Reloading made easy with Hornady’s Auto Charge® Pro powder measurer

Preparing for an African safari means putting plenty of carefully assembled rounds downrange before departure. With a South Africa and Mozambique adventure on the horizon, Mike Arnold added the Hornady® Auto Charge® Pro to his reloading bench to see how it compared with the balance scale and hand-trickling method he had relied on for decades. Here, he shares his experience setting it up, the time it saved and, most importantly, how those reloads performed during his range preparations.

As a student and professor, I’ve used electronic scales for decades in laboratory settings. They are extremely accurate and a real labor and time-saver. That begs the question of why I never looked into such equipment for automating my reloading exercises. The simple answer, and one that is a tad sad, is because I lacked the imagination to extract myself from the tried-and-true balance I’d used since learning reloading as a kid from my dad. So, it was with a level of befuddlement when Hornady’s Auto Charge® Pro powder measurer penetrated the decades of muscle memory in which I trickled a powder charge into a metal dish swinging at the end of the balance bar. Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t anything wrong with the balance I’ve used for years, but as a hunter interested in repeatable loads, there are equally accurate, and much faster, means by which to do my powder charging. I thus found the Auto Charge® Pro to be a wonderful addition to my reloading bench.

Setup for the Auto Charge® Pro was dead easy (see YouTube short), and that conclusion comes from a guy who struggles with reading instructions. I don’t mean that I can’t usually understand instructions, I mean I don’t generally bother reading them. I don’t say that with pride, but with the knowledge that I once installed an automatic garage door opener upside down; I don’t mean the controller, I mean the bar, chain, etc. In my defense, it worked for 10 years…but I got off topic. I did sort of read the setup instructions for the Auto Charge® Pro, and it worked first time, every time, during my reloading session. The fact that what normally took me several minutes to do, namely trickling a load of powder onto the balance scale, took a mere 20 seconds was marvelous. More importantly, I did not need to start over after overshooting the needed number of grains. In past sessions, the latter was always the catalyst for choice mutterings from me.

Regardless of how straightforward the setup was and how fast the dispensing went, obviously, the real test of how the Auto Charge® Pro performed occurred with the reloads during the subsequent range workup (YouTube short). The short answer, the reloads stoked by the Hornady electronic measurer proved as extremely accurate as those cartridges charged by manual, hand trickling. The accompanying graph gives previous results of the MG Arms 7mm Remington Magnum’s performance with hand trickle loads. Because the goal of my range time was practice for an upcoming African safari, I only fired from the 4StableSticks, standing rest, and not the bench. The accuracy of the cartridges from the Auto Charge® Pro session fell right in the middle of that accomplished in my previous shooting sessions.

To call myself pleased by the results really is a vast understatement. Not only will the Auto Charge® Pro save an incredible amount of time and effort when preparing ‘normal’ loads, it will allow me to quickly transition between different weights for reviewing the accuracy of rifles and bullets sent my way by various manufacturers.

Author profile

Mike Arnold is professor in the Department of Genetics at the University of Georgia and author of the 2022 book, BRINGING BACK THE LIONS: International Hunters, Local Tribespeople, and the Miraculous Rescue of a Doomed Ecosystem in Mozambique. Mike’s newest book, BRINGING BACK THE WILD – Stories from Revitalized Ecosystems Around the World and How Sport Hunting Supports Them, appeared in June 2025. Mike is also host of the podcast, Bringing Back the Wild. You can find a description of Mike’s travels, talks, articles, books, and podcast at mikearnoldoutdoors.com.