Scott Satterlee rethinks and greatly simplifies his load development procedure

Scott Satterlee (on left) discusses his new method with the Lillys (center and right)

Scott Satterlee needs no introduction for most who reload since he is the developer of the well known Satterlee load ladder development procedure. This method loads a given cartridge’s brass/primer/powder/bullet combination with incremental powder charges and looks for a ‘node’ where an increment of powder charge results in little change in the velocity of the bullet. Where there is little change in velocity, there is reduced sensitivity to variation, and that indicates a possible optimal charge.

However, according to Satterlee, over the last few years he has been working on ways to simplify his load development and reloading process in order to reduce the time he spends on both. For a PRS Competition context, his attitude, and rightly so, is that time spent on shooting practice, and more importantly the rest of his life (friends and family) is time better spent than hours obsessing over minutia at the reloading bench. Therefore he rethought his methods and came up with one that works as well and is much less time consuming. The basis of this new approach is using JUMP LADDERS rather than load ladders, and using very, very long jumps that most anyone would consider insanely long.

According to Satterlee, other than annealing (and only every other cycle), he only tumbles, resizes, neck trims (if needed) and reloads his brass, and even uses a PROGRESSIVE reloader. He still gets excellent results with a reload recipe that has proven to be extremely robust. How about not needing to redevelop his load through six new barrels from two different manufacturers? Amazing, right?

But, really, does it work? Listen to Satterlee describe what he did before, and what he does now in this video. This is a sit-down discussion between Satterlee and the Lillys detailing the evolution of his new approach. Do yourself a favor and set aside 30 minutes to watch and closely listen to this video; it is full of time-saving reloading gold.