Documenting handloads

Before anything else

This page is about documentation. It contains no load data and no loading recommendations, and neither does the app it describes. Only the current published data from the powder and bullet manufacturers is authoritative. Reloading is done at your own risk, and an incorrect charge can cause serious injury.

Where the licensing line sits

Reloading for your own use is legal under federal law and requires no license. Selling reloaded ammunition is manufacturing, and that requires a Type 06 FFL; the Department of Justice has prosecuted unlicensed manufacturing as engaging in the business without a license. The firearms and ammunition excise tax — 10 per cent on pistols and revolvers, 11 per cent on other firearms and on shot and cartridge ammunition — is owed by the manufacturer or importer, not by a hobbyist loading for personal use.

State law can be stricter than any of this, and it varies considerably. The federal starting point is not the whole answer.

Lot numbers are the entire point

The single most common gap in a reloading record is the lot number. Powder lots differ, and the standing advice in the hobby is never to mix them. A record that says 42.0 gr of a given powder tells you almost nothing a year later if that powder came from three different containers over the season and one of them shot differently.

Record the lot for the powder above all, and for primers where you can. It costs fifteen seconds and it is the difference between a load you can reproduce and a load you can only remember.

The dimensions worth recording

Charge weight in grains and cartridge overall length in inches are the obvious ones. For precision work, cartridge base to ogive is the more useful measurement than COAL, because it is measured to the part of the bullet that engages the rifling rather than to a tip that varies. Alongside it, jump to the lands and neck tension are the two variables people change and then fail to write down.

Brass preparation belongs in the record too — annealed, turned, uniformed, and how many firings this batch has seen. It explains more results than most shooters expect.

Chronograph data: keep the string, not the summary

Record the individual velocities rather than only the average. Average alone cannot be turned back into extreme spread or standard deviation, and those two are the numbers precision shooters actually compare loads on. Note the device as well — a LabRadar, a Garmin Xero or a MagnetoSpeed measure at different points and are not perfectly interchangeable across a season of records.

If you shoot a discipline with a power factor requirement, remember the convention: the result is truncated, not rounded. A bullet weight of 230.1 grains at 794.7 feet per second gives 182.86, and that is a power factor of 182. Loads sitting within a grain of a threshold are exactly the ones worth having a documented chronograph string for.

Results are only readable with conditions attached

Group size in inches, or in MOA at a stated distance — one MOA is about 1.047 inches at 100 yards, and mixing the two silently is a good way to make two seasons of data incomparable. Add the firearm, the distance, the temperature and, if you have it, the station pressure. A three-quarter-inch group is a fact; a three-quarter-inch group at 100 yards, 41 degrees, from this rifle with this barrel at 1,400 rounds is information.

Consumption and inventory belong together

A hundred rounds loaded is a hundred primers, a hundred bullets and a measured amount of powder gone. If loading does not draw down the component inventory in the same motion, the inventory is fiction within a season — and component shortages have a way of arriving without notice. The same applies at the other end: rounds fired at the range should come off the ammunition count, which is covered under keeping a range log.

How Waffenschrank helps

Waffenschrank keeps recipes with their components, deducts powder, primers, bullets and cases from inventory when a batch is produced, and stores results against the load rather than loose. Chronograph strings can be imported and average, extreme spread and standard deviation are computed from them. Units follow the market you have set, so inches, grains, feet per second and yards where those are the working units.

The app deliberately suggests no charges and publishes no load data. It records what you did, so you can do it again. More about the app.

General information, not legal advice and not load data. Reloading is done at your own risk; only the current published data of the powder and bullet manufacturers is authoritative. Federal law is the starting point only — state and local rules can be stricter, and licensing questions belong with ATF or a lawyer.