I am in the same court with you Paddy. I made my own cases from FF brass but I FL size them and the seat a bullet a bit long. Slide it into the chamber with a firm push and retract. If it tends to stick, the bullet is in the lands, so I seat it a bit deeper and repeat until there is no tendency to stick. That is my distance to lands.

It's way easier and there's no guess work involved. This method will get consistent results to .001 and basically replicates the wooden dowel method of shuttling the bullet back and forth to "feel" for the lands, only you're shuttling the whole cartridge back and forth.

I keep and label my modified case with date, gun, bullet and OAL measurement, and use it periodically to measure throat erosion. Very easy to use and accurate piece of tooling.