The other night I went to the range with my Taurus Tracker in 357 and a bunch of hand loads. I was just looking for some relaxation and wanted to kill some paper, so I placed a large blueprint sized sheet 50 yards down range and stuck a bunch of red stickies on it for an aiming point. I started out with 9 grains of blue dot and worked up to 10.2 which my Speer manual says that's enough. This was under a 158g SJHP from Remington. I would never have believed the results. The pistol was open sighted but benched. Starting at 9 grains, the groups were ok, about the size of a small paper plate. By the time I got to the 10.2 grains the groups had tightened up to under 3" diameter (actually about 2" but there was one flier so I counted it too). I'm sure a lot of the error was me, but if anyone would have told me the tremendous difference handloading makes over factory loads I wouldn't have believed em'. I'm now a 100% died in the wool convert! I even tried target loads with 148g DEWC (can't remember the loads while I'm writing this at work now but they were AA#2 and very light) and they still not only reached the target but also printed very nicely. Now I'll go home tonight, and after shooting about 120 rounds or so, start reloading 3 - 400 or more. God I love this hobby - or is it reloading, no shooting, ah wait - reloading .....
