Powder Measure Redux Part 7: Frankford Arsenal Platinum Series Powder Measure

Frankford Aresenal has been coming up with a bunch of innovative reloading equipment recently - or, rather, productizing the ideas that existed before, but were implemented only by small companies specializing in semi-custom products, making this initially rarefied equipment available to common reloader at a fraction of the price.

We have recently reviewed their case trimmer, I love their very inexpensive electronic scale (though I only use it for quick sanity-checks), and their wet tumbler allows cleaning the brass down to the primer pockets for far, far less than competitors.

So, understandably, when they came out with a powder measure, I had to review one. Now, most powder measures have more or less the same physical design, and produce roughly the same accuracy. Here, for example, are three popular powder measures dispensing Varget:

(As a reminder, if the standard deviation of a sample is X, a single drop has a 68% probability to be within +/-X from the average, 95% within +/- 2X, and 99.7% within +/-3X. In the case of these powder measures a standard deviation of 0.1 means that 95% of your charges will be within 0.2gn - above or below - of the goal.)

As you can see, the cheapest (Lee, street price $25), the mid-range (RCBS, $175 for pistol/rifle combo), and the very high end (Redding, $200 for rifle only) produce very similar standard deviations (and, in fact, statistically indistinguishable in the sample above.

(You can find complete results of our testing here.)

The Frankford Arsenal measure is very, very similar to most high end powder measures. It has all the high-end features such as the powder baffle and the micrometer-controlled powder chamber. It comes with two bench mounts - a stand and a bench-front mounting brackets (the stands are considerable extras in RCBS and Redding powder measures). It is sturdily made and is quite hefty.

The most important difference is the price. We sell it, as of this writing, for $71.

But how well does it work?

Radwag AS/60/220/C2 semi-microbalance scale was used for weighing the samples. Here are the results (numbers are in grains).

In other words - it works exactly as well as any high-end competition powder dropper, at half to one third of the price. If you are looking for a powder measure, this one deserves to be on your shopping list!