The UK's Finest Independent Forum for Shooters and Gun Owners. Est 2010.

If only my Bisley club had a handloading area ... I'd happily compete at 40-50p/rd, especially with ammo I could precisely tailor to my rifle. But I simply don't have the facilities to handload.

The price is including the primer

I got 10,000 PMC large rifle primers from Dodgyrog at a very good price so still have around 9 years stock!. I was a bit dubious about them but so far they have been excellent, there's an interesting article on The Rifleman's Journey comparing a lot of the most common primers, they come out of it very well.

http://riflemansjournal.blogspot.co.uk/ ... study.html

Gaz wrote:If only my Bisley club had a handloading area ... I'd happily compete at 40-50p/rd, especially with ammo I could precisely tailor to my rifle. But I simply don't have the facilities to handload.

You joined the wrong club. You could always affiliate to mine next year and take advantage of the reloading room. We may even have gun lockers available by then. Oh, we are cheaper/more affordable than the one that you are affiliated to.

phaedra1106 wrote:In comparison my son and myself use nowhere near as much ammunition (up here in The North we're lucky if we get 10 full bore range outings a year) but even so there's no way we'd be able shoot at £1 a round, it would be £100 an outing just for ammunition.

Our hand loaded .308 ammunition uses RWS once fired cases, 42gr of N140 and 168gr Nosler CC bullets, works out at 33p per round (using the RWS no more than 5 times)

Hannams' list price for 1kg of N140 is £76.47 (that's a year old and probably more today), so a 42gn powder charge is 21P. If you paid £10 / 100 for the brass, that's 2P per load, and primers, even going back a few years, 2.5P each. Add that up and I get 24.5P per load, let's knock a couple of pence off for buying the powder below RRP, still 21-23P. Where do you get Nosler 168 CCs for around £10 per 100? The last time I paid that for match quality .308 bullets, Noah was still building the ark!

Steve E wrote:

Gaz wrote:If only my Bisley club had a handloading area ... I'd happily compete at 40-50p/rd, especially with ammo I could precisely tailor to my rifle. But I simply don't have the facilities to handload.

You joined the wrong club. You could always affiliate to mine next year and take advantage of the reloading room. We may even have gun lockers available by then. Oh, we are cheaper/more affordable than the one that you are affiliated to.

It is very tempting, as it makes shooting cheaper for both membership and ammo. And there's the bar...

Gaz wrote:If only my Bisley club had a handloading area ... I'd happily compete at 40-50p/rd, especially with ammo I could precisely tailor to my rifle. But I simply don't have the facilities to handload.

no excuse Gaz! no need to buy the most expensive sooper doopa fashion kit, start simple and then work your way up if thats what rocks your boat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeEl9wZyabc you can also fit everything you need into a shoe box if you opt for a Lee handpress

Yep the lee hand press is a good little piece of kit!

Laurie my prices were as follows,

N140 - Bought 8Kg last year at £55/Kg
PMC Primers bought at the same time were £30/1000
RWS Cases were £18/100
Nosler 168gr CC bullets, brought 3000 back from the US at $208.99 (£137)/1000 and bought another 2000 from Klaus Pickert.de for €203 (£165)/1000 shipped to my door.

So,
.308 Costs
RWS Brass (bowl usage) 0.4p
42 Grains Vit N140 15p
PMC Primer 3p
Nosler 168gr CC 15p
= Total Cost 33.5p

Assembled ammunition will cloverleaf at 100m and sub-MOA at 200m, not been able to try it any further and I'm not comfortable shooting prone so doubt if I could tell if it was the ammunition or me if it shot any worse!.

Not bad phaedra. Don't waste your 168s - you'll never see those prices again short of a private vendor having a clearout. £55 for N140 is a steal too! (Are you sure that's not TR140 as £55 is the usual going rate for that product?)

What stands out in this thread is that while many 308 shooters are making ugly sucking noises about new RWS at £99/100, the considerable number of people who willingly or otherwise buy these cartridges and recycle the brass around the shooting community are an absolute boon for a very large number of handloaders and are actually and probably unwittingly providing a fair size subsidy to those others. If they don't want to handload, that's their lookout of course - although things are changing, a friend who has always shot NRA supplied ammo in all matches and enters many of the large matches including The Imperial where use of issued ammo is compulsory, has got rather tired of this and is now as of this season reloading all of his RWS brass for use in matches where handloads are elegible. (We shouldn't forget Nigel Cole-Hawkins and his Swiss powder bargain either as another boon to the do-it-yourselfer.)

(I'm still using up a rather large amount of ex-match once-fired Norma 308 brass I bought in the 80s, but they cost £7.50-£10 / 100 even back then plus carriage, I shudder to think what a tenner of 30 years back is worth today with inflation. The other factor was that a fair number of No.4 based or other early first generation TR rifles were still in use at that time and some cases are only suitable for plinking - you know which ones as soon as you resize them, those needing twice as much effort on the press handle. Today's recycled RWS cases have almost invariably been fired in small-chamber tightly breached rifles.)

No problem with the 168s in stock in the US at $248 (£150)/1000 so if we go back over again I may have to stock up on a few thousand or maybe some 155s would be nice for a change

Just checked and I still have 2750 of the Noslers and 729 RWS cases so I'm pretty much stocked up for a couple of years or more, unless of course we have the Zombie apocalypse! (in which case the new .44 will be getting a lot of use!).