Post Your AMP Press Plots

Rocketmandb · Mar 12, 2024

For those who have an AMP press, I thought it would be interesting to see others' plots and what prep they did to get said plots.

To kick it off:

6 BRA
105 Berger Hybrid
Lapua Brass (once-fired/formed)
FL sized and mandrelled (sp?)
Moly neck lube twice - once before mandrel, once after
LE Wilson seater
20 rounds seated

The bummer is that I was running about a 6 lb spread until #s 17 and 19, which pushed the spread out to about 10 lb.

Painterbolt · Mar 12, 2024

I just started messing with Molly in the neck right before I seat a bullet. It seems to help with consistency. Also lowered seating pressure by close to 10lbs.

Rocketmandb · Mar 12, 2024

Painterbolt said:
I just started messing with Molly in the neck right before I seat a bullet. It seems to help with consistency. Also lowered seating pressure by close to 10lbs.

It helps immensely

Examples from earlier 6 BRA plots:

Test with no mandrel, no lube:

Test with mandrel, no lube:

In my Mandrel Musings thread I documented that there is a correlation between seating force SDs and muzzle velocity SDs.

Mandrel Musings

When I first got my K&M arbor press for seating, I was somewhat surprised at the spread of the values of force required to seat bullets. Knowing that neck tension plays a significant role in ES/SD, I started doing various things to try to bring seating force in line. I had been doing most my...

www.snipershide.com

Rocketmandb · Mar 12, 2024

Painterbolt said:
I just started messing with Molly in the neck right before I seat a bullet. It seems to help with consistency. Also lowered seating pressure by close to 10lbs.

Also, I've found that with annealed cases, moly seems to be the best lube - and I've played around with a bunch of them.

Bmghunter · Mar 12, 2024

Rocketmandb said:
Also, I've found that with annealed cases, moly seems to be the best lube - and I've played around with a bunch of them.

I have dry graphite lube. What's your experience in terms of this force graph with it? Trying to see if I should bother with it at all.

Rocketmandb · Mar 12, 2024

Bmghunter said:
I have dry graphite lube. What's your experience in terms of this force graph with it? Trying to see if I should bother with it at all.

So... there is a lot to this answer.

Here are the salient points:

1) I've heard forever that graphite has a hard time sticking to annealed brass. That has not been my experience - I wanted to know why.

2) I put a lot of thought against it and tried to narrow down why my process allowed graphite to work and why it wouldn't work with others.

3) It came down to cleaning brass - more specifically, the solution I use in my ultrasonic.

4) I use Boretech Case Clean (and I love it). Unless I rather dramatically rinse the brass afterward, there is somewhat of a soapy residue remaining.

5) I decided to test some rather dramatically rinsed brass against only marginally rinsed brass.

6) The dramatically rinsed brass did not seat as consistently (with graphite) as the marginally rinsed brass, leading me to believe that the residue left behind was enabling the graphite to stick better.

7) So, it seems that all it takes is some soapy residue to make graphite more effective with annealed brass.

8) Nevertheless, I tested a bunch of neck lubes and found that moly slightly outperforms graphite in marginally rinsed cases (and significantly outperforms in dramatically rinsed cases).

I might do another test between moly and graphite to validate.

Cascade Hemi · Mar 12, 2024

How does the graph look with brass that hasn't been cleaned?

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

I'll see what I still have laying around. But one interesting observation for me was that lubing the bullet was much less effective than lubing the inside of the neck. Based on the graphs, lubing the bullet wasn't much different than no lube. Seemed like the neck was rubbing the lube off.

Repeated with dry graphite as well as suspended graphite such as neolube. It was fairly annoying because its easier to dip a bullet in liquid vs applying it to inside of neck.

kthomas · Mar 12, 2024

I would be curious to hear more about how people are using these charts to derive actionable outcomes to increase performance of their reloads.

