top-quark.blog

Ammunition reloading economics.

I've been looking at getting back into reloading (mostly pistol) cartridges. At one point, I had quite a setup, involving an RCBS Rockchucker, but sold it during college. I currently have only a Lee Handloader, which I'm not terribly fond of using.

Lately, I've gotten into competition shooting (IDPA for now), and am starting to shoot more, now that I have some free time. I'm currently shooting a lot of Brown Bear 9mm ammunition, imported from Russia. I can get it for around $0.187/round, shipped, which I believe is the cheapest ammunition available at the moment.

I realize there's plenty of steelcase ammunition detractors out there - despite their ample arguments and protestations (easy to find online), all the Russian steelcase works wonderfully for me. It's accurate and reliable. But that doesn't keep me from remembering a time not long ago (2 years?) when Winchester Whitebox was under $10 for 100 rounds.

So I'm trying to put together the numbers to see if it's economically viable to reload 9mm today. Here's my breakdown of a per-round cost, exclusive of equipment and time, based on prices today:

$0.079/rnd Bullet - Berry's bullets 115 grain plated; $79.08/k shipped
$0.029/rnd Primer - Available from local gun forums; $29/k
$0.013/rnd Powder - based on a load of 4.6gr W231, at $160/8 lbs shipped
$0.008/rnd Brass - Once-fired, $30/k, 75% recovery until 90% depleted
----------
$0.129/rnd Total

Compared to the $0.187/round cost of Brown Bear ammunition, I save $0.058/round by handloading. 31% off.

I've done some shopping as far as the type of reloading setup I'd like to assemble, and I'm looking at setups costing around either $300 or $500.

To break-even on these equipment investments, at a savings of $0.058/round, I'd need to produce:

$300 reloading setup - 5172 rounds to breakeven
$500 reloading setup - 8620 rounds to breakeven

These aren't huge roundcounts for me, but they're still up there, now that I'm working and don't live by the national forest. At this point, my limits as far as useful shooting are about 200 rounds per trip to the indoor range, every other week. That's right about 5200 rounds per year - I'd be able to pay off $300 of equipment in a year.

I actually entered into this analysis with the belief that I wouldn't be able to make back my investment without an astronomical upfront purchase of supplies, but the first 6000 rounds' upfront materials costs look like:

$474 - Bullets
$174 - Primer
$160 - Powder (8 lbs jug)
$180 - Once-fired brass
----
$988 Total for first 6k rounds. ($1288 with $300 of reloading equipment.)

This slightly distorts the per-round cost analysis, as that 8 lbs keg of powder at 4.6gr/load is good for a bit more than 12k rounds.

$1288 for 6000 handloaded rounds, with equipment
$1122 for 6000 Brown Bear factory loaded rounds

These numbers do actually show that, contrary to my hypothesis, the reloading upfront costs don't actually vary much from outright purchasing the loaded ammunition.

I probably will find the time to put together a setup some time this year, then.

There is another dimension I haven't quite explored - time. With a turret press setup, I can get about 200 rounds per hour produced, based on my previous experience. To load those 6000 rounds, I'd need 30 hours of labor. If I analyzed this strictly along the dimension of economics in relation to my hourly consulting/contracting rate, reloading is an insanely stupid proposition. In moderation, reloading is an enjoyable activity for me, though, so I feel this is probably acceptable.

I want to take some time later to research primary movers of ammunition costs. If preloaded ammunition can somehow head back down to the $10/100 rounds zone, the economics and hassle balance change completely. Given how much volatility there's been in the last five years with respect to the political landscape and the voracious commodities markets (particularly wrt metals), I want to find out how much we can attribute ammunition price swings to these various factors, with an eye for maybe:

Waiting for a return to lower preloaded ammunition prices
Looking to hedge ammunition costs with commodities plays on metals (ETFs, mainly)
Doing further analysis to determine cost trajectories of components v. loaded cartridges

iPhone 3G with T-Mobile

For self-reference, and to save others time:

Got a friend's iPhone 3G going on T-Mobile. iPhone 3G, iOS4

Jailbroke with redsn0w
Unlocked with ultrasn0w

Changed T-Mobile data feature to the $10/month unlimited web2go plan - told the rep that I had a Samsung T509 crap-phone.

At this point, I had an issue with not being able to set the APN. It just wasn't an option in the General->Network menu on the phone. Attempting to access websites without changing the APN resulted in an error message from T-mobile goading me into a $25+ smartphone plan. I used the "email" option with www.unlockit.co.nz to set the internet2.voicestream.com server as my APN (I believe it was the first T-mobile option on unlockit)

After setting the APN, everything worked.

Regret on the jailbreak: Enabling background wallpaper, multitasking. iPhone 3G is painfully slow/laggy as-is; it needs to run as lean as possible.

Battery pack volume efficiency

Y'know, while I'm actually using this thing for the first time in a century...

