Hey there! I've just got myself a Lee Perfect Powder measure for a great price.
I'm satisfied with it, but a very minor incident has made me wonder if I should trust the stability of a metered dispense of powder, or the simplicity of a digital scale?
As instructed in the manual, I've put my one whole pound of powder through the measure at a series of large 60 grain charges. Then I proceeded to try to tune down to the load I intended to fire in the future, 3.6-3.8 grains of Win231. To double check my measurements, I had a Lyman Digital scale handy to check the weight of what I was dropping. I also have a Lee Safety Scale but I just wanted to try things out in a mock up sort of situation with a batch of cases to fill and eventually dump back into the powder container.
Here was my procedure.
*Release the lock-washer thing and twist the adjustment to the approximate CC setting I had wanted, around 0.33 or so. Lock the washer and keep note of the position.
(This was tricky for me since that small of a measurement was too shallow to be able to see the numbers. )
*Do a test dump, waiting briefly per-portion of the stroke to ensure all the flakes make their way towards where we want them to go.
*Measure on the digital scale to know where I need to tune next, be it more or less CC's.
If I could repeat the desired charge of around 3.7ish grains of powder, I would feel that I'd be comfortable to load it.
I had mock charged about 25 cases measuring the powder every time, when I started to realize the Lyman was reading somewhere around 3.8 to 4.0 grains upon measuring. In response to that, I gently tuned the Powder measure down a teeny bit until it was measuring 3.6-3.7 again.
Still thinking something was up, I went through the re-calibration procedure for the Lyman Digital scale, and I dumped all the cases that had originally read 3.8 grains, and each one measured 3.3 up to the point I had made that adjustment.
Considering such a minor error caused me to undercharge around 10 or so cartridges if it were a real reloading session, should I just put more trust in the Perfect Powder measure to meter out the exact charge weights I need, and put a little less trust in the Lyman Digital Scale? Thankfully, recalibrating it was easy, but now I don't feel as comfortable using it to check my powder load every single time.
Should I avoid repeatedly measuring charges in a Digital Scale?
Overall I'm quite satisfied with the perfect Powder Measure. It made dispensing powder a breeze. I was using the Lee Dippers earlier but .3cc usually leveled out 3.2-3.1 grains of powder, and the next up dipper, 0.5, usually meters out 5.1-5.2 grains of powder. So, it kind of laid on the unhappy middle ground of needing to do a little more twisting with a powder trickler.