A look at the Lee Auto Drum Powder Measure -- Setup, parts, accuracy...Detailed!

hey guys it's true Todd now here loading up a batch of great American classic a 45 ACP and I've been using this we auto drum powder measure and it's a list names got a lot going for it so I thought it was something to make a video about it this powder measure is fairly new for me I think it came out in the 2016 catalog catalog and I just noticed that it's actually shipping with the Lea classic tour press kit so another good reason to get some information out there about it lately I have been obsessed or tinkering with powder measuring differently and waited to get better performance and that's where this comes in also you see I've got this swing arm over here for mounting powder measure right over the press to the top this is a Hornady Lock and Load so this is this something I've been working on for a while and I thought it was time to do a video about this thing we'll break this thing down I'll show you the anatomy of it we'll talk about the good maybe they're not so good we'll talk about accuracy and we'll actually demonstrate accuracy I'll cover adjustment and I'll give you my thoughts along the way and also at the end of this I'll give you some tips to get great performance out of any of your powder measures so if you're familiar with lead powder measures for a long time Lee has had this wee auto disc not a measure which is going to put a good job for us and they also have had this Lee they call it a perfect powder measure and this thing is shockingly accurate considering that it's blow molded parts I mean this thing we're going to put up some some great loads it's very consistent but what I think they've done here is created a hybrid they've taken the auto disc which is pretty accurate I'd say it's between plus or minus 0.1 grains and they combine it with the style of their perfect powder measure and created this and this thing in my testing is actually if this if this is accurate to plus or minus point one for a total range of two point two I would say this is a total range of 0.1 so they've done a really good job with this getting this getting this accurate they use the best of both of those and for 35 bucks honestly I don't think you can beat it it's not a whole lot to talk about on the hopper here but basically this is the same hopper they've used on some of their other some of the other power measures relieves made over time it's got the valve on it when you turn it to close like I did there and I guess if I have a criticism of the hopper itself is it doesn't fit very snug in the aluminum housing the rest of the measure it just kind of it's just gravity holds it in there if you if you were to lay this down or whatever it would just fall right out now the bad thing is if you haven't a bump it or lift it off you know make a mistake and pick it up while the valve is open you're going to take a little powder shower so an observation about this and the other measures that escaped me before is if you look at this Hornung power measure they put a bathroom in there you just kind of drop it in and it settle to the bottom we call the powder on top and the power just kind of filters around it and what that does is it keeps the overall changing weight of an ever-decreasing power amount from putting buried away varied amounts of weight on the filling chamber or the measuring chamber so that you don't get a compacted load when it's full and unless compacted load when it's when you're near the bottom so it stays constant all the time and I thought I always thought would that be kind of a neat idea for you know something to add just one step more for the full of lead higher measure and then I realized that they kind of have it built into it they have a small opening here where the power feeds through and that goes into a larger staging area in here so basically the baffle concept is is built into the lead powder measures sometimes escape me before going to share that with you so next thing I want cover is this little item here let me take this off so this is a disconnect earth as we've built into this thing and the idea is that you have to reset it between each charge and come up and you take a charge and see our rotating there and then if I was to come up and charge it again without resetting it you won't let me double charge that cake so that's a safety feature and then you have to reset it manually like this and then you can take another charge in this case now I have a double charge so when we personally that's not really a feature that I need I'm used to using this we auto disk and it doesn't have a disconnect err on it it'll charge it every time you raise some RAM and second I use a little light right here so I can actually see inside the case but overall I thought it was probably a greater chance where I would forget to reset the button and create a squid for the power moment so that said that's how I feel about it that's a choice you'll have to make or what I would like to do here is I'll just show you how to take this off real quick you just get in here there's a screw right down in that box there try to let you see what's going on here you can't have to lift this up out of there and pull it up out of there sticks in that knife there and then you have to work these ears around these grooves here that's good together there and these diesel these ears right in this groove here and that's what does the the disconnect function along with this a why I'm hearing this this one you just have to pick up you unsnap it take that on that's part of the disconnect America I just hang on to those for later so now that I got this out I'll show you sort of the case in there so when you run it with without this on there you just have to make sure you have it in the engaged position he's not rotating there you just have to make sure that it's all the way pushed that way and I guess you can turn it on and off if you wanted to know why you would just bite manually moving that in and out of position so that's it for the dis enter I didn't feel like it was something that I you did so it's easy to disable or take off and then it works just like a crooked cover measure if you're used to that so I'm going to take this apart and to do so I'm going to make sure the drum is closed and I'm going to start taking some of the powder that's ready right up in here oh this isn't still when I pull the comb out okay take this apart pretty simple you can screw this net right here I guess it's actually