Home Forums Reloading Big Game Rifles Powder Measuring

This, Yes!

I started reloading in 1966, at age 11. A friend's father taught me. Before I was 12, I had saved my money and bought an RCBS Rockchucker and Uniflow powder measure, Ohaus 10-10 powder scale, set of Lee powder dippers, Ohaus powder trickler, RCBS .45 ACP and .303 British die sets, Speer and Lyman loading manuals, and the other tools and supplies to start reloading myself. Dad's only advice or admonition was "pay attention to what you're doing and don't blow yourself up." I still have every bit of that to this day and, other than those manuals and a case lube pad, still use every bit of it.

Anyway, my friend's father had a Lyman powder measure that had a little "knocker" mounted on its side and when loading any of the stick powders of the day, you HAD to use that knocker to keep it from bridging and/or having any hope of consistent charge weights. When I started using my new Uniflow, I learned to do a double bump at the top and bottom of each up-stroke and down-stroke when using stick powders, but out of habit I do it for all powders. BUT, I also figured out to throw my charges a few tenths light into the scale pan and trickle them up to proper weight when using stick or coarse powders. I sometimes "trickled" out of one of the Lee powder dippers instead of the trickler.

I also experienced charge weight drift as the amount of powder in the measure went down, which was another good reason to throw light and trickle up. Sometime in the late 60's, I saw an article or tip in a magazine that described putting a baffle in the bottom of the powder measure hopper, so I made one out of the lid of a Campbell's soup can, and it worked really well. While it stopped most of the charge weight drift, it did not prevent heavy charges when the stick powder would "crunch".

I do NOT move the handle slow and gentle, but I don't slam it either. It's important to develop a very consistent cadence with the measure. I start with the handle in the dump position, raise it up smoothly but not slowly, do a quick but not hard double-bump at the end of the stroke, pause about a second, and move the handle down at same speed with another double bump at the bottom.

The double bump at the top of the stroke does two things: 1) it helps the powder chamber fill consistently, and 2) it helps to keep the powder in the hopper settled more consistently. At the bottom of the stroke, the double bump helps reduce powder bridging.

I load all of my big game hunting ammo on my Rockchucker or an upgraded Forster Co-ax press, using the Uniflow measure. I also have a couple of Dillons that I use for volumes of anything over 100 rounds and only use fine or ball powders in the Dillon measures on them. Whatever I'm loading on, I try to keep the charge weights to +/- 0.1 gr for critical stuff and +/- 0.2 gr for less critical stuff.

One thing I find interesting is the number of fellow tricklers responding. I've been here at the 'Fire for over 20 years, and I can say that the early campers thought a trickler was the most useless piece of kit ever devised.


Truth there. That's why I brought it up to y'all. Even though there are plenty of flyers on this forum, the groupings have remained consistently tight and near the target over the years.


So okay, here is a stumper for y'all. Let's go all the way back to the beginning of this. I have an RCBS Rock Chucker Master Kit, and starting at square one. I start to see a lot of variation in my charge weights and add the baffle to the Uniflow. I still get variations, and there is a fairly steady increase in weight. For a while before I decided to trickle up, I'd weigh every 5th charge and be tweaking the weight back down almost every test. It became enough that I eventually decided to resort to throwing light and trickling up.

Where was that variation coming from? It never weighed lower than expected, always higher. The problem continued into my days as an inveterate trickler. I'd get one charge that was spot on and then screw in the barrel a tweak to get it back down below .2 grans under target. Throughout all this, I was mostly messing with stick powders. The most common was H4895.

I played around with different things to get less drift, I came up making a funnel out of aluminum with the spout stopping 3/4 way down the hopper. This works to keep constant pressure in the hopper i also use a baffle, This set up will hold 1 pound of powder and when reloading volume when powder stops coming out of funnel i refill, the funnel spout is .300 hole. This is what I came up with trying to fix drift and it works very well with stick powder, with ball powder it's dead not on. I made alot of funnels for friends and they all been happy with the results, they keep telling me I should start selling them.

I think there's something to be said about accepting the shortcomings and margins of error in any given mechanical device, and developing methods that circumvent those shortcomings efficiently enough to get the outcome desired.

Chargemasters and the like wouldn't exist if our powder measures performed precisely every time. That's where technology has taken us so far to counteract the shortcomings and margins of error.

At my bench I use only stick powders in my rifle cartridges. I'm OCD enough to want a precisely weighed charge in every load. I'm also cheap enough to steer clear of things like a Chargemaster. So, to get what I want I trade fast/convenient for time/effort, and trickle up.

