Weighing bullets

While it was raining this afternoon I weighed bullets. For those of you who might wonder why, Junior put together a good tutorial over at Castbullet.

I buy bulk bullets when I can. These bullets may come from one of a variety of sources, but this last time I bought a bunch of bullets that were listed as Mil-Spec Match bullets, from Widener's. These are sold as 168 grain, .308 match bullets. There is no manufacturer listed, so they might have been manufactured by one of several bullet makers, either domestically or from overseas.

More particularly, they may not weigh exactly 168 grains. While this doesn't make much difference to the military (hence the mil-spec designation) it matters to me. I want to know the weight of my bullets, within a set of standard parameters. So, I sort them into like-weight groups and store them in those groups.

Reloading, or handloading for the purists, is about reducing variables. Sometimes we get very particular about variables. While I'm not loading my ammo for the benchrest game, it helps my confidence in each individual round of ammunition if I know it's as closely alike to the round next to it as I can make it.

So, I weighed a batch of 30 to get some numbers. My batch of 30, randomly selected bullets varied in weight from 168.5 grains to 170.0 grains. That's an extreme spread of 1.5 grains. I ran the bullet weights through Microsoft Excel and found that they average 169.4 grains, with a standard deviation of 0.3 grains.

Knowing those numbers, it's time to start weighing bullets. I have an inexpensive digital scale, so I'll use that. On my bench I have an egg carton. In the little egg holders I've marked weights with a sharpie marker. I start at -0-, then mark up in tenth-grain increments. The photo below shows me sorting some .243 bulk bullets I bought a year or so ago.



So, having sorted the bullets, I put them in zipper storage bags and now I can load like weights when I'm loading ammo. It's just one trick I've learned over the years and lets me get premium performance out of bullets that might not be as uniform as I'd like. An average handful of bullets pulled from the box might vary by more than a grain, but the bullets in each zipper bag are alike within a tenth of a grain.