May 14, 2026 · By Diane Johnson
A load workup goes faster when you treat it as a fixed sequence instead of a guessing game. Same steps, same order, every time. Below is the workflow I run, and it's the one LoadOut is built around. The cartridge in the examples is the 6 GT, but the structure is identical for a 6.5 Creedmoor or any other modern match round. Nothing here changes with the chambering except the published numbers you start from.
Read this part first. This article is about process, not recipes. You always start from current, published load data — the powder maker's tables, the bullet maker's data, and a reputable loading manual for your exact components — and you stay inside those limits. LoadOut does not give you a charge to use. It is a record-keeping and reference tool: it stores what you shot and does the math on it. The starting numbers come from the manufacturers, every single time. If you're new to handloading, that's not a suggestion, it's the whole foundation.
The 6 GT earned its place in the Precision Rifle Series for three plain reasons: it's accurate, it's efficient with powder, and it kicks lightly enough that you can spot your own impacts through the scope. That last part matters more than people expect. A low-recoil cartridge lets you watch where a shot lands during a ladder instead of losing it in muzzle jump, which makes the whole workup easier to read. The same logic is why 6.5mm rounds like the 6.5 Creedmoor stay popular. None of that depends on a specific charge, so I'm not going to give you one. It depends on the cartridge being well-behaved, and the 6 GT is.
Pull the data for your exact powder, primer, brass, and bullet from the manufacturers and a current manual. That defines your floor and your ceiling. Your ladder lives inside that range and nowhere else. Write down what the manual says before you touch a press. This is the only source of charge figures in the entire process.
Step the charge up across the published window and shoot the ladder. Two well-known approaches: OCW (Optimal Charge Weight, from Dan Newberry), where you watch where the bullets land and look for a span of charges that print to the same place — a stable node. Or the Satterlee velocity ladder, where you chronograph an ascending ladder and hunt for the flat spot, the stretch where velocity stops climbing much. Pick one. Both point you at the same thing: a window where the rifle stops caring about small changes.
Put numbers to the ladder. Chronograph every shot and watch three things: standard deviation, extreme spread, and where velocity plateaus. Low SD and tight ES tell you the load is consistent shot to shot. The plateau tells you where the barrel's harmonics are settling. When those line up — velocity flattening while SD and ES drop — you're looking at a node. This step is only as good as your chronograph; junk data here wastes the whole ladder.
Don't trust one ladder. Load the charge you picked again and shoot it fresh to confirm it repeats. One good group can be luck. Two is a node. If the second run falls apart, go back to the ladder; if it holds, you've got your charge and you can stop touching it.
Now hold the charge fixed and vary seating depth. You're changing the bullet's distance to the lands in small steps and comparing group size at each one. The charge is locked; the only variable is jump. Some depths print tighter than others as the bullet's entry into the bore changes. Find the depth that gives the smallest, most repeatable group and keep it. The charge gets you onto the node; seating depth is just the final polish on a load that's already good.
A load you can't reproduce isn't a load, it's a story. Write down the components, the conditions, and the results so you can rebuild it next season without re-running the whole workup. This is the step people skip, and it's the one that pays off most. Six months from now you won't remember the details. Your log will.
LoadOut walks this workflow start to finish so you're not juggling spreadsheets and notebook pages. You enter your charges, feed in chronograph data, and it does the math: per-charge mean velocity, standard deviation, extreme spread, group centroid, and mean radius. Lined up that way, the ladder starts to answer itself: you pick the charge that holds velocity flattest while SD, ES, and group size tighten together. It runs on iOS, Android, Apple Watch, and Wear OS, and stays local-first — everything you develop lives on your device, not on our servers. And to be clear one more time: LoadOut records and references your work — the charges themselves always come from published manufacturer data.
Run the workflow once, log it once, repeat it forever. Explore LoadOut →