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What did you do in the reloading room today?

I bought myself a new scope for my birthday and mounted it…..
Before:

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During:

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After:

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The Razor will end up on my 223AI that’s getting it’s 22 year old 8.5-25X50 Mk 4 retired.

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ShaKr524 said:
It really is. I had been given the 9mm military brass form a friend and didn't relish the thought of depriming and then swaging on the old RCII. When is saw the APP press and the swage kit on sale at Midsouth I said what the hell. Glad i did. Now I can also deprime/resize then tumble before loading on the PRO1000 which I prefer. That's another machine people dog on a lot but dammit if it doesn't make accurate ammo fast. I bought when it was all I could swing when raising a family and never felt the need to upgrade. The only problem with either machine is i run out of things to process or load pretty fast..... :) .
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I have an extra FW Arms self centering swage foot around, and I am going to try that out with the pocket swager. It works as is, but I think the self centering hold down will give me more confidence. Hopefully get to it today.
 
Choid said:
I have an extra FW Arms self centering swage foot around, and I am going to try that out with the pocket swager. It works as is, but I think the self centering hold down will give me more confidence. Hopefully get to it today.
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So this works very well. You can really go fast because of the auto center gizmo, and not worry about getting squirelley at all. I hooked it up to a Dillon casefeeder and just went until my arm got tired.
 
Choid said:
Can't say I've seen 45-70 with such a distinct shoulder on it before.
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That's a roll crimp on the brass. It's supposed to keep those big fat 500gr bullets from setting back during recoil on a repeater.
Honestly, with BP loads, the projectile should be sitting in the top of the charge anyway.
 
More like what I didn't do..........got some where around 150 rounds of Lapua .308 that I ran thru the AMP, and sized the neck..........was going to run them thru a mandrel............but it seems some whiskey has gotten in the way .............

Happy New Year..............

That shit can wait............
 
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Did someone say whiskey....

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Got 150 .223 rounds pulled this am than the primer feed on the S1050 started fouling up and required a clean up.

In the past month I have pulled about 4000 9mm and 700 .223.

Got 2000 more srp to stuff in brass.
 
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I’ve not touched my stuff much.

Decided to start working on the Hornady 224 brass after the two classes this fall. Suppressed brass from the gas gun is nasty.

Gonna deprime them tumble them in the big Dillon before I bother re-sizing.
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opeagle said:
I’ve not touched my stuff much.

Decided to start working on the Hornady 224 brass after the two classes this fall. Suppressed brass from the gas gun is nasty.

Gonna deprime them tumble them in the big Dillon before I bother re-sizing.View attachment 7773963
Click to expand...


I picked up some range brass that must have been shot suppressed or something and looked that sooty.

I put it in a big rubber bucket with some lemi-shine and it took the gross stuff off the brass.

I dried it in my furnace room. I put it all in an old pillow case and shook/moved it about to help clear water that was stuck in the case. DONT leave it in the bucket - it will never dry and water will stay in the bottom of the case.

My brass I shoot is clean enough to just toss in corn cob but if shot suppressed or it sat out and oxidized lemi-shine will be my new goto method.
 
Like an idiot I managed to scratch/gouge the inside of my current L.E. Wilson FL Bushing Sizing Die ...by unwisely using a screwdriver to pop loose a stuck bushing like a caveman instead of just going slow, using some cleaner, and doing it properly in a less harmful manner.

I've ordered a Forster custom honed FL die, but their lead time is ~12 weeks or so...

I tried cleaning the shit out of it with Boretech Eliminator and One Shot cleaner, and also hit the inside of the die a little with a piece of Scotchbrite pad wrapped around a chamber brush and chuked up in a drill... all to no avail. I'm 99.9% sure it's not due to brass deposits or anything, and is just plain due to me being dumb and dragging the corner of a flathead screwdriver blade in there.

Annoying.

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I will wet tumble it later in the process. I’ve played around with it both as an early step and as the last step before priming. At this point I’ve been wet tumbling after trimming.
 
also have a few I crushed with marks like that from a cordless drill .
 
reubenski said:
The drawback of wet tumbling is peening the necks. Eventually with enough wet tumbling or extended wet tumbling sessions the burs or peened out brass will turn into excess. As you size the brass with peened necks, the button and bushing will smash the the deformed neck material back in. It won't protrude as a bur anymore, but it doesn't go away. It collects at the case mouth. Eventually your case mouths will be thicker than the rest of your necks. You'll notice it when you try to slide a bullet into a fired case and there's resistance. You're effectively creating "mouth donuts". It appears like you have a tight neck chamber or your necks are too thick. Eventually you'll figure out the mouths are thick.

