Unpacking the Reloading Room and What I Would do Differently

[David2011]

After a long distance move to a home with no space for a reloading room I finally have a shop built and got the "must do" things mostly finished. FINALLY, I'm unpacking the reloading gear which has been in climate controlled $$$$ storage. I started bringing a few boxes at a time home, a mix of RC airplane things and reloading room things which were all fairly well marked. I should mention that I'm bringing things home piecemeal because I have to build new accommodations for all of the small stuff like molds, dies, casefeed plates, primer systems and so on. The new reloading room was squeezed into the upstairs of the shop where the ceiling is the inside of the roof and there are no normal walls so no cabinets on the walls.

The first small issue I ran into was that I did a poor job of packing all of the components of one item together. When I packed, many of the fasteners that held tools to mounting plates and mounting plates to benches were put back into the plastic cabinet of drawers where I kept all of the unused reloading bench fasteners. I should have packed the tool, its mounting plate and all of the associated fasteners in the same box.

I also did not put all of the small parts for complex items in one box when in retrospect I could have. At this point all of the presses are on their mounting plates and mounted on the benches. I found all of the powder measures for the Dillons but none of the aggravating safety linkages that attach to the powder measures. There are still several boxes of reloading items in the storage unit but most are marked "Brass" so I'll probably have to bring them all home and go through them to find a few items that I shouldn't have hidden from myself.

It would have been worth the trouble and worth having slightly less efficient use of boxes to have all of the related items together. I still have a few toolheads, dies sets and other important items that will show up eventually but it's a real pain in the mean time.

Should I ever move again I'll try to remember these mistakes and not repeat them. I'm still in my 60s but still too old to waste months or years putting the equipment back together again.

[lightman]

I just recently completed a move, but not as far as yours was. I actually gained some space, going from a 7X9ft room to a 13X18ft room. I spent lots of extra time boxing stuff up and marking the boxes. That extra time really paid off. So far the only thing that I'm missing is a really nice magnifying glass in a leather holster. I think it was a Galco. Hopefully it will show up!

[David2011]

I went from a 1296 sq ft shop that had a reloading room of about 120 sq ft and a gunsmithing room of about 200 sq ft to a shop of 380 sq ft plus the upstairs area of which about 10x16 has enough headroom for me to stand. The upside is that there is no constant intrusion of New Mexico sand, dirt and dust. Good thing; the woodworking makes enough dust. At least it’s clean dust and I do have a good dust collection system.

Hoping to load a little ammunition in the next few days just for giggles and sanity.