The Gun Counter

Question: Through personal experience, have any handloaders found evidence to the contrary?

“n practical terms there is absolutely no reason to weight-sort cases as a precision-improving step. These tests include cartridge cases of the same brand that have been prepared identically, but with weights varying by up to 10 percent. That’s an absolutely huge variance that should eliminate the possibility of loading ammunition that will deliver a high level of precision and an extremely low level of velocity deviation according to conventional wisdom. Many handloaders sort brass into groups according to less than 1% [one percent] weight variation.” -- Kyle Lynch. “Raise Your Modern Precision Rifle Skills.” The Complete Book of Reloading, 2017. pp. 72-73.

My understanding is that weight sorting is a first order approximation of sorting by capacity and neck thickness. I can tell you from personal experience that the latter two *definitely* matter.

First you weight sort, then you check necks, not just thickness, but in multiple places on the neck to make sure its consistent all the way around. With "good" brass, you may only wind up culling 10% of a batch. With the likes of Remington and Winchester? Expect to toss anywhere from a third to half.

Then the prep cna start..

It really depends on what caliber, how far you are shooting and what does accurate mean to you.

1.5 moa at 200 yds. Just load the bullets and go.

> .5 MOA at 1000 yards - use every trick in the book.

For example, on my 270 hunting ammo, I fireform (which means keep track of which rifle it was used in) then neck size, trickle charge the powder and make sure the seating depth is within .001. This gets me 1.5" groups at 200 yds. Way more accurate then I need for minute of deer where we rarely shoot past 200 yds. I don't even sort brass by manufacturer for this and I have 3+ different brands.

For my Precision AR, I have been doing the same thing except I also sort brass. I only use Lake City with a certain head stamp for all my precision reloads. I weight sort them to 1 grain variance. Doing this (when I do my part and there is no wind) gets me 5/8" 5 shot groups at 200 yds and roughly 7-9" groups at 600 yds although the user is the bigger issue at that range.