You can mitigate this by wet tumbling for shorter sessions, ommiting the pins or SS media, and trimming using a tri-cutter AFTER wet tumbling to clean up the micro-deformed (peened) case mouths and not allowing excess brass to build up from peening/ sizing. By trimming before wet tumbling, you're just beating up that nice sharp, clean case mouth you created.

I would recommend wet tumbling nasty brass for 20 minutes without pins. Drying. Lube. Resizing/ depriming. Dry media tumbling to remove lube. Trimming (chamfer/ Debur). Prime. Load.
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I get bummed out by the lack of carbon in the necks and causing the press feel to react accordingly when i have used SS pin tumbling.

Ill not wet tumble anymore.

Now you have me thinking why did lemi shine do a good job removing grime on the outside of my case but I am loading them now and necks are not jamming up the expander ball?

I dont know for what reason there is that conundrun but its definitely not the issue I had when SS pins were involved.

With my lemi-shine operation I do put the brass through a spin in corn cob with NuShine so perhaps most of the burnty neck carbon remains and the Nufinish imparts some wax.
 
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When I wet tumbled I had a service do it and they sent my brass back tumbled and annealed.

I prep brass on a S1050 and use a size die with expander ball in station one to fix any semi auto necks and than last station has a mandrel for setting tension.

I know most wont use an expander ball for precision but as mentioned its good to straighten necks dinged by the Garand, M1A or whatever AR.

My size die is the Dillon rapid trim at station 6 followed by mandrel at 7.

30-06 and .308 after pins was a bitch with having a sticky expander bal grinding through and back out of the necks even despite the Dilllon Case lube likely finding its way in there.

Any peened case mouths were taken care of by the rapid trim or when I chamfered and deburred after sizing.

I do love the shiny look of that wet tumbled bras though.
 
You an avoid any peening by not using pins. Just having brass on brass shouldn't present a problem.
 
Wallnut, nufinish and mineral spirits.
No need for anything else.

Range pickup brass.
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Edit: Forgot 1 used dryer sheet per tumble.
 
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My "routine" for pistol brass is to run through the auto decapper, then wet tumble no pins, then rollsize and then load. I'm not putting dusty garbage through machines not built to take it. Same for any rifle cartridge I shoot out of a semi auto, only difference being that they go on the CP2000 for prep after rather than straight to loading.

For rifle I can see being attached to your old shooting grime, but graphite is a better way to go.

Dust is disgusting. Medieval shit.
 
Decapped, cleaned and rollsized 12k 9mm casings. Did maintenance on presses. Fuck my life.
 
Got another 300 .223 loaded. Over a thousand for the week.

Primer drop was messing me up.

Tore everything down, polished the shuttle, polished top of the punch, made sure the shuttle slide back and forth like it was greased. Replaced shuttle punch spring. Rotated the small rubber vacuum hose on the shuttle.

Worked better today. Starting to think my old Win primers are out of spec. They were bought around 2013/2014 when Win was pumping shit out trying to restock after the Newtown panic.

Better today but still had 8 primers fly out of the machine or get crushed.

Prepped a pistol for class on Friday and cleaned the ACOG on my carbine....been getting some great gun maintenance done.
 
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pmclaine said:
Got another 300 .223 loaded. Over a thousand for the week.

Primer drop was messing me up.

Tore everything down, polished the shuttle, polished top of the punch, made sure the shuttle slide back and forth like it was greased. Replaced shuttle punch spring. Rotated the small rubber vacuum hose on the shuttle.

Worked better today. Starting to think my old Win primers are out of spec. They were bought around 2013/2014 when Win was pumping shit out trying to restock after the Newtown panic.

Better today but still had 8 primers fly out of the machine or get crushed.

Prepped a pistol for class on Friday and cleaned the ACOG on my carbine....been getting some great gun maintenance done.
Click to expand...

The primer system is the worst part of that machine, and of really any high end reloading machine. I can't count the number of things that have gone wrong with that little slide. One thing to check, which seems stupid, is that if you have a certain generation Super 1050, the screw holding in the little plastic roller on the primer slide can come out a bit and bind.

