, if I could be reloading more right.

When I measure OAL I measure from the tip of the bullet. Accubonds and BTs aren't much of an issue because they're all really close to each other in length. Spin the seater up or down, measure, bingo.

Partitions and VLDs aren't quite so uniform. I sort through bullets to find one of predetermined length and use it as the representative bullet, so to speak. Spin the seater, find the right length, bingo.

But I've read about measuring from the ogive, since that doesn't change, while the tip can be off for a variety of reasons. So the question is, how many of you measure from the ogive, and how do you do it? And who just measures a bullet and calls it good?



P

Where the tip of the bullet sits in relation to the lands is of little consequence.

Where the ogive sits in relationship to the lands is of great consequence

My comparator is the steel dial caliper kept on my loading bench. When I want to compare ogives on different bullets, I lock the caliper to halfway between bore and groove diameter for the caliber (as an example, .304 for .30 caliber) then use the caliper's jaws to scribe a line around a bullet at that diameter. This also makes finding a similar seating depth for different brands of bullets easy.

I found that comparing VLDs to BTs and partitions had a different length to lands on the VLDs, which doesnt make sense to me. I repeated several times with an "ogive measurey thingy" that EDtoomanyletters lent me, and it does appear that distance to lands is shorter on the VLDs (should be the same for any bullet of same caliber right?)
I even thought about the longer VLDs bottoming out on the measurey thingy but it would make it longer