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

kthomas said:
I would be curious to hear more about how people are using these charts to derive actionable outcomes to increase performance of their reloads.

So, my observation is there won't really be a universal way to use the press unless someone is using almost the exact same loading method and components as someone else. I.E. you can't say "when you see the graph do X, that's a bad round" as a general rule for anyone using the press.

As the press is nothing more than a comparator in the same sense a headspace comparator works. Only works for that individual.

Now, with that caveat out the the way, you can use the press for two things:

- identify a hardware issue (die, trimmer, etc)
- identify possible "flyers" that may be due to seating force discrepancies

And you'll need historical data for both. As in, you know that the way you load ammo a graph looks a certain way. And you know where in the graph matters. Meaning even though you see a spike or a low spot in spot A on a graph, it doesn't matter on paper. But when you see it at spot B on the graph, you know thats going to be a possible bad round.

I'll post an example below so it doesn't get lost in a wall of text in this post.

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

Here's an example. In the picture on the lower right, you'll see what the graph for that ammo usually looks like. I left the test die graph in to help visually (red line).

At some point, the graph started looking like the upper right. So I started troubleshooting. The culprit was the pilot on the trimmer. Once it was polished clean, the graphs returned to "normal."

Would it have mattered on paper? Possibly not, but when its something as simple as cleaning a pilot, there's no need to test and see if it matters, just fix it and keep going.

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

Here's a graph illustrating how neck lube affects seating consistency and overall force needed to seat.

Red: No lube
Yellow: Dry Graphite
Green: Hornady One shot on q-tip

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

And here's a comparison of relying the factory anneal on virgin brass vs running it through AMP Annealer. This isn't brand specific. All brands' factory anneal isn't that consistent. Lapua, Alpha, Hornady......all produced similar graphs.

Red is factory anneal. Blue is running virgin brass through AMP. Annealing was the only variable changed.

Rocketmandb · Mar 12, 2024

@Rio Precision Gunworks how do you color code different plots?

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

Rocketmandb said:
@Rio Precision Gunworks how do you color code different plots?

Most of those were with the old software. But pretty sure the new has the feature.

Either double click or right click on a plot. It should bring up options to change the color, add velocity info, etc.

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

Here was another interesting observation when I was doing everything I could think of to see how the plots changed. Which I think is a very important step when using an AMP Press. There's no universal guild to what you're seeing in a plot. So you need to do a lot of experimenting and taking notes what changes what in a trace.

If you don't do that, you'll have a much harder time figuring out if an abnormality in a trace is something you should be concerned with.

The two bullets in the picture were pulled from rounds that were in the two batches in the graph. All bullets pulled exhibited the same scratching of the jacket or no scratching. This likely won't affect downrange performance all that much, but interesting nonetheless.

Rocketmandb · Mar 12, 2024

Rio Precision Gunworks said:
Here was another interesting observation when I was doing everything I could think of to see how the plots changed. Which I think is a very important step when using an AMP Press. There's no universal guild to what you're seeing in a plot. So you need to do a lot of experimenting and taking notes what changes what in a trace.

If you don't do that, you'll have a much harder time figuring out if an abnormality in a trace is something you should be concerned with.

The two bullets in the picture were pulled from rounds that were in the two batches in the graph. All bullets pulled exhibited the same scratching of the jacket or no scratching. This likely won't affect downrange performance all that much, but interesting nonetheless.

View attachment 8371417

What was the difference between the two groups?

CK1.0 · Mar 12, 2024

Rio Precision Gunworks said:
Here's a graph illustrating how neck lube affects seating consistency and overall force needed to seat.

Red: No lube
Yellow: Dry Graphite
Green: Hornady One shot on q-tip

View attachment 8371289

Your graph visually illustrates what I've been living/wondering about for the last couple of months...

With the last couple/few batches of rounds I've loaded for my 6GT, I've skipped the lube before seating bullets and I've been swearing my ammo just hasn't been as consistent. It's felt like the feedback I've been getting downrange has been telling me my SDs just weren't as tight as usual.

