I had a pretty decent pass rate on ammo QA with the Lee Pro1000. I didn’t really keep any stats on it; I didn’t think I’d ever need to prove it out.

The new (to me) Dillon press had an even better rate, at least to begin with. When I did have a QA failure rate that crept up kind of unnoticed, I first blamed the brass, but in the last post I revealed that I had found the real reason, which on the surface was a loose nut. That loose nut may have been me, but the point is now I have the press all readjusted and probably even better than before.

I loaded a box worth of 40S&W night before last. If my goal is “a box of ammo”, I don’t particularly count them as I’m loading them, but I know what about a box of ammo looks like in the output tray. I happened to have loaded 59 rounds when I stopped. I put them, one at a time, into my gauge block and of the 50 rounds it holds, I had one that didn’t quite drop into the gauge block freely and it was towards the end of the block.

The thing is that I don’t think I have ever had 40-something rounds in a row drop freely into the gauge block, even when I thought the ammo QA process was going along swimmingly. This tells me that I have the press adjusted better than I ever have.

To verify the dimensions, I put the calipers on 10 fairly random rounds out of the finished box. Overall length was 1.125″ +/- 0.002″ and case mouth diameter was 0.419″ +/- 0.001″

The failed round was good on OAL, but read 0.422″ at the case mouth. This round did drop unimpeded into the actual chamber of the Lone Wolf barrel in the pistol, so I am confident that this particular degree of “failure” is not worth rejecting the round.

As for what I was loading, I finally ran out of Power Pistol, so I have put in my next experimental powder, Winchester 231. I bought a pound of it quite some time ago based on a recommendation for it as a soft shooting powder for 40S&W. They were right. With 3.7 grains pushing a 180 grain bullet, it was a joy to shoot in a match last night. I could probably reduce the charge even more, but I need to see what it’s doing on the chronograph first.

So joyous, in fact, that I made 6th overall in the standings again. That’s two weeks in a row. To fully disclose, a fair number of the club’s better shooters were down in Bellville for some match I couldn’t attend this time, and one particular Master class shooter had to leave early, so I might not have placed so well had they all been there. Doesn’t matter, 6th overall! 🙂

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.

A couple of years ago, I purchased a box of about 1000 rounds of 10mm brass, mixed large and small primer, at a discount. I ran them all through the tumbler together then manually sorted them out by primer size. A little more than half of them are small primers.

By original specifications, 10mm and 45 Auto brass is made to use large primers. There is a lot of ammo being made today using small primers. Small primers on 10mm or 45 Auto are not a problem to load. It can actually be an advantage. It is easy for me to switch between loading 10mm with small primers and 40S&W designed with small primers because I don’t need to reconfigure the press for large primers.

Manufacturers are using more and more small primer in traditionally large primer applications in the quest to make range ammo less harmful to the shooter, particularly those who practice indoors often, such as law enforcement and competitors. Lead styphnate is a common primer chemical component and avoiding the concentration of lead in your body is a pretty good idea, “Green” agenda notwithstanding. Non-lead primer compounds tend to be significantly more energetic; it takes less of it, so small primers make sense. Even with smaller charges in a small primer, these energetic compounds tend to drive themselves out of the primer pocket, which can lead to feeding and ejection issues and even present a danger to the shooter from gases escaping into a part of the pistol that normally doesn’t have any high pressure gases. These issues are addressed by crimping the primer into the case.

The manufacturer’s most common crimping process is basically to use a circular punch that is very slightly larger than the primer to deform the case brass around the primer to crimp the primer into the pocket. When reloading ammo. step one on the press is a die that simultaneously resizes the case and presses the spent primer out. The crimp does not adversely affect removal of the old primer. Unfortunately, the crimp does leave a burr around the primer pocket that makes seating a new primer iffy. Most often, the new primer is crushed as it snags on this burr rather than seating into the primer pocket.

That is why I still have this brass.

There are two basic ways to recondition primer pockets to remove this burr and render the case reloadable. One is to use a primer pocket reamer, a specially shaped cutting tool that physically removes the burr. I have a set of these reamers and they work quite well, though they are a little tedious to use in competitive pistol shooting quantities. It also permanently removes material from the case head, though not a large amount.

The other is to use a tool to swage the primer pocket back into the desired shape. Swaging in this case is a form of cold forging, shaping the metal under force without a significant loss of material. The process lends itself to a higher rate of production than the reamer and makes the discount price on such brass even more attractive.

In my case, I currently have several hundred rounds of small primer 10mm brass, but I am finding that small primer 45 Auto is a little less expensive than large primer. I suspect that will not always be the case as more lead-free priming becomes normal.

The RCBS tool is intended to be bench mounted, but for a quick test, I operated it as handheld. It is really easy to set up and adjust. The directions suggest sorting the brass by brand because the web of the case may be slightly different between manufacturers. Here is a crimped small primer 10mm case after depriming.

Note the ridge, most visible near the “FC NT” stamping.

After running the case through the primer pocket swager, the same case looks like this:

While adjusting the tool, I managed to get a case slightly off center, which put a slight eccentricity on one side of the pocket, barely visible adjacent to “FC” in the picture below.

I don’t think this is going to adversely affect primer seating at all because it’s only the very edge of the pocket affected, but I will pay close attention when loading this case.