After reloading, I personally would never go back to buying factory ammunition.
Accuracy is the most important factor to me when using my rifles, to ensure clean and ethical kills, when I am hunting.
All of my rifle are significantly more accurate since I have tailored my ammunition to suit each rifle. It's also dramatically reduces the cost of each round.
All factory ammunition is made short to ensure that they will fit all available rifles. If you compare my home loads to factory rounds, the difference in length is visibly noticeable.
The bullets are seated deeper inro the case in factory ammunition. The result of this is that there is a jump between the the bullet leaving the case and it engaging the rifleing. This creates a level of ossilation that continues as the bullet travels down the barrel. This affects the accuracy.
As the powder loads are carefully measure when I make my rounds, the powder loads are also more constant than those that can be achieved by the mass production of ammunition. This reduces the ft/s variation between shots. This again increases the accuracy.
The net result is a dramatic increase in the accuracy of all of my rifles, compared to factory ammuition. This has the effect of increasing my confidence in my equipment.
From my experience factory ammunition normally groups between 1.5 and 2.5 inches at 100m. All of my rifles will group at 1.0 inches or less.
I recently achieved a 0.375 inch group shooting 5 shots at 100m. This was out of a £615 Browning X-Bolt .308. This was using 130gr Soft Point Hornady bullets (which are not premium bullets) and standard primers. This is quite remarkable for a cheap rifle. It does take me some time to settle down to shoot Groups like this.
If you are planning in trying home loading, I would recommend getting someone with experience to show you how to do it.
I have a friend that made a mistake and added too much powder to each case. The excessive pressure blew the primer out of the back of the rifle, which peppered his face. It didn't hurt him luckily, but it jammed the rifle bolt in the gun.
Having said that, if someone who is an experienced homeloader shows you how to do it, it really isn't difficult. the rewards for doing so are well worth the effort.
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