Sorry for not seeing your questions till now. I got both dies (gave em to myself for Christmas), but then my grandkids gave me a non-traditional Christmas present. They gave me the nastiest, meanest chest cold I can ever remember. I'm still struggling with it, and I'm feeling pretty darn puny, and thank goodness I have plenty of football to watch. I'm so weak that my wife had to help me pull kleenex out of the box the other day, and it took me 3 tries to tear toilet paper.
So anyway, it'll be another week or so before I really feel up to doing all the loading and shooting. And I've made a few planned changes to the testing. I'll shoot 15 round groups (maybe 20 rounds), but I'll use the 40 grain Nosler BT instead of the 65 gr Sierra GK. The Nosler shoots a bit better and I have a whole lot of them. I don't plan to shoot the mixed headstamp/non-prepped cases again, since I think I learned what I needed to know, in that it shoots pretty good, but not as good as the fully prepped and sorted cases. And I'm going to skip the partial resizing section of the test, because the 223 case (in my hands and in my experience) doesn't partial resize well because the case isn't tapered enough and partial resizing causes the shoulder to be pushed out. So, unless someone talks me into doing more than the following, here's the plan: Full Length sizing with a Redding non-bushing die; neck sizing with a Redding standard neck sizing die; neck sizing with a Lee Collet die; and FL sizing with a Redding full length bushing die. Now all I'll need is cool weather with low wind speed. And I'll need to quit coughing before I get to shooting. That'll throw a few fliers, for sure.
Since I haven't started all the loading and testing yet, if anyone has any reasonable suggestions about changes to my plan, please feel free to speak up. I'm doing this for me, but I might as well take the time and effort to make the results worthwhile and believable to you guys too.
Happy New Year.