Reloaders, please fill in the following blank.......

We don't shoot the volume that most of you shoot…..and have a minimum of high volume tools. We have owned a Dillon 600 for about 10 years…..one of these days, I'll try to figure out how to use it! 🫢 About the time I was gonna put it to use…..the politics and the shortages prompted me to conserve resources!

So, I guess that there's nothing that would stop me! memtb
 
I've been reloading and only shooting my handloads for over 40years. When I bought ammo, it was to get the brass. I still have and use some of the stuff I bought way back then. Like my RC press, an MTM case tray, and various dies. When the RCBS chargemaster came out I retired my 505 scale and sold my RCBS powder measure (wish I hadn't), up till then I was still trimming cases with the Lee trimmer chucked in a hand drill. That chargemaster kicked off my reloading modernization. I love how my super trickler can throw a charge faster than I can seat a bullet. I have a 4 station electric trimmer and an annealer. I love it all, but NONE of it is irreplaceable. I would gladly fall back to the Stone Age of reloading before I would pay the prices I see on boxes of ammo.
 
Can't think of anything that is irreplaceable in the reloading world in the equipment category. There always seems to be a new or better piece of equipment to tempt me. If I was shooting high volumes of something like 9mm or 223, speed and efficiency probably would drive whether it would be worth it to continue reloading. I'm not in this category.
 
And I'll offer the opposite answer: My beam scale. I have a RCBS Chargemaster auto trickler, but with large extruded powders, I am never quite satisfied, especially during work up, where I want the charge to be perfect.

Nothing quite as constant as the same Ohaus/RCBS scale from the 1980s. I know my loads over decades are being compared by one constant -- that beam scale. It gets covered all the time, babied and never abused.

If I lost my beam scale, would I stop reloading? Probably not, but its the one piece of equipment from my RCBS starter kit from 1981 that I still use every session.

To be fair, for loading a batch of something already known, I might check the chargemaster once at the beginning and then knock out 50 rounds. I'm not crazy......
 
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