Just wondering if this has any merit at all.  I was thinking about working up some loads for a couple 7.62x39's. Since steel case is as cheap as you can get does it make any sense to reuse the components and just powder and charge??in other words take the cartridge apart dump the powder and work up a load with my powder and charge. Seems it would be a lot cheaper than even buying the bullet.

If you average weight of 10 or so of the powder charges from the steel cased ammo, use that number with that same powder and put back in steel cases and then weigh each pulled bullet and segregate you can work up potentially accurate loads using the cheap steel cased stuff.

Yeah never thought of that   Tks. I am gonna try a few manufacturers. To see how they shoot but thinking the qc probably isn't the best. Some seem very accurate but they can't be relied on for the best accuracy

I have played around with this in various com-bloc calibers with surplus and recent manufacture. I did not find the powder charges to be all that inconsistent. You have to look at more variables than the powder if you are looking to improve accuracy. Weight of the projectile, crimp, etc...

Also the rifle you are shooting the ammunition out of is a huge factor. You can spend all that time and effort to make slightly more accurate ammunition, and not realize the result if the rifle is not capable of being accurate.

In the end, I found the exercise to not be worth the time and effort of pulling the projectiles, re-weighing the powder, sorting projectiles by weight, reassembling and crimping to make 4" group ammunition into 2" group ammunition.

The exercise proved it possible, but not practical.

So you want to do "mexican match" but replacing the powder instead of the bullet? In theory you could get lower SD and would be a more consistent load, but if the bullet you are using is a consistent 2-3 moa bullet in any load you really aren't going to gain much.

Exactly this. The powder is probably the least important variable in improving accuracy. Replacing the powder with a different one will yield little if any improvement in accuracy. Re-weighing the existing powder might yield some improvement.

I think there is more gain in original Mexican match. The better bullet is worth more than a slight variation in powder

Theres nothing wrong with the powder used in most loadings....its just the consistency. If you do as suggested above and get it exact, with or without commercial projectiles you'll get exactly the same results as if you used VVn120 or whichever commerciallt available powder. It might be stinkier but your accuracy will be the same.