By Duane Thomas
The progressive reloading machine is, in essence, a little mini-ammunition factory, that completes every process necessary to take empty shell casings and other components and put them together into rounds of loaded ammunition. One of those processes is adding a precise amount of gunpowder into every casing.
We will leave aside the actual mechanism on the machine used to adjust powder charge weight up or down, since that can vary between different companies’ machines, and focus instead on the basic approach we take to get our powder charge weight exactly where we want it.
Okay, we have our powder reservoir filled with our chosen powder. We’ve checked a load manual (or multiple load manuals) and/or our own records of prior loads, we know the charge weight we want for the load we’re building. We have our powder scale waiting to do its duty. We’re ready to set our powder charge.
So, we run an empty casing up into the die at the machine’s powder drop station.
We remove that casing from the machine and dump the powder back into the reservoir. Do this 10 times to settle the powder in the reservoir.
Now, we carefully dump the powder in the casing out into the powder pan on the scale’s platen. If it’s a digital scale, it tells us exactly what is the charge weight. If it’s a balance-beam scale, it tells us whether the powder charge is light or heavy relative to what we want.
At this point, we dump that powder out of the powder pan back into the powder reservoir.
We set the empty powder pan back onto the scale’s platen.
Based on what our scale told us, we adjust out powder charge drop weight either up or down.
Since we dumped the powder out of the casing to weigh the powder charge, the casing is now empty. We place the casing back into the machine at the powder drop station, we cycle the handle, run the casing up, drop another powder charge, dump that one out into the scale’s powder pan, see what the scale says now, dump the powder in the pan back into the powder reservoir.
We just keep doing that, as many times as it takes, until the scale tells us we have exactly the powder charge we want. Once the charge is correct, dump 10 charges into the pan. Weigh the total, then divide by 10. This tells you what to expect.
