The LEE scale is probably the most frustrating tooling ever invented for reloading. It is not magnetic dampened, is extremely slow, and frustrates many people. I have seen one shot, and one smashed with a hammer, and both people felt relieved afterwards. A cheaper Ohaus scale will be a far superior tool, for a reasonable price.
Beam powder scales vs cheap digital scales vs powder scoop
- Thread starter Iloverevolvers
- Start date
Whether or not your rifle has a Wylde chamber has nothing to do with the brass from another rifle being able to be chambered in your rifle after neck sizing.
The issue is with the shoulder and chamber walls, more often than not, neck sized brass from one rifle will not chamber in another , regardless of the cartridge.
You got lucky, but yo may run into issues with the next loadings of that brass.
Cat
There should be a few important things to remember about all scales... and it starts with the difference between being accurate and being consistent. There probably isn't a scale that a fellow can afford, plop down in his house, and claim to be accurate. Scales just don't work that way. What a fellow can do, as suggested many times in this thread, is get any number of different scales, plop one of them down in his house, and claim it to be very consistent. When reloading, the scale is only one part of the desired outcome. As long as that scale is consistent, then it will more than fulfil its duty within the process.
R.
R.
False..they are not unless you get the high end scale. The reloading beam scale sucks.
Any digital scale are more accurate than a cheap beam scale.
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I have several scales. An old Lyman beam scale, accurate but slow. An RCBS beam scale, again acurate but slow. An RCBS digital scale that wieghs to .1 grain. I used it for years and thought I was making great ammo until I bought an Acculab scale. I now use the RCBS digital scale to weigh brass.
I also run 2 RCBS Chargemasters at the same time to throw powder. The scales on the Chargemasters will get you anywhere from 1 grain short to +.5 grains over. So once it comes off the Chargemaster it goes on the Acculab.
If you are only loading a hundred rounds or less a year an beam scale will do. If you are loading a few thousand match rounds a year a beam scale would make you want to give up reloading.
I also run 2 RCBS Chargemasters at the same time to throw powder. The scales on the Chargemasters will get you anywhere from 1 grain short to +.5 grains over. So once it comes off the Chargemaster it goes on the Acculab.
If you are only loading a hundred rounds or less a year an beam scale will do. If you are loading a few thousand match rounds a year a beam scale would make you want to give up reloading.
How can you possibly make such a claim when affordable digital scales drift more than a 2wd pickup in the snow?...
How can a scale that drifts 0.1grain every couple of loads possibly be more accurate than a beam scale?...
I have a RCBS digital scale in front of me. After removing and replacing the test weight 20 times I've gone from 771.3gr to 771.6gr. If that held steady for 100 rounds my last load would be 1.5gr lighter than my first load.
And just leaving the weight on there it's slowly crept up to 771.8, and now my zero is 0.8gr instead of 0. Oh wait. It's changed again, now my zero has drifted to 1.0gr...
Cheap digital scales suck fat donkey nuts, and nobody is ever going to convince me otherwise.
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My wife takes a daily blood-thinner pill that supposedly contains 81mg of aspirin. The pill is tiny. It does not even register on our cheap kitchen digital scale, whose lowest reading is 1 gram (not counting "0" as a reading) and supposedly has a 1 gram plus or minus 0.5 gram accuracy up to 10 lbs.
There are nine pills left in what was originally a bottle that contained 300 pills. If the bottle were still full, I would place a small ceramic bowl on the balance, wait for the indicated weight to stabilize and then zero the scale (tare) on that weight. Then I would add the 300 81-mg pills and, after the weight stabilizes, record their weight.
If each pill is 100% aspirin, 300 x 0.081 grams = 24.3 grams. Because our scale rounds off to the nearest whole gram, I assume that in this case the indicated weight would be 24 grams. A reading much higher or lower would indicate that either the label on the pill bottle is incorrect or the indicated weight on the scale is incorrect. Because this is a medicinal product that supposedly has stringent production requirements (including each pill weighing at least 81mg, plus or minus a very small amount), I would lean toward the scale's reading being incorrect.
However, there is the very real possibility that there are inert "fillers" in the already-tiny pill. If that is true, then the scale's indicated weight of 300 pills would be at least somewhat higher than 24.3 grams.
