medalguy

YES some Winchester primers have problems. About 2 years ago I bought 50,000 Winchester LR primers and had a Hell of a time getting them to feed through Dillon primer tubes. I finally managed to trade them off to another shooter for Wolf primers and it's been smooth sailing since then. I had them so tight inside the primer tube I was having to remove primers from both ends of the tubes, then use a wooden dowel to tap forcefully to remove the offending primers. Sometimes there were several that would get so stuck I couldn't load the full 100 into a tube. Change to CCI or Remington and they slid very easily. Go back to a new pack of Winchester, and stuck again. I haven't bought Winchesters since then. All I use now are Wolf/Tula and they work just fine.

Personally I think .05 for .40 brass is high, especially for mil brass. Usually I can pick up lots of this at the range. I'll bet you can get it on some of the gun forums for .02 - .03 tops, commercial brass that doesn't need to have the crimp removed. As for swaging rates. I do mostly rifle brass, and I guess I do about 1200-1500/hour although I've never really timed myself. I know I can do it for about 1-1/2 hours before I neeed to take a break, and that's usually a full large flat-rate box of 5.56, or 2,000 pieces. I recently did a bunch of .45 brass, and it seemed like it took longer to do that box for some reason.

I have seven 450 and 550 presses and I've had problems with the powder measure varying on one press. These are all dedicated to one caliber each and I never reset them. My solution was blue loctite and that fixed the problem. The "wrinkled" lockwasher looked fine on that powder measure BTW. Nice and tight. Probably wear after over 100K rounds through it.

Thanks for the replies. First, the shellplate grooves are as clean as I can get. I brush everything off every 200 rounds or so and vac any loose powder off the plate. I'm using WC844 and it's very fine so some does spill. Next, the ejector wire does ride up and I push it down. I thought that might be the problem but the more I load the less I think this is it. I checked the wire for abrasions too, none found. Finally, yes the loaded rounds do hang up on the handle, and sometimes they don't even fall off the shellplate but fall in towards the center and when the plate indexes, they fall onto the floor. Not sure how this can be cured. I just police up any fallen rounds when I finish for the day. The only thing I can't control is any dents in the case rims. I haven't had this problem in any caliber except 5.56 but I'll start checking every round that doesn't fall away easily for dents. Thanks all for the info.

I am having an infrequent problem that I can't resolve so I wanted to see if anyone else has experienced this. I'm loading 5.56 on a 550 press, and sometimes a loaded round doesn't want to move at the last stage where the ejector wire catches the loaded round and pushes it off the shellplate. This only happens maybe once every 20-30 rounds, and I can't feel any roughness on the ejector wire, and nothing on the shellplate that I can feel. Has anyone else had this happen, and if so how did you cure this? It's more of an annoyance than anything else.

Same here, been tumbling loaded ammo for nearly 40 years (different ammo not the same ones!!) and never experienced any kind of problem, although I never thought about media getting stuck in the bullet point cavity!

That's been my experience: If I lost a part, I pay for it. If I break a part, it's free. I just called Friday about the index locator ball spring that broke on one of my presses. Got a replacement coming no charge. I broke the same spring about three months ago on another press and they replaced that one no charge too. Have no complaints from me on service. Warranty covers broken parts, not lost ones.

I wondered about the accuracy of my chrono also so I got a second unit and placed it right behind the first one and fired several strings. I found about 3% variance constant. I also have found errors seem to be more common when firing at the top of the sticks. I believe the instructions say to shoot in the middle and that seems to work better. When all else fails....