Over the years, I have had a few loaded cases that seemed “wrinkled” when they were done.

This particular one is fairly extreme as most don’t have such a clearly defined fold in the brass.

Since they were infrequent, I have always presumed that there was only some case issue, such as a case that had been reloaded a coupla times too many and lengthened from repeated resizing. Of course, 40S&W is a bit more likely to have been bulged, which makes them lengthen even more when resized.

As I said, they were fairly rare. Lately, however, I have had a lot of them. I first blamed the brass, assuming it was just range brass that had been fired and reloaded a few times, but it got more and more frequent. I just set the press up to try a load with 3.7 grains of Winchester 231 and loading a whole box of 50 took 68 loaded rounds to complete because of 18 rounds with various degrees of this kind of damage, including this one:

Well, duh, I finally started checking elsewhere and found it almost immediately. The lock ring on the bullet seating die was probably two turns free of the tool block and the die had simply worked down to being way too short. The fact that some rounds weren’t crushed is curious.

I am using Lee Precision dies, which I kept from my Lee Pro1000 press partly because I already had them in hand and also because the Lee factory crimp dies come highly recommended, no matter what press it’s on. I kept the 3 die set and added factory crimp dies for each caliber I load.

The Lee lock ring (left) is an aluminum ring with an O-ring in a groove. Lee boasts thusly:

Lock Rings – Finger tighten – set and forget, they never move. Just be sure to always loosen your dies by turning the ring, not the die. These have become so popular that we sell thousands of lock rings to people who want to update other brands.

Admittedly, they have served me well on Lee presses, but there is a shoulder on the Dillon tool head that might keep the O-ring from working as Lee intends. I think this is probably what caused the ring to work loose.

Of course, I should have seen it long before it got that far out of adjustment, but in my defense, they have historically worked perfectly, so I had no reason to suspect them.

I already had a bunch of Dillon’s rings, which are also of a low profile, making them easier to work with a wrench in the close confines of the tool head. I reinstalled them, readjusted the press and, what do you know, 25 rounds error free. That’s significantly better than 1 in 4 rounds crushed beyond recovery.