What reloading components have you overbought?

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Shivahasagun

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ESPECIALLY what you can't sell easily.

In a previous "ammo panic" I saw
.25 acp go away. As in ammo search engines coming back with "nothing found" or perhaps a couple sources wanting $1 a shot.

I predicted that because there almost no .25 acp gun being produced, and it hasn't been popular for a long time, this was it for the cartridge. Maybe it wouldn't become the .41 Rimfire, but certainly a .32 S&W (Short). Can you imagine all the demand for 9x19 and some foolish company cranking out .25 acp?!

So I bought lots of loaded .25 ammo and lots of FMJ bullets.

Because I like .25 acp. It was the first auto pistol cartridge I reloaded. (That wasn't a great idea) Ihadn't reloaded it in a while and today I was cleaning about 200 cases and checked my FMJ bullet supply.

I saw the box I knew I had of under 900 bullets. Then I found another box of 1K. Oh boy. I'm not sure I want spend that amount of time reloading these little guys!

But at least they don't take up much space!

And I was wrong! The ammo makers DID crank out and stock .25 again! How many of these guns are still out there? And fired! And fired enough that there is plenty of .25 acp for purchase? And yet everyone knows it's useless and would never own or carry one....well someone's lying!

What reloading components have you over bought that likely nobody else wants?
 
For the first half of my reloading life, I bought the sold line that I needed to try a lot of different powders with a lot of different bullets to find loads which would shoot small for my rifles. "Every barrel is different," folks say... But largely, I've figured out how to put loads and barrels together so they shoot well, so I don't do any of that experimenting any more... So I have a bunch of jugs of powder that I bought between ~25 to 15yrs ago, that I just don't shoot, and a handful of boxes of bullets in various calibers. So I guess I've over-bought a lot of different powders and bullets I don't need or want...
 
Brass, maybe. But brass gets cracked, split, lost, primer pockets worn out...and some of it only comes around in production every couple years. So I try to have a couple hundred cases of each caliber sitting around just in case.
Case in point: .44-40 (WCF) was unobtanium for several years, So I nabbed a couple hundo when I had the chance.
 
.380

Ammo, dies, bullets… wife got a Glock 42 a long time back when she could still get blue label guns (EMS) and she started to go shooting with me. I tooled up and put together the test loads, shot those myself, then assembled the first 100 reloads that were not test loads. That box still has all but 2 magazines full in it. The magazine that’s in the gun, and the one that’s beside the gun in her night stand safe.

And .308. I got a really nice custom mauser rifle and was shooting really well. Guy at the range wouldn’t quit offering money until he went home with the gun and all the ammo I had for it. Dies, brass, bullets still at home. So I traded my way into a Spanish guardia civil rifle in .308 but never trusted it to shoot full power .308 in it. Loaded 100 rds of trailboss under a 150 gr FMJ. Traded the rifle away without ever firing it.

Now here I am with a 7.5x55 and I’m hesitating on buying reloading stuff for it.
 
For awhile I would buy hunting bullets for rifles I owned, when they were on sale or when someone on the forums was cleaning out their loading bench. As a result, I have more hunting bullets then I will ever need in my lifetime. I load and shoot some of them at steel plates every now and then, but I still have lots.
 
370gr rnfp's for the .480, bought two hundred. 355gr rnfp's for the same gun, think it was 250 bullets. I'll never shoot 400 more rounds through that gun, but it sure gets some attention at the range, lol!

chris
 
GeoDudeFlorida said:
Nothing. Anything I have surplus to my needs will be needed by someone else who has been looking for exactly what I have.
Click to expand...

Real talk ^

And with only a FEW exceptions, components have appreciated fast enough over 4-5yr holds to be able to draw greater than the original retail price. It's not enough to consider components an investment engine, BUT it's reliable enough to be comforted that we won't LOSE money on components if we buy and resell in time.
 
I bought 1500 .30 175 SMK's when the M118 pull down components were on the market. Couldn't pass up .20 each. I've only shot a couple hundred so far. Maybe I'll find a use for the rest some day.

In the meantime, they do come in handy for home made trigger weights. 40 175's weigh 1 pound, a nice even number to break into fractions. Kind of expensive for that use tho.
 
Not really bought anything that I regret, but I do have a bunch of odds and end bullets left over from testing over the years. I've made it my goal to find a moderately accurate load with minimal load testing to shoot these up on for fun range type days.

Powder, maybe the 8# jug of CFE223 I bought but I ended up using it up in M80 ball cloner loads.

Primers and brass, no regrets, ever.
 
Well components and commercial ammo are easily sold if needed. I buy anything I find on sale that I might reasonably use.
Reloaded ammo on the other hand not so easy sold and for considerably less cash. I keep my inventory to a minimum level that I might want to shoot at the nrxt range trip or use the next hunt. I do however have literally buckets of clean processed brass for everything. Shoot some up, go home and get some processed brass and prime, charge, and seat bullets to replace what I used. Clean and process fired brass at a later date.
Being known as the local reloader it seems there is always someone that wants to buy some supplies from me if I do have any to spare. When I croak there will be a field day at my estate sale!
 
I'm in the too much powder boat. I have 1lb of just about everything I'd ever need to experiment ... 64 different types not counting the crossovers like H110/296. Though I have good quantities of what I shoot ... N320, N105, Green Dot, 3031, AR-Comp.

I used to think I had too many primers. I had written a program to continuously search the main sites back in 2008 during the first primer crunch. It would text me when primers came in and I would grab 5k of anything that popped up. I'm down to 39.4k remaining ... and that makes me nervous.

There are a few things I grab whether I need them now or not ... 348 WCF brass & bullets. Swift A-frames in a few calibers.
 
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