A Messy, Well-Lighted Place Eileen Clarke
straighten up a little when my camera comes out, and so far no one has been unwilling to share their experiences. No, I’m not talking about their pickup trucks – or even their kitchens – it’s their reloading bench. Since I now have one of my own, I’ve become fascinated with other people’s benches. And that has turned into a never-ending conver- sation. Including on July 4th last year, when my friend Will started talking about the Lee loader and as the potato salad chilled and the kabobs grilled, I had to ask: “When did you start? Who helped you get started?” And since he said his Dad didn’t know the fi rst thing about reloading, and had no other men- tor, “What did you read, that helped?” Will, as it turned out, was unusual.
T
He started handloading at 20 or so, what a lot of people would consider an adult. The vast majority of people I’ve asked say they started at 12 or 13. Puberty? Coming of age? Parents recognizing im- minent (?) adulthood? Why is it almost always that age? Perhaps it’s finally
Jay’s Bench
hey’re all a mess, and mostly people don’t apologize, but do
having a job – a paper route was most common among my sampling – and they actually had personal money – to a degree, money they could spend at their discretion. And handloading was tops on the list eleven months of the year. Displaced, perhaps, by fi reworks during the month of July. In any event, apparently, someone
knew it was time: either the 12-year old or a nearby adult. One 60-ish year old man said Elmer Keith himself had got- ten him started handloading. “Was he a relative?” I asked.
“I just knocked on his door.” Amazed, I said, “And he let you in? How did he know you were OK?” “I don’t know,” the guy said. “But
I think you can see these things. And Elmer apparently saw it in me. A fellow gun nut. Who would need help support- ing his obsession.” That’s the number one reason I
heard for starting handloading. Money – or as Will put it, “I’m cheap.” Beyond that, there are as many stories as to why and how as there are handloaders. Our friend Jay is an electrician, and
a good guy, who handloads for his black and smokeless powder, shotguns and handguns, and then reloads for friends, and lets other friends use his reloading bench to load their own with his equip- ment. It’s a tiny corner of his garage, but there’s his stuff, stuff he uses to load for other people, plus other people’s stashes they borrow Jay’s equipment for. Part of Jay’s stash of powder is 25-30 pounds of the original WWII surplus H4831 that belonged to a friend who’d passed away. Nothing wrong with the powder; it had been stored carefully, and was re-packaged into two dozen yellow and red matching tins, labeled neatly, and added to the assortment he already had in the powder cabinet according to type and use. Jay’s was the fi rst “foreign” bench
I took a snapshot of, and when my photo appeared in a magazine – with an article on loading bench time/motion studies my husband John Barsness wrote – we had several phone calls immediately from friends asking how we got that photo of their reloading bench. The thing is, despite all the stuff Jay has in
Ron’s Bench
For all the handloading Jay does, his bench area was the neatest. Note the yellow and red cans on the bottom right of the photo. They’re sitting in their own cardboard box. “A place for everything and everything in its place” could come right after “Always double check the charge” on the list of do’s and don’ts for loading benches.
To a man, and they were all men I spoke to, when the Lee Loader was mentioned, their faces lit up, and they lost 20 years – maybe 30. Though Ron said, “I have never used a Lee Loader. I own one or two only because they came to me in boxes of STUFF during trades.” And it took him only seconds to fi nd it.
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