April 28, 2026 · By Diane Johnson
Load development is the process of finding the combination of powder charge and bullet seating depth that your rifle shoots most consistently. The handloading craft turns on a single idea: a stable "node." A charge node is a window of powder charge where the rifle's behavior changes slowly — small errors in your charge weight, and small swings in temperature, barely move the bullet's point of impact. Find that window and your groups tighten, your velocity steadies, and your cold-bore shot lands where your sighters did.
Why it matters: no powder dispense is perfect, no two days are the same temperature, and no chronograph reads to zero error. A load tuned to a node tolerates that real-world slop. The four methods below are different routes to the same destination. Each looks at a different signal — point of impact, muzzle velocity, vertical dispersion at distance, or group size against the lands.
OCW — Optimal Charge Weight, developed by Dan Newberry — hunts for a charge node by watching where the bullets land rather than how fast they leave. You load round-robin groups across an ascending charge ladder, then fire them at a target and study how the group center shifts from one charge to the next. Across most of the ladder the impact climbs steadily. But over a small span of charges the point of impact barely moves: three adjacent charge weights all print to roughly the same place. That plateau is the optimal charge weight. Because the impact is insensitive to charge there, the resulting load stays stable across temperature swings and the small measurement error every reloader lives with.
The Satterlee method, named for Scott Satterlee, looks at velocity instead of impact. You chronograph an ascending charge ladder — one round at each increasing charge — and plot muzzle velocity against charge weight. Most of the curve rises predictably, every added grain buying more speed. You are hunting for a "flat spot": a span of two or three adjacent charges where velocity plateaus and barely increases. That flat spot is a stable node — the barrel's harmonics are settling there, so the load is forgiving of small charge variation. It is fast to run and leans entirely on clean chronograph data, which makes a reliable chronograph the price of admission.
The Audette ladder, attributed to Creighton Audette, reads the node off the target at distance. You fire ascending charges — one shot each — at a single aiming point set well downrange, and you note where each lands in height. As charge increases, the impacts generally climb up the target. The node reveals itself where consecutive charges stop climbing and cluster together vertically: several shots stacking at nearly the same height instead of marching up the paper. That vertical cluster marks the charge node, and the extra distance magnifies the effect so it is easier to read than a close-range group. Picking a charge from the middle of that cluster gives you the most tolerance.
Once a charge node is settled, seating depth is the fine adjustment. A seating-depth ladder holds the charge fixed and varies how far the bullet sits from the lands — the rifling at the front of the chamber — in small steps. You load a few rounds at each depth, fire them, and compare group size. Some seating depths will print noticeably tighter than others as the bullet's jump to the lands changes how it enters the bore. The goal is the depth that produces the smallest, most repeatable group. Where charge selection finds the stable node, seating depth squeezes the last bit of precision out of it.
LoadOut has all four methods — OCW, the Satterlee velocity ladder, the Audette ladder, and seating-depth tuning — built in, so you can run any of them without spreadsheets or guesswork. As you log each charge, it computes the per-charge statistics that tell you whether you have found a node:
Side by side, those figures turn a ladder into a decision: the charge where velocity flattens, SD and ES drop, and the group draws in is your node. And because LoadOut is local-first, every load you develop stays on your device — no tracking, no general analytics, just your data.
Ready to find your node? Explore LoadOut →