Thread: redding dies
View Single Post
Old January 10, 2000, 12:54 AM   #7
flatlander
Senior Member
 
Join Date: June 16, 1999
Posts: 120
Bone: I bought a Redding Competition Seater die a couple of years ago for loading match ammo for my AR15's. At the same time, I borrowed a friend's NECO case gauge, which I used to check loaded round runout(or bullet wobble, if you want to call it that). My old RCBS seater was giving me anywhere from .004" to .012" of runout. Just switching to the Redding seater reduced that to an average of under .002". Whether that factor alone makes the Redding dies worth what they cost is up to you. I did find out that the seating stem in the die has a tendacy to pick up moly & wax off my moly'd bullets, which finds its way up into the hole the stem floats in. This will build up after 100 or so rounds are loaded and cause the runout to increase. It's a simple matter to unscrew the top of the die, remove the stem & chamber for cleaning, relube, and reassemble. The seating depth is not affected by this cleaning. Another thing - for our rapid fire 200&300yd ammo, we usually load 68/69 & 75/77gr. bullets, seated to feed through magazines. You can't do this with stick powders without compressing the charge, and my Redding seater didn't tolerate this. Its stem expanded at the bottom of the skirt where it's thinnest, and galled, then seized in the sliding chamber. Redding repaired it at no charge, but advised me the die wasn't suitable for seating on comressed charges. I really like the micrometer adjustment for seating depth, though. You might want to look at Bonanza's Ultra BR seater; it has the mic top also, and costs slightly less than the Redding.
flatlander is offline  
 
Page generated in 0.03636 seconds with 8 queries