Lot of folks, with the ammo shortage of the past months (which I think we're coming out of) lament the shortage and think about beginning the craft of making their own ammunition.
They think it's expensive. They're wrong. A good basic reloading setup can be had for little more than $100.00, which you'll recoup when you load your first five boxes of ammo.
I wrote an article about a basic setup and you can find it here.
My buddy Junior, not to be outdone wrote a couple of articles about reloading in a tent, to include casting the bullets. The two articles can be found here, and here. He makes his bullets on a campfire and loads the ammo on a stump. It doesn't get much more low-tech than that, and people have been making ammo like that for over a hundred years.
There's not much to reloading if you pay attention to a few basic rules. It's a craft that's easily learned and most folks can learn by reading a good manual. As a matter of fact, my most basic advise to any new reloader is to buy a manual first and read it cover to cover. Don't buy anything else until you read the manual. After that, getting what you need is easy.
There's a great thread over at The High Road about getting into reloading. The thread is here and gives a lot of information that you might not find anywhere else, with links to suppliers.
If you reload long enough, you'll have several hundred dollars of equipment and supplies on your bench, but that's just for convenience. Good serviceable ammo can be made with very little outlay.
2 comments:
I do think you're being a bit conservative when you say,
"If you reload long enough, you'll have several hundred dollars of equipment and supplies on your bench"
Stuff just seems to pile up.
Z
Zdog. Yeah, I reload for 12 calibers, and that isn't much when I see the stuff that other people accumulate. With powder, bullets, molds, furnaces, presses and the other assorted paraphernalia, I probably have a couple of thousand on my bench.
I didn't want to scare the newbies.
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