I used to religiously lube my case mouths real quick with a IPA/lanolin-wetted q-tip before seating bullets, and did it that way for the last couple of years... and I'm going to go back to doing it. It only takes seconds, and I feel like my laziness has had me leaving some performance on the table.

That said, the difference between lube vs no-lube isn't huge, I don't clean my brass, I just tumble off the sizing lube, and that helps a bunch.

Is that graph showing the effects of lube on clean/cleaned or non-cleaned/dirty brass..?

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

Rocketmandb said:
What was the difference between the two groups?

I honestly don't remember if it was just lube, or if it was something else. I would only change one thing at a time when doing direct comparisons. So I'm pretty sure it was just lube.

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

CK1.0 said:
Your graph visually illustrates what I've been living/wondering about for the last couple of months...

With the last couple/few batches of rounds I've loaded for my 6GT, I've skipped the lube before seating bullets and I've been swearing my ammo just hasn't been as consistent. It's felt like the feedback I've been getting downrange has been telling me my SDs just weren't as tight as usual.

I used to religiously lube my case mouths real quick with a IPA/lanolin-wetted q-tip before seating bullets, and did it that way for the last couple of years... and I'm going to go back to doing it. It only takes seconds, and I feel like my laziness has had me leaving some performance on the table.

My rationale is that when you're jumping bullets, neck tension (not just interference fit, neck tension as a whole with all aspects) is pretty important. Have consistent pressure build up = consistent muzzle velocity. And at the moment, the only thing we have to measure is something like the amp press. I've considered rigging up something that holds the round upside down, pushes a rod through the primer hole, and pushes the bullet out. With the amp press measuring the force to dislodge the bullet.

I'd have to test, but I'd also think that if you're loading into the lands, neck tension becomes less important as the pressure is going to build to a higher amount before the bullet moves.....than it does when the bullet is jumping. Since the steel lands will hold the bullet longer than a brass case neck.

David Tubb only anneals when he is jumping bullets for this reason. Says he doesn't see a need when its the lands holding bullet instead of neck.

CK1.0 · Mar 12, 2024

Rio Precision Gunworks said:
My rationale is that when you're jumping bullets, neck tension (not just interference fit, neck tension as a whole with all aspects) is pretty important. Have consistent pressure build up = consistent muzzle velocity. And at the moment, the only thing we have to measure is something like the amp press. I've considered rigging up something that holds the round upside down, pushes a rod through the primer hole, and pushes the bullet out. With the amp press measuring the force to dislodge the bullet.

I'd have to test, but I'd also think that if you're loading into the lands, neck tension becomes less important as the pressure is going to build to a higher amount before the bullet moves.....than it does when the bullet is jumping. Since the steel lands will hold the bullet longer than a brass case neck.

David Tubb only anneals when he is jumping bullets for this reason. Says he doesn't see a need when its the lands holding bullet instead of neck.

Is that graph above showing the effects of lube on clean/cleaned or non-cleaned/dirty brass..?

Ledzep · Mar 12, 2024

I probably just need to buy one of these to play with but has anyone correlated plots to ES/MV data with any level of confidence yet?

Been curious since they came out and got busy before I could make it a priority myself.

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

CK1.0 said:
Is that graph above showing the effects of lube on clean/cleaned or non-cleaned/dirty brass..?

I personally clean all of the carbon out of the necks of fired brass. Since I'm using NeoLube or something similar anyway, I like to just start with a clean slate each time.

While I'm sure it matters very little, having a random amount of fired carbon in the neck just isn't in the spirit of consistency.

kthomas · Mar 12, 2024

These graphs seem like they would be a great QA/QC check for ammo manufacturers, when they do large batches of ammo.

Pretty cool for those that do large volume reloading at home as well. Save the graphs, if you see anything funny with a batch of ammo, you can go back and reference the graphs to find out if something was amiss. Or to spot issues in real time, as you guys in this thread are doing.