But regardless of what's in the pill, if I divide whatever the scale's readout is by 300, I will have a very good estimate of a single pill's weight, plus or minus 0.5 grams ALSO divided by 300. 0.5 grams divided by 300 equals 0.0016 grams which equals 1.6 milligrams or 0.025 grains. Therefore, I would know that a single pill weighs, say, 81mg plus or minus 1.6mg, which is very close. Not bad for a cheap kitchen digital scale.
My point in writing this post is that objects other than so-called certified weights might be able to be used as "check-weights" to determine the accuracy and precision of any kind of device that measures by weight (as opposed to volume). In my case, again, I'd like to charge 3.1 or 3.2 grains of Titegroup. 81mg/pill = 1.25 grains/pill and 3.2 grains divided by 1.25 grains/pill = 2.56 pills. You get my drift. (Also, a scoop that contains approximately 3.2 grains of Titegroup is going to be a tiny scoop, I think, but those of you using Titegroup would know more than I do about this. How tiny would a fill-level-and-dump-3.2-grains-of-Titegroup scoop be? Would you trust that custom scoop?)
If any of you or your loved ones take daily small doses of aspirin for blood-thinning, the next time you weigh some gunpowder, put one or more pills on your pan and report back here what it weighs. I'd be very interested in reading your results.
There are nine pills left in what was originally a bottle that contained 300 pills. If the bottle were still full, I would place a small ceramic bowl on the balance, wait for the indicated weight to stabilize and then zero the scale (tare) on that weight. Then I would add the 300 81-mg pills and, after the weight stabilizes, record their weight.
If each pill is 100% aspirin, 300 x 0.081 grams = 24.3 grams. Because our scale rounds off to the nearest whole gram, I assume that in this case the indicated weight would be 24 grams. A reading much higher or lower would indicate that either the label on the pill bottle is incorrect or the indicated weight on the scale is incorrect. Because this is a medicinal product that supposedly has stringent production requirements (including each pill weighing at least 81mg, plus or minus a very small amount), I would lean toward the scale's reading being incorrect.
However, there is the very real possibility that there are inert "fillers" in the already-tiny pill. If that is true, then the scale's indicated weight of 300 pills would be at least somewhat higher than 24.3 grams.
But regardless of what's in the pill, if I divide whatever the scale's readout is by 300, I will have a very good estimate of a single pill's weight, plus or minus 0.5 grams ALSO divided by 300. 0.5 grams divided by 300 equals 0.0016 grams which equals 1.6 milligrams or 0.025 grains. Therefore, I would know that a single pill weighs, say, 81mg plus or minus 1.6mg, which is very close. Not bad for a cheap kitchen digital scale.
My point in writing this post is that objects other than so-called certified weights might be able to be used as "check-weights" to determine the accuracy and precision of any kind of device that measures by weight (as opposed to volume). In my case, again, I'd like to charge 3.1 or 3.2 grains of Titegroup. 81mg/pill = 1.25 grains/pill and 3.2 grains divided by 1.25 grains/pill = 2.56 pills. You get my drift. (Also, a scoop that contains approximately 3.2 grains of Titegroup is going to be a tiny scoop, I think, but those of you using Titegroup would know more than I do about this. How tiny would a fill-level-and-dump-3.2-grains-of-Titegroup scoop be? Would you trust that custom scoop?)
If any of you or your loved ones take daily small doses of aspirin for blood-thinning, the next time you weigh some gunpowder, put one or more pills on your pan and report back here what it weighs. I'd be very interested in reading your results.
I bought a very nice precision scale thinking I could improve on my charge precision with subsonics and the damn thing drifts so much it has created a brain worm in my head that keeps me up at night. I have loaded hundreds of rounds at times only to see .2 - .4gr drift when it went back to "zero" Makes a big difference when the load is 3.2gr.
Using the scale on my Chargemaster 1500 and "trickling up" with a manual trickler to my charge weights, I can get single digit SD's in most of my supersonic loads but for sub loads, especially using ball powders, I now rely on my RCBS powder thrower.
