Re: Busted my Lee Press
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Fuzzball</div><div class="ubbcode-body">"for me the standard lee dies are a crock."
Your comment is a common type, sliming the tools without any supporting data. Perhaps you could add some? Or maybe you fail to see the actual engineering thought that has gone into some of the Lee die's features.
Lee's aren't my favorite dies, except their Factory crimpers and Collet Neck sizers, but they do work quite well. Certainly as well as any but the Forster and Redding comp dies. And they aren't massively better, only slightly but consistantly so, in my experience anyway. </div></div>
Happy to. Don't mean to slime Lee, I like their stuff but there is science behind both comments and it remains my opinion.
Best thing i did was buy a concentricity gauge. So I did a proper manufacturing job and tested my quality as i went along. Boy did I get a shock. Runout was all over the place on the case and the on the loaded rounds some were beyond 10 thou most were 5 thou - 8 thou. This helped me look at technique carefully but I consider this to be unacceptable.
I chose my words carefully, FOR ME they are a crock. Depends what you want to do. My chosen quality threshold is mine and may not apply for others. We can disagree. I want to control my runout much better than that and achieve this consistently without too much black art as I find this hard to repeat consistently.
So I went to the Lee Collet die to get more consistency on the neck runout. I can do this with one 90 degree turn and I consistenly get <2 thou. Great bit of kit for a good price.
I used the standard wobble seating die and could not get consistency between batches. Some were great others were awful (>4 thou), so I paid the money and got a Redding seating die. Even with cases with neck runout of 2 thou the finished round runout at the tip is < 1/2 thou on my test batches. So my experience of this combination of dies is that it is a massively better approach and i can consistently measure this.
So the Collet die is a fantastic tool to sort the case neck (I use a Redding body die as well) but the Standard FL die and the Seating die don't get anywhere close to an acceptable standard for me. All of this was off the basic press, hence my belief that it is about the dies (and the operator) not the press.
IMHO I don't believe the results I got with the standard die set are good enough. I have measured ammunition produced by others on RCBS standard dies and it wasn't any better. I can't extrapolate that to a comment about all standard die sets as I don't have any data.
I don't really believe this lives up to the manufacturers' suggestion that buying their basic kit allows you to make ammunition as good as factory. It is all very well being able to 'tailor' the round to your gun but if the dimensional consistency is poor then how can it be as good?
Personally i think my new obsession is a bit dull which I why I put in the summary, but with my engineering background it gives me some quiet satisfaction.