technically extruder just got the Dreadnought take that out is what that looks like and usually the gonna flank with the drum removed let's take a look in here got a couple of gears in here this is what converts the linear motion into rotating motion we've got right up in this corner that what should be the top of the cylinder we actually have a silicon wiper that's replaceable you can actually change these out in order fresh ones if you need them and what does what's unique at what this actually does is when the drum rotates it White's off the top here and gives you a nice clean measurement and also by using a a supple wiper rather than just to metal the metal edges you don't get any grain cutting like you would on say just a metal of metal type you know both are okay but this will actually accommodate a grant and not actually cut the grade and what that does it makes for a much smoother operation and in my estimation a little more accurate whenever you cut a grade with one of these four masala powder measures usually that load is off a little bit so the another thing I'll show you here is inside the drop tube they've actually put what looks like a Teflon surface in there or an insert and what that's going to do is make a nice smooth static free surface that allows the powder to fall cleanly all the way down into the case and last but not least you see that there's a groove cut here and this groove is supposed to collect powder that gets in between the drum surface and the housing and it just works instead of falling out it's supposed to work its way into this groove and the back-and-forth motion of the drum is supposed to carry those grains into the true so that so it doesn't fall out that Martian and that part has mixed results and we'll cover that a little bit later okay so the kit comes with two drums comes with a pistol and a rifle rifle obviously has larger capacity the pistol has a much smaller capacity they each have these become of these keys the keys are removable so if you get a setting that you really like you can store the key off to the side to itto make an accidental adjustment and just swap these out each time for you want to set up that same load again that's kind of a nice feature in addition you can write or mark or put a piece of tape on here you can actually write right on this or you can you know put a label on it or whatever on this glass right here to just say what to identify how you have this one store the rifle one comes with a little plug that you can take out and push in here and convert the rifle to a pistol so if you just wanted to use these on pistol you could turn the ripe one into a pistol a little hard to get back out if you do push it in there so make sure that's what you want to do you can't get them out by running it all the way through and stick a couple underneath it to pop it back out I've done that before Poli also makes a kit that has four of these two rifle two pistol I think it's nine zero one four five three and it sells for about fifteen bucks so really economically you can set up a whole bunch of these and leave them set up for loads that you do repetitively you don't have to make the adjustment again for the pre could be low price you probably outfit your whole setup for 15 bucks or 30 bucks okay now for the bad news so they call this a drum powder measure but I'd really kind of call it a cone because of the shape but here's what happens with the really really super fine powders the powder can work down here in and come out the bottom you know whereas if you have a true drum style like this one all the gravity effects are straight down there's nothing there's no gravity to kind of cause the powder to work out the size so these don't tend to leak but but this one with this with this cone shape here the the powder will slowly get between you know the housing and the drum and kind of find its way down I showed you the groove in they're supposed to eliminate that and from in most cases it does but the with the very finest powder I've got some H 110 here we can see you know this stuff is basically dust I mean it just sticks to everything it's kind of hard to handle it's tiny little teeny tiny particles can't even feel along my fingers they're so small so with this powder here that's the one downside it will slowly migrate down out of here and it will kind of land on top of your your die holder here so that's like I said that's the downside it's still accurate it doesn't change the accuracy at all but just to get this annoying leak that you can't seem to stop now they tell you in the instruction that you can put a piece of paper in here there's their solve for linkage is to do a paper drag method that's where you just put piece of tape paper in there and you just tighten it until you get a drag sorta like a feeler gauge you get it this slight drag there now what I found is it didn't matter how I test that I could crank this all the way down and if you do crank this too much it's not over here tighten it up too much then you don't get really good free tribal it starts to catch and by in a little bit and you want to get that full travel underneath the hopper down into the dispenser dispensing portion so I've tried it with CFE pistol you can see this is a little bit a little bit coarser still pistol powder and it doesn't leak at all so I just want to make you aware of that if this is something you're thinking about doing if you use a leap perfect powder measure and you've used it with H 110 that's what it leaks the same so if you if that's your important reference if you've already used it and you've had good service out of this where the powder you're using I think you can expect the same performance out of that out of the auto club now for adjustment adjustment is pretty straightforward if you're using this for pistol and you're using the expander guy leaves expander die and slash powder to die in this case I've got the expander die and then on top of that I have a extension riser this is called the auto disk riser and all it does is it just raises this up to be clear the other dies a little bit but if you're using one of these you adjust this particular guy for the Belling of the case mount that you want which is this primary job is to build a case mount if you just do that adjustment to get the right amount of bail on your case mouth to accept the bullet and this works out perfect when you tighten this down the adjustments just right and I'll show you what that looks like here there's two points to you can