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June 23, 2009, 11:01 PM | #1 |
Senior Member
Join Date: May 13, 2009
Location: Carrollton TX
Posts: 521
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Best technique for my Loadmaster setup
All,
I am loading .45 ACP on a Loadmaster. I like the Loadmaster but I have lots of problems with primers flipping, going in sideways, and otherwise jamming and messing up any momentum I can get while loading. I suspect this is mostly because of the way I have my press set up. Here it is: The press is mounted to the board and the rear of the board is secured to the back of my desk. You cannot see it, but I also have the front of the board somewhat secured to the front of the top desk drawer via a couple of latches. I believe the problem occurs on the handle upstroke (when the ram is coming down) right as the cartridges pull out of the dies. Since the front of the board I have the press mounted on is not secured very well, I have to hold down on the edge while I pull up on the handle. Otherwise the force required to pull the cartridges from the dies would lift the board up off the desk. Even doing that, the press jerks pretty badly as the cartridges pull out. I believe this causes the primers to jump around at the lower end of the feeder, and one every now and then doesn't settle quite right and therefore goes in crooked. OK, so the solution I came up with is to get a second 5-hole turret and mount only the decapping die in it. So my process then becomes: 1. Decap and reprime a bunch of brass. 2. Exhaust the primers in the tray. 3. Change turrets. 4. Finish the reprimed brass (powder/neck-expand, seat bullet, factory crimp) I loaded 150 rounds in about 30 minutes tonight. This may seem slow, but it was way faster than I ever had done that many cartridges before. Also it was nearly stress free. No stoppages except for when I saw a .40 coming down the tube, and also one .45 fed in upside down. But those were easy compared to clearing a primer that feeds wrong. The reason this works for me is that the error-prone operation (priming) now has a much less "violent" upstroke...there's only one die to pull a cartridge out of and it is not very tight. Yeah, I guess I could just find a better mounting solution but this is the most comfortable spot in my house right now to reload in (my office). If I do it in the garage its about a billion degrees (Texas) and I don't have any other room to build a bench in. Anyway, just thought I'd share what seems to work for me. -cls |
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