I reload my own ammo and occasionally a few rounds for friends. I have log files for each caliber and I recently wondered how many rounds I have reloaded for the various calibers. The log files were simple text files and included calibers for which I just did some chronograph measurements and calibers I only did preliminary things like explore powders and bullets to use.

It turned out that the typical log file entries were consistent enough that I could write a simple program to count the number of rounds I reloaded. A typical entry looks like this:

12/27/2014 100 rounds. Win primers. 180 grain Winchester JHP over 6.0 grains of N350. 0 rejects.

All the program had to do was search each line in the files for the word “rounds” preceded by a number then sum those numbers. I found a few cases were I had recorded group sizes or chronograph tests that match the format and changed those to something like “10 shots over the chronograph” from “10 rounds…” and ran the program on *.log in the reloading directory. The result was about double of what I expected in every caliber:

223.LOG: 2027 rounds.
22LR.log: 0 rounds.
3006.LOG: 467 rounds.
300WIN.LOG: 1351 rounds.
40SW.LOG: 34941 rounds.
45.log: 0 rounds.
9MM.LOG: 18643 rounds.
Total: 57429 rounds.

It’s not near as many as a lot of people but I was still amazed. Of course I did start reloading on October 3^rd, 1996 which is over 18 years ago. So that only figures out to about 3200 rounds per year. I’m hoping to up that considerably and do a lot more shooting this year.