I use a Denver
Instruments balance which weighs to one fiftieth of a grain! Yup – that’s right 0.02 grains. Well why not? If you’re going to the trouble of weighing something, you might as well get it as
accurate as you can! Having said that, like most benchrest shooters, I still ‘throw’ my charges for 100 yard benchrest – using one of those fancy expensive Harrel throwers but they only throw to three-tenths of a grain at best. For 100 yards, it doesn’t seem to make any difference; for long range stuff however, clearly there will be a difference - on the target - that’s why I like my Denvers.
At the recent World Benchrest Championship in France however, I had to change my view of ‘auto- dispensers’ – several teams had them for the 200m competitions and GB team member Tony Lenton had brought his RCBS Chargemaster along. Well, if everyone is using them, I suppose they must be OK and indeed I was well impressed with the RCBS unit, it worked well and more importantly, the results on target confirmed it.
On a recent trip to Hannam’s Reloading (www.
hannamsreloading.com) the charming Ms Hannam talked me into trying Hornady’s latest version of their electronic loading device – the Autocharge - which was timely as I’d more or less decided to buy one. Price-wise, they aren’t cheap at over £300 but could it really make my Denvers redundant?
The Hornady Autocharge box felt surprisingly light for £300 worth of kit and my first job was to extract the instruction manual and have a good read. If you’ve bought a TV or a digital camera recently, you’ll have no doubt waded through a hefty tome in a dozen different languages before you can even switch it on!
Just a motorised trickler... 13
Hornady Autocharge Automatic powder dispenser Review By Vince Bottomley
What a pleasant surprise – just a double-sided piece of card tells you all you need to know about using the Hornady.
Well that may be but no doubt we need to leave it switched on for twenty-four hours to stabilise? Nope – 15 minutes is fine! OK, tip the powder into the hopper and let’s go. As with any electronic scale, calibration is recommended before use; it only takes a couple of minutes.
That’s what I call an instruction manual!
Strip away all the hype and this impressive expensive device is nothing more than a motorised powder- trickler housed in a fancy plastic box – you probably already have a manual trickler that you twiddle to dribble the last few granules of powder into your scale pan. That’s exactly what the Autocharge does - after keying-in your chosen charge-weight, press the ‘dispense’ button and watch the Hornady dribble the bulk of the charge in a matter of seconds – it then slows to trickle the last half grain or so.
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