GeoDudeFlorida
Member
- Joined
- Dec 1, 2020
- Messages
- 11,118
It's like any other recipe: restaurants have better equipment and professional chefs - and generally make better food than home cooks. But, that doesn't mean only family members like or willingly eat home cooking. Some home cooks are really good - almost professional chef grade - while others should be banned from their own kitchens. Chefs cook for a broad audience; home chefs cook for themselves.
Like profesional kitchens, "we" home cooks reload and handload for very different reasons than the big factories. Working up loads is not just about safe pressure, it is about wringing the most out of each cartridge. For some people, that means economy, accuracy, flexibility, terminal ballistics, recoil and flash (lack thereof) or some other factor. I can only speak for myself but I do have some generic "shelf box" loads that work in all of my guns in that caliber and (so far) every gun I've tried them in. Those are the ones made up of common components, using nominal loads based on published data that has been around and virtually unchanged for decades. They perform well - typically as well as or maybe slightly better than factory box - but aren't anything special - pun intended.
All of my .38Spl's like the 148gr. HBWC/Bullseye load I've worked up over decades of trial and error - everyone knows it by heart who loads for .38Spl. so it's not just "my" recipe. And that's kind of the point of developing a load: Why are you developing it? Is it to make one gun sing like Robert Merrill on an evening at the Boston Pops, or to make any/all of your guns in that caliber sing like Roy Clark at a Hee-Haw reunion?
For the record, Roy Clark's a pretty good singer, in my opinion. He's not Robert Merrill but, he's pretty darned good.