Also, the upside of the 1050/Mark 7 type presses is that you don't prime on the upstroke, so it is more consistent, among other things of course, but one downside is that you can't feel a tight primer pocket from a loose one. Those machines really want you to swage all your brass, even if it isn't mil crimped. You should have a nice little shiny bevel on the primer pocket for optimal performance. That way slightly less perfect primers will seat as well. Two essential tools are the Ammo Brass swage setter, and the Ballistic tools primer go/no go gauges.

This is directly from the people at Mark 7 when I told them my brass wasn't mil so I didn't really worry about crimps and swaging.
 
Had an interesting loading session yesterday. Had the Pro1000 set up for 9mm. I was loading a 1000 rounds for a friend and had about them 3/4 finished. I run into a small bin (thankfully) and check everything before dumping them into an ammo can. One of my younger kids was helping me by placing rounds in a 50rnd loading tray for primer inspection. All was hunky dory till I look into the next case coming around under the seating/crimping station and I don't see a powder charge! STOP EVERYTHING........ at this point I am pretty sure I had seen powder up till then (but also questioning if I had looked close at the last couple because she was asking questions). So I look at the top of the auto disk and I see the drop tube has powder in it :unsure:. I am using True Blue so it is a super fine ball powder that meters amazing. At first I am thinking powder bridging but with the fine ball that should be almost impossible. At this point I decide to pull the bullets and weigh charges on everything in the small bin I am working into. Out of the 80 or so rounds I find 2 without powder. All the rest weighed within .2 of what the measure was set for so the drops were consistent. Its then i look under the die head and see that somehow an empty 22lr case is stuck in the powder drop tube (it fits perfectly by the way) preventing any powder from exiting the tube into the case. This explains the completely empty cases vs the correctly charged ones. It also means there was a definitive line when it went from ok to no bueno. I checked another 50 randomly out of the ammo can just to make sure and they all were spot on so I am satisfied that the issue was contained and resolved. I still have no idea how the 22lr case got in there. The only conclusion I can come to is, it was in one of the 9mm case and when that case lifted to charge it was pressed into the drop tube. This as after I deprimed/resized on a APP press, tumbled, inspected and dropped them into the collator tubes on the Progressive. This is where using a containment system saved my bacon. Had I been running into a big bin with lots and lots of loaded rounds I would have had to pull them all to be sure.........
 
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opeagle said:
I’ve not touched my stuff much.

Decided to start working on the Hornady 224 brass after the two classes this fall. Suppressed brass from the gas gun is nasty.

Gonna deprime them tumble them in the big Dillon before I bother re-sizing.View attachment 7773963
Click to expand...
I'm in the same boat. Not sure what to do. Rice seems best for the necks, but it barely makes a dent in suppressed sludge.

I'm thinking I may do this:
1. 30 minutes wet tumble with dawn and lemishine (no pins)
2. lube (imperial), size, mandrel
3. trim every firing (remove neck burr)
4. rice tumble
5. prime
6. charge
7. seat

I need an annealer, I suppose that would go in between step 1 & 2. Thinking of something cheap for now like the EP annealer.
 
Started to rebuild from my previous house being stuck in a closet need to extend the bench, add my other shelf, and put a gunwork bench on the opposing wall. Having it in a larger room really made me see how low on components I really am.
 

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Installed a HitFactor shellplate roller-bearing/low mass detent kit in my XL650. Big different in smoothing out the shellplate rotation. like it’ll reduce powder spill and really smooth out the press operation. Have the day to myself, so once I get some laundry done I’m gonna load some .40 S&W frangible to give it a test.
 
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Loaded some 204 Ruger which makes me realize my hands are too big for some of this shit.
 
Just got finished tumbling few hundred 223 and now depriming them. Gonna check the pockets as some seem to be getting a little loose, might be time to start a new batch.
 
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I have used Nu-Finish as an additive for a long time with good results.in walnut media. I saw this in the polishing section at Harbor Freight the other day when picking up media and some more Nu-Finish. Thought i would see if it worked any faster than what i have been using. I used 4 table spoons cut with equal parts Isopropyl alcohol and ran the tumbler for about half hour. The cases in the pic were not crazy dirty to start with but had been sized and were coated with a little one shot. I ran them for an hour and they look great. It would normally take about 3 hours with Nu-Finish to do the same. If you still dry tumble it might be worth a try.
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