[Dangus]

Hey guys. I'm a young man (22) who has been shooting since I was a tiny little guy, but nobody in my family has been a handloader/reloader, and I only have one real good shooting buddy outside the family who I am certain does handloads(don't really know anyone else in Eastern Iowa well enough that I know if they reload or not, never bothered to ask most of them).

Anyway, I have a few questions here that should be interesting.

Is there any websites on how cases are formed? I know some handloaders can form their own, but they all tell me it's horribly expensive and time consuming and the only guys I know of that do it are not local friends, and they only do it for .50 BMG for match shooting from what I can tell. Why is it so pricey for the little guy, but factories can crank these things out like mad? Can't a little case forming machine be made?

Powder, can it be bought in bulk to save money? It seems like the powder is expensive enough that when compared to mil surplus rounds it often costs more to reload them than to buy a new one, and that's just talking cost of powder. Granted mil surplus is dirt cheap, but it still strikes me as really strange that powder would cost more than a whole round does.

Putting rounds together. Factories probably do this on a conveyor system that loads each round as it goes by and does it quite rapidly. Do any reloaders make anything similar, or have anything similar that they can buy?

Forming bullets. Just like cases, I am always told that making jacketted rifle bullets is more expensive than buying them. Once again this would seem to make no sense. If cost of materials is higher than a new bullet in some cases, then obviously the factory is paying a lot less for the materials and still has enough to cover labour and then sell at a profit which ends up less than I'd be spending. This stikes me as odd. Is there any rapid production techniques for homemade jacketted bullets?

Why can't steel be reloaded? Steel can be annealed, it would seem that it could be reloaded, is the price just too much or am I missing something? As for the Berdan primers, those pop right out when you anneal the cases, and those that don't come out by blowing air into the case with either your mouth or an air hose.

Finally, is there any truth to these places selling pulled bullets that are supposedly 'air-pulled'?? The claims of a few sites that they use air to pull their rounds seems plausible enough but my reloader buddy scoffs at it saying that pulled stuff is still pulled stuff and if you're gonna handload you might as well just pay for new bullets instead of pulled, no matter how it was pulled.