Interview with Robin Sharpless from Redding

If you have been reloading for any period of time, you will have heard of Redding.Robin Sharpless is the Vice-President of Redding and an absolute wealth of information.We have been trying to get together for a chat for a bit, and finally, the stars aligned!Transcript (rough edit)For those of you who have been reloading for a little while the brand Redding will already be quite familiar. I have been trying to organise an interview with Robin Sharpless their Vice-President for a little while and finally our schedules have synced together and we were able to spend a good hour or so talking about things Redding and Reloading. Robin is an absolute wealth of knowledge when it comes to Reloading; both of the Redding products and their inner workings and what sets them apart from many of the other products out there and then also just Reloading in general. So we cover off a lot of subjects; there is going to be a lot of stuff you can learn in there; of particular interest to me was our discussion regarding neck turning and its relative importance in the greater scheme of things, and a little bit about primer pocket forming and consistency which leads to concentricity which leads to lower SD and more accuracy and everything like that. So check it out; this is Robin Sharpless from Redding. Enjoy.Q:      I would like to think most people who are into reloading anyway are going to be familiar with Redding as a company, but you could give them a little bit of a history of the company; a bit of background where they got going.A:      Absolutely. Redding was founded in 1946 in Courtland, New York right at the end of the Second World War and the first product that they ever made was a powder comparator scale. The original scale didn’t actually give a weight but what it did was it allowed you to set a weight and match the charge and again that was in ’46. The company continued to grow in Courtland. Mythology says that it actually was started in a chicken coop behind the fellow’s house and grew into a very small company and then continued to grow; added on dyes, added powder measures, additional powder scales, continued to file lots of cool patterns on things like our competition seating dyes and all of our things with micrometres on them and in them; and really grew to be a sort of uniquely oriented niche company serving the very high or sophisticated reloader – and I don’t mean that in terms of just money but in terms of the sophistication of their demands; what they wanted that ammunition to really do.The part of it that is interesting is we have always categorised the reloading business into two people; one person is the reloader whose primary goal is to produce ammunition as good as commercial qualities at a lower cost so that they can shoot more; and then the hand-loader who is the individual that’s looking to do something that you can’t buy off the shelf and attain levels of quality that you would never be able to have produced even by some of the custom ammo houses, but be able to actually tailor load to his rifle or his handgun or whatever he is after, so that it either improves accuracy, range or gives them the opportunity to do something in terms of bullet weights or bullets that aren’t available in the commercial market.Q:      It's interesting; there was an article I actually put up on my site recently is that difference between the reloader and the hand-loader. At one end I shoot 9mm pistol for IPSC which realistically like you say is reloading; it's an economical choice where I am just going through a couple of hundred rounds at a particular session and just want to reload up to commercial quality but I am only shooting to a distance where that’s fine. And then the other end is like you say the hand-loading for my long range rifle where you are starting to measure ever...