Considering reloading 25 ACP ammo

You can't call anything a hobby unless its consuming your time, and quickly turning into a money pit.  Which leads you to do things like spending money on tools and equipment that will help you spend less money on your hobby long term.  This brings me to my currently delima.  Should I start reloading my own ammo?

Unless you have lots of spare time, and are either shooting very large volumes of ammo, or are shooting very expensive ammo, reloading your own ammo doesn't make much sense.

Reloading common rounds like 9mm and 45 ACP

Common rounds like these are too cheap to reload.  At least they are now that ammo prices have come back down to reasonable levels.  50 rounds of 9mm can now be bought for around $10, and 45 ACP can be bought for about $13 / box.  At those prices you might save a few cents per round, and that doesn't factor in your time or the equipment needed to reload them.  This makes reloading for these rounds not very cost effective.

Reloading uncommon rounds like 25 ACP or 25 Auto

Recently I purchased a small pocket pistol off gunbroker, and it shoots the small 25 ACP cartidge. Even though its about the size of a 22LR round, it sells for about 50 cents per round.  This is a situation where reloading might make sense, especially if you plan on shooting this gun a lot.  

So lets do some math on what it costs to reload this round.

This is assuming we have to start from scratch buying all our components separately.

Of course if we save all our brass this gets the price down to $0.15 per round.    If we buy in much higher quantities, we can possibly get the price down to under $0.10 per round which would bring our cost down to $5 for a box of 50.  This is a $20 savings off of the $25 normal retail cost.

Equipment Costs

However we still need to buy our reloading press, dies, and scales for measuring out the powder.  

Figure after shipping you are closer to $100.  This is the cheapest way to reload, but not exactly the most time efficient way.  If we want to do things a little faster, we will need to spend over $300 for a progressive setup.

Reusing old Brass

Old casings have to be cleaned before they can be reloaded.  Well let me rephrase that, you should clean your old brass before reloading,  Dirty Brass is more likely to jam up your gun, and cause cycling issues.  To clean old brass you need a brass tumbler and some polishing medium ( typically ground walnut, or corn cobb ).  

Tumbler machines can cost $50 - $100, plus about $10 for the medium that brass will tumble around in.  You then have to run them for a good half a day or so, to complete the cleaning of the brass.  

Conclusion

After realizing that there is an almost unlimited supply of used brass laying around the range, I decided that it might be more cost effective to reload than previously though.  Primers only cost about 2 - 3 cents each, and bullets are maybe 10 cents each.  Powder is dirt cheap, considering how little is needed per load.  Even at today's prices 9mm can't be found for less than 20 cents per round.  25 ACP on the other hand costs about 50 cents per round.  The important thing to is ask yourself how much you really plan on shooting.  I make it out to the range maybe 3 or 4 times a year, and go though 150 rounds of each 9mm, 45 ACP, and 25 ACP.  Brass is plentiful,  and Bullets can be cast from old bullets if you are desperate.  Primers and powder are really the only things you need to stock up on in case there is another run on reloading supplies.

I am tempted to buy a single stage press setup, as I only plan on reloading maybe 200 rounds of each caliber I shoot ( 9mm, 45 acp, 25 acp ).  I would do this until I feel I am familar with the equipment, then eventually move on to a progressive setup.  Fortunately the Dies for a single stage press should fit into a progressive press without issue.  Plus this type of hardware doesn't loose that much of its value.  You can typically sell it on the used market and get most of your money back.

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