Thread: The Four Stages of Handloading Competence

Greeting Again,
After a cuppa and some cheese on crackers I am back.

3. Conscious Competent. We work at what we don't know.
In this stage the path forks in a number of places. Terry Wieland divided this stage into three sections, confident, overconfident and dangerous. Confident plodders like me carry on expanding their knowledge and understanding of handloading. We seldom go beyond book data and only with underloaded cartridges in strong rifles. The overconfident often work up beyond book data mining the safety margin built into most book data until it is wafer thin. The dangerous tell us that all book data is crap and that they can load way better ammo than that. Fabulous velocities and accuracy is loudly announced to those that will listen and many that would rather not. These are often shot with no one else present for some reason.

4 Unconscious Competent. We don't even have to think about knowing it.
This is the final stage in development of competency. Terry called it sensible or perhaps fearful depending on the handloaders prior experience. I don't think it really applies to handloading as new stuff appears every Monday and Friday, or so it seems to me. We are likely look forward to being permanently locked in Terry's confident section of stage 3 sifting through the new stuff and modifying our handloading practise where required. We would also hope that the overconfident and dangerous drift back to meet us over time without the loss of any body parts.

Almost time for lunch. Will be back shortly with some observations of the effect of the interweb on handloading competency.
Regards Grandpamac.