Pretty neat.

Rocketmandb · Mar 12, 2024

Ledzep said:
I probably just need to buy one of these to play with

Honestly, that's why I got one.

Ledzep said:
but has anyone correlated plots to ES/MV data with any level of confidence yet?

Not plots, but I did so when recording max force on a K&M arbor press.

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

Ledzep said:
I probably just need to buy one of these to play with but has anyone correlated plots to ES/MV data with any level of confidence yet?

Been curious since they came out and got busy before I could make it a priority myself.

I have, but it's all component/process dependent. As in, I wouldn't be able to look at your graph and tell you something is going to perform a certain way. Unless we were both doing everything as close to the same as possible. Since the press is a comparative tool more so than a measurement tool.

Also, IME, it's not huge changes. The "bad" rounds are still plenty good for practical shooting.

Rocketmandb · Mar 12, 2024

kthomas said:
These graphs seem like they would be a great QA/QC check for ammo manufacturers, when they do large batches of ammo.

Pretty cool for those that do large volume reloading at home as well. Save the graphs, if you see anything funny with a batch of ammo, you can go back and reference the graphs to find out if something was amiss. Or to spot issues in real time, as you guys in this thread are doing.

Pretty neat.

The biggest gainer is recording everything you do so you can see the impacts of small changes in your process.

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

kthomas said:
These graphs seem like they would be a great QA/QC check for ammo manufacturers, when they do large batches of ammo.

Pretty cool for those that do large volume reloading at home as well. Save the graphs, if you see anything funny with a batch of ammo, you can go back and reference the graphs to find out if something was amiss. Or to spot issues in real time, as you guys in this thread are doing.

Pretty neat.

That's another thing we use it for. You can set the press up to auto run. It senses the weight of the die and then actuates without needing to click a button. So I'll just burn through a batch of ammo for a customer and put the rounds in an ammo box in a specific order so I know what round is which in the graph.

Then you can go back and either cull out potentially bad rounds, or sort them via putting them in an order where you have a better chance for consistency across shot strings.

And customers also like seeing a cool graph with their ammo.

CK1.0 · Mar 12, 2024

Rio Precision Gunworks said:
I personally clean all of the carbon out of the necks of fired brass. Since I'm using NeoLube or something similar anyway, I like to just start with a clean slate each time.

While I'm sure it matters very little, having a random amount of fired carbon in the neck just isn't in the spirit of consistency.

Au contraire mon frere, it matters a lot. Your naivete about carbon in the necks is alarming, and kind of makes everything you've said suspect IMO lol.

Clean brass < dirty brass. You don't know what you don't know.

Cascade Hemi · Mar 12, 2024

Rocketmandb said:
For those who have an AMP press, I thought it would be interesting to see others' plots and what prep they did to get said plots.

To kick it off:

6 BRA
105 Berger Hybrid
Lapua Brass (once-fired/formed)
FL sized and mandrelled (sp?)
Moly neck lube twice - once before mandrel, once after
LE Wilson seater
20 rounds seated

The bummer is that I was running about a 6 lb spread until #s 17 and 19, which pushed the spread out to about 10 lb.

View attachment 8371100

Have you tried HBN? I think I still have a pound of it. I'm not sure how I would apply it, maybe emulsified in alcohol.

Rocketmandb · Mar 12, 2024

Cascade Hemi said:
Have you tried HBN? I think I still have a pound of it.

I did and it was, surprisingly, the worst of the bunch.

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

CK1.0 said:
Au contraire mon frere, it matters a lot. Your naivete about carbon in the necks is alarming, and kind of makes everything you've said suspect IMO lol.

Clean brass < dirty brass. You don't know what you don't know.

LOL. I'm putting carbon in the necks. That's what graphite is. It's pretty common in BR. They will actually use low grit sandpaper in the necks every time and then apply their lube of choice. Tony Boyer specifically mentions some of these methods in his book.

