I have two factory-loaded rounds for .30-06 Springfield. The bullets are black with silver tips; I guess they are commercially known as Silvertip rounds. I wanted the bullets so I pulled them and just to satisfy my curiosity, I weighed the powder charges. The first weighed-out at 51.2 grains; the second weighed-out at 60.6 grains. The second is 18.3% greater than the first. That's terrible! I know that factory ammo is not loaded by weight; it's loaded by volume. My sample is small in just these two rounds, but to miss by so much is a shame. Could it be that factory-built rifles we can walk into a gunshop and buy are at best a 1½- to 2-inch rifle at 100 yards because the ammo is not consistent? We could certainly argue such.
I try my very best to trickle my handload charges to exactly the mass I want. It takes a while to do so with such accuracy, so I've lately gone to a tolerance of ±0.1 grains when trickling my charges up to the 65- and 68-some grains my mildcat cartridges require. A sloppiness of 0.1 grains out of 650 parts is about 0.154 percent. My 0.1-grain tolerance is about 119 times more accurate than the factory fodder referenced above. I get that number by dividing 18.3 by 0.154. I may be tilting at windmills by dividing a decimal of one place to the right of the decimal point by one having three places to the right of the decimal point. In any event no competent handloader would miss the mark by even one percent, which is 0.65 grains of a 65-grain charge. You'd have to be a genuine dingbat to miss by over half a grain...
I try my very best to trickle my handload charges to exactly the mass I want. It takes a while to do so with such accuracy, so I've lately gone to a tolerance of ±0.1 grains when trickling my charges up to the 65- and 68-some grains my mildcat cartridges require. A sloppiness of 0.1 grains out of 650 parts is about 0.154 percent. My 0.1-grain tolerance is about 119 times more accurate than the factory fodder referenced above. I get that number by dividing 18.3 by 0.154. I may be tilting at windmills by dividing a decimal of one place to the right of the decimal point by one having three places to the right of the decimal point. In any event no competent handloader would miss the mark by even one percent, which is 0.65 grains of a 65-grain charge. You'd have to be a genuine dingbat to miss by over half a grain...