Charlie98
Member
Here's the thing... you will never be able to determine chamber pressure for your firearm without pressure testing equipment. There are pressure signs you can look for... everything from sooty cases, to flattened or pierced primers, all the way to a mangled firearm... but those don't give you any sort of number you are looking for, they are just indicators, much like chronograph data. Further, there are upteen differences in a loaded cartridge that would contribute to higher or lower pressures vs published data... everything from case volume to bullet coating... and that's before you even put it in your firearm, with it's very different tolerances. There is a phrase... 'tolerance stacking...' that would be at play here. There is nothing in a loading manual that is absolute... except that the data published was 'exactly' what they came up with in their testing that day.
I'm not saying pressure isn't relevant, what I'm saying is it's only a small piece of the puzzle, and one you cannot readily measure or even accurately estimate. QuickLoad is about as close as a layman can get to specifically generated load and pressure data, but as you mentioned, it can be very inaccurate.... but it can be another piece of the puzzle you are trying to find.
