kcofohio asked:
Who helped you start on your journey?
Nobody.
I got into reloading in the mid-1970's as a teenager because I had a Universal 30 Carbine and could not buy ammunition for it (30 Carbine was considered a pistol cartridge and you had to be 21). My father would buy ammunition for me, but limited me to one box of 20 cartridges per week because he didn't want me to spend all of my money shooting. Minimum wage at the time was $3.35 per hour and that's what I was making as the weekend guy at the local radio station.
Reloading was the only way to shoot more, but my father disapproved because when he had been a teenager one his friends who was a handloader that engaged in very unsafe practices and he was afraid I would blow myself up.
Still, the lure of more shooting was greater than the fear of being maimed, so I got an original Lee Loader. Paid $6.97 (still have the box with the price sticker on it), a box of bullets, a box of primers and a pound of Winchester 630 powder and set to work. I set up in my grandmother's garage and followed the instructions in the Lee Loader to the letter. That was the only instruction I had.
In time, a friend joined me in reloading, but like me, he was a novice and we plodded forward. In 1978, I had saved up enough to buy an RCBS Reloader Special press, a set of dies and a scale (balance for you purists) and I began to learn how to use it. I had no powder measure and so weighed out everything on the scale one load at a time. My friend and I worked out everything by trial and error.
By 1979, when I got a Mini-14, I had enough confidence in my abilities as a reloader to buy a single box of factory ammunition to make sure the rifle worked properly and thereafter to shoot only ammunition I crafted. It was also about this time my father developed enough confidence in my reloads to start using them. In fact, for the last 38 years he has shot nothing else. Once he dropped his objection to reloading, he helped me develop a rigorous system of procedures for reloading, a system for tracking components and loaded ammunition and a system for continuously reviewing the result of my shooting in order to do routine process evaluations and quality assurance tests.