Over the weekend I loaded up some 30-30 and .45LC with my new carbide dies & hand loader. Out of both caution & curiosity, I weighed each of the 30-30 rounds just now, mostly to make sure I didn't double load (hard to do), or not load gunpowder into each. I set my little cheapo electronic scale to grains and weighed each, sorting by weight. The mean weight seemed to be right around 322-324 gn with a few 328 & a couple 320's. I noticed the weight changed a bit when re-weighing them, so if this is a problem, I'll break out my good triple poise scale & check them with it.

All the brass is from the same manufacturers (FC), all the primers are the same and all the bullets are the same (Speer 150 gn 30-30), and they've all been loaded using a Lee 2.2CC (30gn) dipper with Hodgdon's 3031. Now that I've weighed them, I know they all have gunpowder in them (I checked with a flashlight before loading them as well) and most are within a couple of grains of each other with the outliers I've mentioned already.

My question is, how big a deal are the outliers? Since I didn't weigh the brass before I reloaded them, for all I know the difference in the weight could be due to differences in the brass.

Thread moved from the reloading classified section to the reloading discussion section....

Measuring loaded rounds, as you've seen, will give you numbers all over the place. You can't use this method to check your powder charge, unfortunately.

Every component of the loaded round (primer, brass, powder, bullet) will vary a bit, so the final tally will jump around a lot.

Unless you weigh them all before. But why the hell would anyone do that.

As others have said you cant really weight a completed round. When the powder charge is large enough (30+gr) you could do as you did and get the average weight and as long the results are similar to yours, you will know each round has a powder charge. If you didnt have a powder charge you would have a round that was low by a good amount.

Every single component will vary weight wise. If you weighed 3 empty cases you would get three different weights. Same with the bullets. If you weigh each one you will notice a slight variance in weights.

Theres people who will weigh each bullet and sort them into "lots" of the same weights. But for that to be worth while you need to both be the shooter (sub half MOA IMO CONSISTENTLY) and have the gun that can shoot that well

I just clicked on the first reloading topic & started typing, sorry.

So, what you guys are telling me is that it's not that critical?

What about for the .45LC, which only has 7 grains, again I haven't weighed them beforehand, and I'd expect some variances there as well.

Exactly.

It's critical to get your powder charge correct BEFORE you load it, of course, and it's important that all of your bullets are the intended weight (e.g., you didn't mix 200- and 255-grain bullets), but the weight of the finished rounds isn't relevant.

.45 colt and 30-30 used to be loaded with pretty much whatever was available, and people still managed to kill stuff.