If you're ignorant enough to make this statement, then please, by all means, disregard everything I say and keep moving.

Rocketmandb · Mar 12, 2024

CK1.0 said:
Clean brass < dirty brass. You don't know what you don't know.

I tested this and, while the dirty brass was in the middle of the pack, it was not nearly as consistent as clean brass with the better neck lubes I tested. Certainly better than nothing at all, however.

Cascade Hemi · Mar 12, 2024

Rocketmandb said:
I did and it was, surprisingly, the worst of the bunch.

<SLIDES HBN INTO TRASH>

How did you apply the molly?

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

Rocketmandb said:
I tested this and, while the dirty brass was in the middle of the pack, it was not nearly as consistent as clean brass with the better neck lubes I tested. Certainly better than nothing at all, however.

Same. If you put the work in to make your necks look like this before you apply your lube of choice, you end up with those extremely tight/consist traces like the ones in green above. And in turn, very good performance on chrono and target.

The second pic is just to illustrate how the inside of the neck is then coated. It's hard to get good pics inside of the neck, so I dipped neck and let dry. The inside of the neck looks the same.

Cascade Hemi · Mar 12, 2024

Rio Precision Gunworks said:
LOL. I'm putting carbon in the necks. That's what graphite is. It's pretty common in BR. They will actually use low grit sandpaper in the necks every time and then apply their lube of choice. Tony Boyer specifically mentions some of these methods in his book.

If you're ignorant enough to make this statement, then please, by all means, disregard everything I say and keep moving.

I've been using NeoLube for a while. I don't always clean brass. I had some new brass, I fired it once, wiped it off, and resized it. Same as friends on the US F-Class team.

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

Cascade Hemi said:
I've been using NeoLube for a while. I don't always clean brass. I had some new brass, I fired it once, wiped it off, and resized it. Same as friends on the US F-Class team.

Yea, there's definitely plenty different ways to go about it. I don't always clean brass all the way down. But when I'm testing I'm going to attempt to control as many variables as possible. Leaving fired carbon in the necks means you now have an unmeasurable random amount of material inside the neck.

I won't tell anyone they should or shouldn't clean their brass completely. But the blanket statement above that dirty brass is absolutely better than clean brass is just LOL.

Cascade Hemi · Mar 12, 2024

Rio Precision Gunworks said:
Yea, there's definitely plenty different ways to go about it.

But the blanket statement above that dirty brass is absolutely better than clean brass is just LOL.

It's better insofar that I didn't have to screw with cleaning it. Probably not better than controlling variable through perfect cleanliness.

Rocketmandb · Mar 12, 2024

Rio Precision Gunworks said:
Same. If you put the work in to make your necks look like this before you apply your lube of choice, you end up with those extremely tight/consist traces like the ones in green above. And in turn, very good performance on chrono and target.

What process are you using for cleaning?

kthomas · Mar 12, 2024

Rocketmandb said:
I tested this and, while the dirty brass was in the middle of the pack, it was not nearly as consistent as clean brass with the better neck lubes I tested. Certainly better than nothing at all, however.

What specifically did you notice improved, with this added procedure? Better ES/SD? Precision?

I don't clean necks. My ES/SD and precision are really good, especially with my 6BRA.

I'm curious what I'm leaving on the table performance wise, from your and @Rio Precision Gunworks experience.

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

Rocketmandb said:
What process are you using for cleaning?

For stuff like that, I use a sonic cleaner with Boretech solution. Then I'll either use fine grit sandpaper or a fine grit flex hone to burnish the inside of the neck. Having the case spinning in something like an IDOD with a fine flex hone works very well.

But for stuff like PRS, you can just take a rag and wipe the outside of the case off to make sure you don't have anything that will scratch up your die.

