Is It Worth It to Reload Your Own Ammo?

You’ll need a press and the other basic tools to start reloading. This is an investment, so the easiest way to get started out right is to buy a kit. A reloading kit, like the RCBS Turret Deluxe, is a good buy because the kit saves you some money from buying everything individually. To get started from the basic kit, you only need to add the dies for the cartridge you’re loading. It comes with the most important piece of equipment, too – a reloading manual. This book will give you up-to-date specs for loads that work. Presses and kits like this are harder to find these days as people are snapping them up. The scarcity of lower-end kits, like a single stage press, force you to look at going to a higher end kit, like this RCBS one, but that’s not a bad thing. You’d probably wind up buying one eventually, and this kit lets you load more rounds faster.

With the kit you have, all you need is a set of dies for the cartridge you need. What is a die? Good question. The bullet seating die seats the bullet to the correct depth, which you can adjust according to how you are loading the cartridge. When needed, the die can also crimp cases to bullets. You’ll need a set of dies for every cartridge you load, which is one of the beautiful things about reloading, once you have everything, you can load for every firearm you own. For an example, I picked the popular .223 Remington, a cartridge you can scarcely find ammo for these days.

You’ve got to have bullets and they are not reusable. Finding them, well that’s another story. Luckily there are places like Brownell’s, that usually have some form of components in stock. For example, looking at reloading .223, they have Hornady boat-tail FMJ bullets in 55-grain weight, just like you’d get for target shooting. These come in 100ct boxes for under $12. You can’t get much better than Hornady and that is a great price.

You’ll also need primers, which is the part of the cartridge that is struck by your firing pin and ignites the powder charge. Primers can be a tricky thing to find in stock. From a basics standpoint, they usually run around $45 for a box of 1,000. Your best bet is to keep checking in to see when they come back in stock. I know that’s frustrating – trust me. I really get it.

Again, you can’t reload without powder, but it can be tricky to find as well. It’s a good idea to buy a reloading manual well before you start buying powder simply because you need to know which types of powder to buy. Some loads call for blends of powders, while others are straight up with a single type. Powder manufacturers, like Hodgedon, also make the powder being sold in factory-loaded ammunition, so when there is a big run on ammo, finding powder gets a lot harder to do. Also know that buying powder online will most likely add a hazardous materials fee to your shipping costs. The best advice I ever got on this type of thing is to make your order count when you find it online. You will only incur one fee with places like Brownell’s, so you might as well order as much as you can afford to to spread out the cost of the fee, which is usually $20. That fee goes with primers, too, so when you find it all available, go big! It also doesn’t hurt to start sucking up to your local sportings good store that carries powder. Just sayin’.

Now hopefully you’ve been saving as much of your brass as possible. If not, you can always buy more, but it’s pricey and it is one of the areas that can really dig you when you start comparing the costs of ammo versus loading your own. Still, it isn’t all that bad of an idea to buy some extra so you can load ahead. For .223, a box of 100 high-quality Lapua brass cases will set you back less than $65 on average.