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My wife and I enjoy target shooting and have a decent firearm collection. It is a fun and challenging hobby that we intend to share with our kids when they are older.

Shooting as much as we do requires a lot of ammunition. If the firearms weren’t costly enough, feeding them can be downright expensive. After the Sandy Hook tragedy on December 14, 2012, firearms and ammunition disappeared from store shelves for months due to fears of new legislation. What ammunition you could find was pricey. For example, 9mm and .223 Remington ammunition went from ~$0.20/round and ~$0.35/round respectively to nearly $1.00/round. I had long considered reloading ammunition and the extreme scarcity during that time spurred me to pull the trigger on purchasing a reloading press.

I invested more in our reloading press and related equipment than most (~$2K), since I knew I would get decades of use out of it and reloading speed was an important factor to me. My progressive press performs multiple tasks with each handle pull and is capable of reloading 500-800 round per hour. Lower cost single stage presses perform a single function with each handle pull and reload <100 rounds per hour.

Reloading reuses the most expensive part of a cartridge, the brass case. The basic steps of reloading are: Cleaning/inspecting the brass case, removing the old primer from the case, resizing the case, priming the case, loading the powder charge into the case, seating the bullet in the case, and inspecting the completed round. NOTE: there are more steps and detail involved, but I simply wanted to provide an overview of the process. Additional information on the reloading steps for a single stage press can be found here. DO NOT attempt to reload ammunition until you learn the process as injury or death can occur. I recommend “The ABCs of Reloading” and “Lyman 49th Edition Reloading Handbook”.

The trick to keeping your cost per round low is to order components (primers, powder, and bullets) in bulk. Doing so, I can reload quality 9mm rounds for $0.11/round and .223 Remington for $0.18/round. That’s about half the price of target ammunition in the store, but much higher quality. I could save a little more per round buying low quality components, but prefer not to.

When I add in the cost of my time and the expense of the reloading equipment, reloading ammunition does not really save me a ton of money. It does, however, allow me to shoot much higher quality ammunition and every dollar that I spend on components goes much further than if I bought ammo at the store. Best of all, reloading has become an extension of my shooting hobby and has taught me so much more about the sport than I knew before. That to me is priceless.