Bullet and Powder Weight Tolerances

[milrifle]

When discussing weighing bullets and podwer, you usually see someone throw out a tolerance of +/- some weight, say +/- 0.5 grain. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if +/- some percentage of the weight wouldn't be more useful? The way I see it, +/- 0.5 grain of bullet weight would make a lot more difference to the guy loading 55gr .223 Remington than it would the guy loading 405gr 45-70.

I'm thinking the same would apply to powder measures. I've seen guys who say they are satisfied if their powder measure drops +/- 0.1 gr. I'd think that would be excessive on 5 grains of bullseye but probably being too picky on 40 grains of 4895.

So what do you guys think? Maybe +/- .25%? For my 30-06 loads of 26 gr of RL-7 under a 185 gr bullet, that would give me roughly 25.9 to 26.1 gr of powder and 184.5 to 185.5 gr on the bullet. That doesn't seem unreasonable. As a matter of fact, it may be a little too restrictive. So again, what do you guys think?

[runfiverun]

depends on what i'm working on.
for the 22's the boolits and powder are all weighed within the scales .1 gr.
for the big stuff & revolvers 2% is in the norm just from visual sorting.
powder is weighed on the scale for my regular velocity rifles and the boolits are visually sorted.
for anything h/v the same rules as the 22's apply.

[williamwaco]

At 40 to 50 grain charges, assuming you are at least one grain under maximum, powder weight variation of +/- one half grain is perfectly acceptable and will have no noticeable adverse affect on accuracy UNLESS you are a bench rest shooter trying to get in to the 2s or 3s.

The most accurate handgun ammo on the planet is factory wad cutters. .38 special wad cutters usually have around 2.5 to 2.8 grain charges and they vary by as much as 3 tenth grain. That is more than 10% variation.

Don't obsess over charge weights.


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