That said, I routinely play with sub sonic loads in all calibres and I have had excellent results with 77gr pills, 3 ish grains of titegroup (cant remember atm) in my Ruger Ranch 223. MOA groups at 50-100. I believe that most of the variation I get (SD's of 25+) is due to powder position in firing as there is a ton of empty space in these rounds and even TiteGroup can't do everything..
Using the scale on my Chargemaster 1500 and "trickling up" with a manual trickler to my charge weights, I can get single digit SD's in most of my supersonic loads but for sub loads, especially using ball powders, I now rely on my RCBS powder thrower.
That said, I routinely play with sub sonic loads in all calibres and I have had excellent results with 77gr pills, 3 ish grains of titegroup (cant remember atm) in my Ruger Ranch 223. MOA groups at 50-100. I believe that most of the variation I get (SD's of 25+) is due to powder position in firing as there is a ton of empty space in these rounds and even TiteGroup can't do everything..
Your beam scale drifts as well. It just doesn't show it as obviously as a digital scale does with showing lots of zero's.
There won't be a scale in most anyone's house that is truly accurate, unless they have gone to great time and expense to make it that way.
R.
If it drifts it does it at an imperceptible level. I've ran the exact same sort of test as I did above and saw no noticeable change over many repeated measurements, meanwhile a cheap digital can't go 10 measurements.
I'm skeptical that drift is a concern with beam scales, but even if it is, it's a MUCH SMALLER concern.
You beat me to it, I started with one, I got frustrated, I bought a used RCBS 10-10 for $30 and never looked back. The Lee is for sure accurate, but damn it is finicky to adjust and slow. And to be honest the powder thrower that also came in my kit is junk if you ask me, pretty much impossible to set up
or by the time I have it figured out I would have time to reload 100 458 win mag loads weighing every one of them. Both those “tools” are sitting on a shelf!
If you are getting low SD's in one cartridge and high SD's in another using the same equipment, then it most likely is not the equipment causing the issue. The lower the charge weight, especially in a smaller case, the more important it is that the scale be repeatable.
The charge needs to be repeatable as thrown, not necessarily over a longer period of time.
Again... the scale is only a small part of making accurate ammunition.
R.
The digital scale is much more suspectable to environmental impacts than the beam scale is. It also shows more zeros and gives instant feedback which certainly doesn't help.
All scales drift.
And yes, regardless of the scale, if managed it should be a small concern.
R.
My rcbs digital doesn't show more Zeros than my beam, and there's a small lag in response just like my beam.
You're literally just making things up to support your point...
Before I bought my amazingly tiny .223 "rifle" with its folding stock and 9.5" barrel (again, to me, more like a large pistol than a traditional long gun), it had been many years since I had actually held in my hand a .223 Remington round. While the rifle was still in shipping I went to Bass Pro Shops on the south side of Edmonton and bought two 20-round boxes of PMC bronze. When I finally found the box on the shelf, I was amazed at how tiny is was. I was even more amazed when I got into our vehicle to drive home, but before driving I opened one of the boxes to look at a round. I put one in my hand. That thing was/is tiny! Even now, as I handle the brass to de-prime and neck-size, I'm still amazed at how tiny it is. I find it hard to believe that the space inside this tiny case is large enough to affect the burn-rate or burn-efficiency of even 3.2 grains of Titegroup, even if it's all sitting right behind the bullet at the time of firing. But I've been wrong about so many things lately that I would not be surprised if I'm wrong on this, too.
yep, I thought I was inferring that.
My sub 308 loads, for example, use 12+ grains.
My Sub 223 loads use 3ish. So .1gr is a much larger percentage of the charge.
And in the case I am describing, accurate is only half the battle. They need to be close to but still under the Speed of Sound and so Extreme spread is important. Don't want the odd one to be supersoninc.
Maybe try a different powder? One that fills the case more. That extra volume and burn rate change should have a positive benefit on lowering the SD.
Being speed limited is another parameter to deal with, for sure. Not sure what your elevation is, but you should have a bit of room to work with around that 1050fps mark.
R,
That would surely depend on what exact scale you are using, wouldn't it?
Some scales show more than one decimal place?
Not sure how any digital scale doesn't show instant feedback when weighted? And then continues to do so? Isn't that the drift you are seeing?
R.