be aware of if you have the drum out notice that this little 45 degree gear is horizontal when you go all the way to the top it stops at the horizontal that's that's a total complete throw right there like I said there's not you the dimensions are preset on this so for pistol there's really no adjustment needed but if you want to verify that you're getting good throw on it and also pay attention to this little moss right here see this guide you don't want to come up and contact the housing if you do it'll kind of rock off to one side but you put extra stress on this mechanism and necessary so I've swapped this out this is a Russian setup for motion and this is a lead rifle charging guy this is a universal die there's this is the longer version the longer version fits from 2 to 3 all the way up to 300 Win Mag I guess so I'm going to put this in here just to show you that this one actually has to be adjusted if you look at the screen you look at that gear you see I'll kind of loosen it here just to demonstrate but you see the gear is not getting full travel I'm not coming up into this mouse here so adjust that independent for each case but you just get wine in it down till you get a good full throw make sure looks like I get it just right on the money anyway pretty easy to adjust I just want to show you that with the targeting guy you do actually have to adjust it so that you get a full full travel on the on the cylinder I thought we'd try to show some accuracy here we'll take some power charges and we'll wait a minute and just take a look and see how we're doing I've got a primed 45 case and I'm going to use that as a vessel to move between the press on that and the scale I'm just going to make sure I tear on that case so I get a good zero and then everything else all the powder will be all the way I like to run the press Q it's cycle just like you would be when you're actually doing real this is unique powder the flake powder and I'm looking for about 5.5 here bounce around on a 5.56 let me take it out a bit neater particularly well so this is a good test for me Jenny 5.56 - one more in front of six if you can see this that's pretty accurate I mean they say most you're weighing devices and everything reactor with within 0.1 plus or minus one and one so you know that's even in the range of the scale here it's not a very expensive scale but so you know I'm happy with that that's a whole we off we brings between point five six and point five seven and one throw point point five seven so that's pretty accurate my book okay you guys the last thing that I want to leave you with is my tips and tricks based on trial and error to get the best most accurate power measuring out of any type of your powder measure mechanical powder measures and also the whatever use them as a conduit to get the powder down to the case so the theory my theory would be this the most of the powder measures are inherently accurate but some of the things that we blame on the powder measure is that we get for whatever reason we get sticking in a little bit of powder left behind after we throw a charge and we don't get a complete throw down into the case then the next time we take a charge the powder comes down and knocks excess so we get a light load if you have you load and vice-versa now some of the reasons for this could be that we didn't get all the all of the oils or whatever yet for manufacturing or storage inside these powder rifle through guys cleaned out or we've got static electricity that's causing the powder just cling to the sides and not fall all the way through or maybe even humidity so here's the here's my advice first off whenever you get in whatever you're using everything that touches the powder to include the cylinder in here and see that on this quantity automation or in here make sure it's clean make sure there is no oil residue from anything on and I like this break clean this stuff dries really fast some of your plastic parts mom might want to be careful with and just ease out all that you want everything that touches the power particularly from the cylinder that you measured in and the through tube down into the case needs to be clean and dry with no oil or anything like that and so on probably that's what asked you clean everything I like this graphite drive loop this is made by blaster there's a product at Home Depot you can get this from them in the store not to order anything and what I do is I take a q-tip and I spray this on a q-tip get a good and wet and then I coat all of the surfaces everything so this is a is a pistol rotor a drum for the army powder measure so I'm going to spray this off-camera slave and what I'm going to do is I'm going to coat all all the surfaces that could come in contact with the powder and then forms a barrier so if you get any static electricity or anything like that the powder just won't stick to it it's also a dry foam so then you just let that dry so it's going to keep probably keep the humidity from flowing as well I would think I'm just the entire cylinder and the dyes everywhere the Cobbers can act to flow through we're just going to coat that so that none of that powder hangs up on and you'd be surprised the powder will just flow right through that without trying to hang up at all any of these areas here put a light gray coat you know on your powder measures to swab up in there anyway like I said you'll see that that that power just flows right through just a couple of video notes I'll as always I'll put links to the things we talked about here the primary things we talked about in the description box in the bottom just click the show more button and it will open up and you'll be able to see the links to stuff if you're curious well guys that's all I got for your day I hope this video was helpful for you I hope you're thinking about picking one of these up you got some tips to know what to expect key to happiness is many expectations knowing what to expect so anyway if you like video click the like share it subscribe thanks for watching and guys be safe out there

Channel: TreeTopFlier

Views: 104,814

Keywords: Lee auto drum, powder measure, hand loading, ammo, ammunition, bullets, cartridge, gun powder, gun, lee precision, Guns, shooting sports, weapons, firearms, lee 90811, auto-drum setup, auto drum setup, Auto drum review, 90811 review, Auto-drum review, Auto drum leaking, Auto drum accuracy, Auto drum problems

Id: mHK2yqCdnrU

Length: 24min 42sec (1482 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 18 2017