I long ago accepted that a Uniflow measure is going to be only so accurate with stick powders, ie shortcomings and margins of error, and not much I could worry about would tighten things up. So I accepted the fact that I needed to become accustomed to how light a charge I needed to throw, to have room to trickle up to the correct charge, without constantly friggin' with the measure. How much depended on the powder, and I never put any more energy into it than that. Just do it.

To alleviate the always mundane task of manually twisting the trickler I built a powered trickler that requires only a push of a button to rotate the tube and dispense the remainder of the charge. Even that has its own shortcomings and margins of error, but it's exponentially faster and less mundane than the old manual way.

So now, I can set my uniflow for a touch lighter thrown charge and cover all bases that the uniflow is lacking on, because the power trickler makes up for it in less time/effort. I used to dread running through 200 or 300 rounds of match/practice ammo every month, just because I hated the powder measuring process. Now I can hate each step equally. Lol.

You can see it sitting in the hopper.

Mine I made is slightly flatter angle, and only one notch.

Might be the difference.

I thought about making one like you did, but it was cheap, so I said screw it, just go ahead and buy it.

My measures don’t drift like shaman is describing. Maybe the difference is I run 20+ charges and thrown them back in the hopper before I start charging cases in the loading block

I used to use the uniflow for stick powders but it was frustrating and I would re-throw a lot of charges. Now I use the uniflow with ball and lee perfect for stick. The lee works much much better.

I run the handles slow and smooth, and I use baffles. I don’t weigh charges every 5-10 like folks describe, I do a visual check to verify the powder height looks correct in the case.

I stopped trickling/weighing powders when I verified with 20 rounds groups at 600yd thrown vs weighed with RL16 and couldn’t tell the difference. I’ve putting together a rifle that will run H1000 which has longer “sticks” so I’ll re-run the test with that and I hope I don’t have to resort to trickling. I really enjoy not having to weigh charges

There's a piece of old school technology that mitigates a lot of what I see being discussed here. It's the old Belding&Mull measure. (Google it if you care to see what it looks like. I'm too lazy to go through the rigamarole of making a pic of mine.) It works via a side-to-side moving chamber which dispenses into a separate adjustable charge tube. Shearing action with big fat stick powder granules remains an issue but the beauty of it lies in the absolute constant powder level in the dispensing chamber. It's a device that's been around for most of a century now and is the darling of a lot of knowledgeable handloaders to this day. I like mine so much I acquired an identical spare one as backup even though my first one's still going strong 40+ years on. The only powders I revert to throwing light and trickling up are the really coarse ones like 4831 and 4759. The rest just go straight into the case and damned if I can tell any significant difference in accuracy over weighed charges.

For outdoor use, breech seating single shot target rifles at the bench, I have become a fanboy of the Harrell measure. Aside from its uncanny precision when dropping charges of fine grained powders like 4227 (something that I could just as easily do with the B&M outdoors), its claim to fame is its precisely repeatable micrometer adjustments which are handy for jockeying loads when dealing with changing shooting conditions - trust the micrometer, and forego the scale which can get dicey if there's wind blowing.

There's that too. I use a lot of H4895 and it is one of the most forgiving powders I know. Sometimes you cannot really tell a difference of .5 grain as far a where the bullet hits. Still, I wanted to be as accurate as possible.

Remember, I'm the guy who escaped from Planet 4 MOA. I tried everything I could to minimize my groups, and one of the first things I did was try and get as accurate as I could throwing charges. This was one of my least productive rabbit holes, but it did give me good discipline in charging cases.

I use a similar system, but bought a commercial electric trickler. This combined with setting my Harrell's a .1 or .2 short is relatively quick. I really like using my "tuned" 10-10 and fixed the "parallax" by incorporating a camera to bring the scale to eye level:



Can see the impact of a single kernel of stick powder.

Is your rifle, optic, target and course of fire such that you can also provably see it on target?

Nice

Isn't he talking about the camera view on his scale?

^^^

THIS!

I know the comment was about seeing it on the scale. My question was about the relevance of that as it applies to the target.

Sometimes good serious and throwing to the kernel make a fella feel better! Nothing wrong with that.

My question is also the relevance. A 24 grain load would have 240 tenths what is the difference between 239 tenths or 241 tenths. Scale accuracy of +-.1. Personally I have never had a rifle accurate enough to discern .1 grains powder variation on target.

or shooter

If a load is well developed, then a number of other ducks need to be in a row before +/- a tenth means much at all.