Hell, half the time for PRS, I'll use virgin brass and then sell the once fired for 80% value. When shooting 2moa targets, the work of processing brass isn't worth it if you have anything else better you could be doing with your time.

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

kthomas said:
What specifically did you notice improved, with this added procedure? Better ES/SD? Precision?

I don't clean necks. My ES/SD is good, especially with my 6BRA.

I'm curious what I'm leaving on the table performance wise, from your and @Rio Precision Gunworks experience.

IME, start turning high round count samples from things like 10sd to 7sd or 7sd to 5sd. It's not enough to worry with unless you're chasing uber precision (we are talking 30+ round count where we are fairly confident we are getting close to our real life SD).

I haven't tested it for group size, as I'm all but sure you'll need to be shooting close to benchrest size aggregates before you can notice any difference. Which requires different rifles and rests. Not practical/tactical rifles with bipod and squeeze bag.

kthomas · Mar 12, 2024

Rio Precision Gunworks said:
IME, start turning high round count samples from things like 10sd to 7sd or 7sd to 5sd. It's not enough to worry with unless you're chasing uber precision (we are talking 30+ round count where we are fairly confident we are getting close to our real life SD).

I haven't tested it for group size, as I'm all but sure you'll need to be shooting close to benchrest size aggregates before you can notice any different.

For example, my 6BRA produced an SD of 3.1 over 34 shots.

I notice my SD creeps up as the cartridge volume gets larger. For example, my 6.5 Creedmoor rounds have an SD of 5-6, and .300NM 7-8.

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

kthomas said:
For example, my 6BRA produced an SD of 3.1 over 34 shots.

I notice my SD creeps up as the cartridge volume gets larger. For example, my 6.5 Creedmoor rounds have an SD of 5-6, and .300NM 7-8.

Probably won't be able to get much better than that. And even if you did, you'd have to be shooting extremely far for a better than 3sd to matter.

Rocketmandb · Mar 12, 2024

kthomas said:
What specifically did you notice improved, with this added procedure? Better ES/SD? Precision?

All I've been able to document is a correlation between seating force consistency and SD/ES. I did that before I got the AMP, so I can't tell if abnormalities along the plot have any difference.

kthomas said:
I don't clean necks. My ES/SD and precision are really good, especially with my 6BRA.

I'm curious what I'm leaving on the table performance wise, from your and @Rio Precision Gunworks experience.

I'm not at my office computer right now, but tomorrow I'll try to dig up some of the comparison plots between neck lubes, including the one that was residual carbon.

Rocketmandb · Mar 12, 2024

Rio Precision Gunworks said:
For stuff like that, I use a sonic cleaner with Boretech solution. Then I'll either use fine grit sandpaper or a fine grit flex hone to burnish the inside of the neck. Having the case spinning in something like an IDOD with a fine flex hone works very well.

The sandpaper on the inside of the neck thing is really interesting. Could you provide more details on how you do it (grit, applicator, etc.)?

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 12, 2024

Rocketmandb said:
The sandpaper on the inside of the neck thing is really interesting. Could you provide more details on how you do it (grit, applicator, etc.)?

Take something like the wooden stick that you see on q-tips people use to clean weapons.......wrap your fine grit sandpaper around it. Use something like a case prep motor or IDOD to spin case. Burnish the inside with the sandpaper.

Same with a flex hone. Get your desired grit and size.....spin the case in a motor and then run the flex hone in and out once or twice.

Cascade Hemi · Mar 13, 2024

How are you guys applying the Moly?

MarkyMark007 · Mar 13, 2024

Ledzep said:
I probably just need to buy one of these to play with but has anyone correlated plots to ES/MV data with any level of confidence yet?

Been curious since they came out and got busy before I could make it a priority myself.

to stir the pot in this topic too?

Rio Precision Gunworks · Mar 13, 2024

Cascade Hemi said:
How are you guys applying the Moly?

When I use moly powder, I use a bore mop of the appropriate size for the case mouth.

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