Not_A_Llama

Been half a year, and I’ve run across nine machines. All had some degree of the primer slide bump. My buddy’s machine also had a super super rough slide that kept catching and tilting. One guy had two machines; one had a problem with the bump, and the other didn’t. I suspect a lot of operators just accept >1% primer failure without questioning. The ziptie solution works. Just an update to share my experience, and since Dillon doesn’t seem to acknowledge this is an issue.

I mean, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. What I call “violent” is sufficiently so to cause problems with consistent primer seating and to cause a career-long Dillon fan to stop using a $2k machine out of frustration. And enough to make some other strangers record a fix, which re-converted this frustrated user. I wanted to call attention to the fact that this can be a problem, and that the customer service rep I got was unreceptive to the idea that there could be a problem outside of user error. If Dillon doesn’t know or acknowledge there’s a problem, we’re so habituated to their general good service that it’s hard to believe there are issues. before: https://i.imgur.com/veV51pI.mp4 after: https://i.imgur.com/XN1X5c8.mp4

I had a consistent issue with my press loading primers sideways - somewhere around 5% of my cartridges. I loaded probably 10k of the most infuriating rounds of my career. Dillon CS insisted I needed more primer swage, and I accommodated their experiment requests, with no improvement. I benched my machine for a year and badmouthed Dillon every chance I got. I even went back to a Lock-N-Load. Fast forward, and I find this video: Basically, as (many/all of) the presses come, the primer slide gets violently popped backwards as the shell plate index pins line up. Dillon needs to either adjust the primer slide nose geometry, or soften the index pin shoulder angle, or I guess ship the actuator arms with a ziptie like in the video to soften the back-and-forth. Implementing this change has completely reinvigorated my press and reloading. The press runs the way I expected it to. I have had zero priming issues in the last 3k rounds. I sent the video to Dillon and got no response back from the guy who told me I needed more swage. (PS: Hi, everyone. Longtime listener, first time caller.)