dranrab
Member
Thats a really good response and one I highly recommend. I keep a small Harbor Freight freebee flashlight on my bench and look into each and every case before seating a bullet.
For handguns I use a RCBS Little Dandy powder dumper and have around 8 rotors. They will get me close enough to the desired charge in the manual. I have even been known to double dip when I needed a bigger charge than I had a rotor on hand for. Like needing a 9gr charge of powder and not having that rotor but a smaller rotor will drop a 4.5gr charge. So I drop two charges in each case.
I also used a Little Dandy rotor I drilled out and threaded and use a set screw ground down thin and have an adjustable powder thrower. I do use a scale to set it. But as for weighing powder charges I almost never do that for handgun rounds except for max 44 mag loads I can't use the Dandy for. I am more concerned that the case length is close so that the crimps are all the same.
Nearly all rifle loads are weighed on the scale. When I first started I was too poor to afford a scale so I used a set of Lee dippers for rifle loads. And you know what? I loaded some really accurate loads with those dippers. When I got a scale and weighed charges they were no more accurate than the dipper method. But that one gun I had was a custom built gun and shot every thing accurately.
I did load several boxes of 243 loads this year and used the dippers. The gun shot just over an inch with those loads. Good enough for the kind of deer I kill.
I load on a single stage. I charge however many I am going to load. With them all in the block I use a little flashlight like you do to compare all of them. That is one step I never leave out.