Safety Tips for Reloading Ammo | Reloading 101

Today we’ll be covering safety tips for reloading ammo, just the basic tips, and precautions that you want to follow if you want to tackle reloading your own ammunition. So today we’re at our gun bench here and we’ve got the ammunition reloader setup. We’ve got it set up right now for the 9mm Luger which is the kind of ammo we’re going to be cycling through and start talking about how we can stay safe when we reload these kinds of rounds.

The first rule of thumb that I always like to follow, regardless of anything you’re reloading, always takes your time. Don’t jump into it thinking you’re gonna get the biggest bang for your buck and you’re going to knock out 100 rounds in the first 10 minutes. That’s not going to happen and that’s a really good way to hurt yourself. Basically, what that means is you want to go one bullet at a time and really take your time and slow down. The machine is built to reload bullets in a good way, but you want to make sure that you don’t just rely on the equipment and tools you’re using to push out a good bullet. Inspect your rounds and go slow. Like people always say, if you have 100 rounds, but one’s bad, it’s not worth shooting the other 99. If you have one misfire, you lose confidence in the rest of your batch that you just did. No one wants to throw away that many rounds that they just cranked out.

Going along with that same principle, you also want to make sure you inspect not every single bullet, but enough of the batch that you know the rest of it should be working properly. You can really trust a lot of your machine to do what’s right with the ammo and do it properly once you get it all set up. But I never like to give 100% guarantee in any of my equipment, so that always means I want to make sure that it’s still working properly, it’s still handling the ammunition and the brass the right way. It kind of makes it a little bit less nerve-wracking myself when I am firing those because I know each individual bullet is something that I pretty much gave my safety guarantee to fire.

Related Videos: Must-Have Tools for Reloading Ammo | Reloading 101

Following this, you want to make sure that you keep regularly inspecting the ammo that comes out of your equipment. These machines are made to do a lot of bullets effectively, but it’s not going to give you 100% guarantee that something’s not going to change when you’re actually going through the process. If you throw 1000 rounds through that, inevitably, you’re going to have one or two that are not going to be top-notch or even safe to fire. So, I always make sure and never rely 100% on the machinery to do the right job. Always inspect your ammo and make sure you don’t ruin a whole batch with just one bad bullet.
On the topic of safety, there’s not much more you got to worry about. Just inspect your rounds, make sure those are safe. Another rule of thumb, is always wear your safety shop glasses. It only takes a second to put on, there’s no excuse not to have them. There are a lot of moving parts, small springs, primers, and gunpowder. When something small is under pressure or tension, it’s always got that chance of flying up and hitting you in the eye. So there is really no excuse to not have your shop glasses on. Always put them on no matter what you’re reloading or when you’re reloading, wear your glasses.

Those are just the basic safety steps you want to take before you even get into reloading. But once you get a little farther in, you’re more advanced, you want to start playing with different custom rounds, you want to start putting different kinds of amounts of gunpowder in there—make sure you know your gun. What I mean by saying that is that one caliber, like a 9mm, may work really well in a carbine. If you do your custom around that way you’ve got more energy in it and you want to hit something farther like 150 yards downrange, that same round you make, might not be the best round for your concealed carry or a subcompact pistol.

Final Remarks for Safety Tips for Reloading

The last thing that I want to cover is for any new ammunition reloader, make sure you get yourself an instruction guide that is going to walk you through your tools your equipment. This will get you more familiar with the moving parts, helps you maintain if there’s a malfunction or something breaks, walks you through the first few steps of reloading. This will just help to prevent any kind of catastrophic injury when you actually do want to fire the ammunition you make. So number one rule is to get yourself an instruction guide.