Has it ever bothered anyone how amazingly inefficient current battery packs are with their geometric construction? Inside the nice monolithic battery packs you see out there for laptops, cordless tools, and the like, there's (typically) inside a large slab of soldered-together rechargeable variations on the everyday AA battery. Sure, they've got exotic chemistries, and they have tabs for soldering, but they're just a variation on a theme, and wasting so damn much space.

Nerd alert: If you think about it, actually.. say you have a battery pack of dimension (width, height, depth). There's w*h*d cubic units of volume in there, for whatever chemistry you care to fill it with. Now suppose you're constrained to filling this w*h*d with cylinder objects. Arbitrarily, I'm going to orient the length of the cells with the d dimension, set the diameter of the cells to h, and constrain dimension w to integer multiples of h. Our individual cell volumes look like (pi*(h/2)^2*d), multiplied by (w/h) cells. With a lil algebraic manipulation, you have (pi/4)*(w*h*d)... (pi/4) is ~0.785.

So, basically, you're throwing away ~21% of your total battery capacity by using this stupid construction technique. Actually more, since the individual cells have their own external packaging, thermal spacing, tabs, etc. Prismatic cells are a step in the right direction, but for fuckssake, they really need to be building *slab* cells. Yeah, I know there's engineering constraints like thermal migration, bulging, etc, but there's problems to be ironed out all the time. This is just delaying the inevitable.

PS: Extra credit - open up a 9V battery, and learn what fear is.

Firearms Tech Mini-Revisit

Cool - the powered picatinny rails idea I wrote about in 2005 is being worked on:

http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2009infantrysmallarms/wednesdaysessionvTorbjoern.pdf

Looking back and reading my page, I'm pleased that the XM8 died, too.

you'll never know how nerdy i really am

Microcenter had an ad for cheap USB flash drives. Something like $10 for a 1 GB. I'm completely in love with the information density they offer, as well as their overall ruggedness, so I went ahead and grabbed a couple. They had two flavors - a Kingston DataTraveler 1 GB and a Microcenter-branded drive, with U3.

It started with wanting to find out which of the two drives was faster. Using XBench, a benchmarking suite for Mac, I went ahead and ran some hard drive benchmarks. The results were pretty comparable, with the Microcenter-branded drive coming out a touch faster on uncached writes. (results below - just you see)

Then in the process of trying to get rid of the U3 "feature", I re-found that OS X's disk utility is a rather powerful piece of software. You can, among other things, create RAID arrays from a variety of different devices.

Sooo...

Plug, plug

Click, click

So more benchmarks were set up with the new flash drive RAID, and the hard drive on my laptop. The results, with the original data, are below:

Really, the whole playing around with drives and RAIDing was just shits-n-giggles. What really scares me is that I automatically started putting numbers into an Excel spreadsheet, pivoting out results, and making charts. I was halfway through specifying chart series before I realized what the hell was going on. Working in the commodities trading industry has done terrible things to my apathy.

Results interpretation is sort of a repeated exercise in "duh", but the most obvious point is that the hard drive kicks the crap out of the flash drives in writing. What's also "duh", but notable, is that while the hard drive took a hit going from sequential to random large block reads, the flash drive (and flash drive RAID) performance was more-or-less unaffected. Surprisingly, the 256k block read performance on the flash RAID array exceeded the hard drive in both sequential and random cases.

Putting it all to practice, copying over XVID movies to the flash raid array allowed for skipping around the movie without playback delay, where the same files on the hard drive required some time to get going after moving. I imagine this could be useful for video editing, or perhaps some database access situations. There's the usual worry about the life of NAND flash memory, but that doesn't really apply to reads, and it's now often stated that wear-leveling has resulted in flash drive lifetimes comparable to magnetic disks.

Overall, what really sticks out in this case is a kind of general engineering observation, in the implementation of systems manifesting dichotomy. Rather than utilizing one approach or either, igniting numerous holy wars en route, the solution is often to utilize a hybrid approach. The most solid examples coming to mind now are CISC/RISC (Micro-ops), and the essential data storage dichotomy of fast+small and slow+big (caching).

The key in any of these is to allow for an offset between the approaches, such that the weakpoints of one side exactly coincide with the strongpoints of the other. The situation illustrated with the comparison between the flash RAID and the hard drive shows a dichotomy that could be exploited accordingly. An interface could be implemented where random reads could be directed to the flash component of a drive, and sequential operations directed to the magnetic drive component. This segregation could be realized by statistical examination, or just with some sort of miniature tournament model, where the interface issues commands to the flash and magnetic components, and waits for the first component to return the result of the operation.

I know it's livejournalish to post IM conversations, but I appreciate harsh truth:

[22:34:59] me: why am i doing this
[23:30:54] friend: why are you doing this?
[23:54:52] me: I don't even know
[23:55:22] me: but I do know that if I'm gonn do uncached random reads, a ghetto flash raid array is wonderful!
[00:06:55] friend: why can't you just have normal hobbies?

Edit: I'm never as clever as I wish I were:
ipod shuffle raid
hybrid hard drives