SmallCaliberCentral

I am a relative newb to reloading and I was wondering how many of you weigh your bullets. My gun (Rem 700SPS) prefers 40gr Vmax and I found their weights vary from 39.9 to 40.1gr. I segregated them into groups for loading. Being such a light bullet I assume a variance of .2gr could affect the accuracy. Am I correct?

Possibly, but it is doubtful that it can be measured in the field. If you are shooting for score then you of course want to negate any and all variances, but a 0.2gr difference is only one-half of a percent difference on a 40 grain bullet. 00.5% isn't going to play out to much in the field.

Just my opinion though. How far a person delves into case prep, bullet runout, powder charging, bullet weight, component choices...etc, it all depends on your end goal.

I don't weight out my 7mm Sierra Matchking bullets for competition either, but then again I am shooting offhand out to 547yards and wouldn't realize any slight variances. Now, if I were shooting off a bench it might be a different story.

I echo what Trent said. If you are using a digital scale there could be some small margin for error in the scale also. I would assume that the majority of your bullets are dead on 40 grains and that .1 grain is probably immeasurable in real life shooting considering that there are so many other factors that make more of a difference in accuracy. I personally do not weigh each bullet because I'm a hunter. If I was shooting 1000 yard matches it may be different.

Thanks for the feedback guys. Most other forums I belong to treat newbies like they have the plague, but I have never failed to get excellent information here, no matter how lame my question might be. Thanks again.

I weigh (and segregate by weight) bullets and brass but only when I'm doing load development. One of my objectives in load development is to find an accurate load that's also tolerant of small variations. Provided I've done that properly, I shouldn't need to weigh any more when I start cranking out "production" rounds.

Fred_C_Dobbs wrote:I weigh (and segregate by weight) bullets and brass but only when I'm doing load development. One of my objectives in load development is to find an accurate load that's also tolerant of small variations. Provided I've done that properly, I shouldn't need to weigh any more when I start cranking out "production" rounds.

exactly what I do

Same with me. Weigh 'em to eliminate a variable and press on.

I used to weigh them until I ran a couple of slightly different weights in a ballistics calculator and saw how much difference in weight it would take to make any real difference in trajectory. Still, you have to wonder if you have some bullets that are way out of the normal weight range, whether they have a defect in the construction that would throw off their center of gravity leading to flyer.

Nothing wrong with weighing bullets if you striving for the bug hole groups from the bench. I've also learned measuring the bullet from base to ogive contrubutes more to accuracy than minor weight variations. I've found length to ogive variations as high as .006" with older A-max bullets. The new ones are much better and don't vary more than .002". SMK's have shown some wild swings in oal length to ogive so I segregate those by length. Berger seems to be the best so far with little variation. YMMV