Comparison of My Dillon XL750 and Hornady LnL Builds/Operation

hey folks reloading bench back with you once again and since we're in a shelter-in-place safe at home kind of scenario I thought I'd do a comparison I spent some time last night doing some tweaks in the 750 to make it run and my biggest challenge being the Hornady bullet feeder it was beyond cranky hopefully I've worked through that so I thought I'd do a round of maybe 100 rounds of 9-millimeter and do a direct comparison with how I have the Dillon XL 750 set up against the Hornady Lock and Load and after quite frankly going through getting everything functioning just as it would on my lock and load I honestly don't see what the ha is about Dillon and again not bashing Dillon the press worked and the press was fine just like my Hornady Lock and Load i had to tweak that and take her to get that running and i had to do the exact same thing with Dillon and now with the Dillon running there's no epiphany that this is the best thing since sliced bread so I honestly don't see the whole blue versus red it's just another press of a different color and it does the exact same thing so this is what the press looks like when I pop the covers nothing nothing set up yet and I'll spend the next few minutes showing you what I do to prep for reloading on either and I do the exact same thing because I have the same mechanical setup for case and bullet feeding so I'll walk you through some of the steps on what I do hey folks yesterday was the Dillon 750 run I'm nine-millimeter and today is going to be the equivalent setup and configuration description explanation of how my Hornady Lock and Load is set up very comparable to the dillon 750 so I'll go through what I did yesterday and the videos together so I think I'll seesaw between each press at each segment of what I'm doing and this was I don't think I've shown this before but this was my powder powder measure cover because there's a lot more steel going on here then there is the Dylan so I like to keep that as covered as possible constantly looping it but I'll go around the press here in a second and show you some of the similarities kind of what I did yesterday from top to bottom all the way down to my primer catch and this was the custom mount that inline fabbed it's I think - and some change by for wide and then entirely welded on the top and bottom and this was before Dan went to the more modular approach but it gives me the same same effect as what I did on the Dylan same thing or go handle I'll go through some of the things I've done to this so that you can see the comparison and then we'll start with what we did yesterday okay so before I ever had either the bullet feeding dye or the case feeding configuration I had this from inline fab and absolutely loved it and swing out tray to hold bullets and casings when I was doing everything manually I still like to have bullets and cases next to me for the what if I found after yesterday the the way this particular case feeder operates is a little easier to deal with either jams or wrongly fed upside down cases than the Dylan but again half a dozen one six or another it's just another mechanism for feeding cases so you know each one has pros and cons and then what I did with my bullet feeder and the janky nests of I have here with my mount to keep the guy from jumping around some people have criticized that at whatever it works for me and it keeps the tube in and maybe that's something that I have to do with the 9 mil as well considering what it was doing yesterday another upgrade from inline fab let's see how paying down a little bit this particular mount that got rid of the Hornady standard really thin sheet metal I will give Dylan props that their sheet metal shoots are a lot more robust than than the Hornady so to replace that with a very sturdy looks like eighth of an inch plate that goes under the mount and onto the riser just adds an incredible amount of weight there's no snow sag I can even put an elongated bin in there but I usually do rounds or runs of about a hundred rounds so there's no need for me to have an extended bin but I do have it there just in case so that's kind of the configuration and setup of the press again very similar in terms of what we've got here with a powder lockout die so the exact same run station one is a d cap and resize station two is powder station three is powder lockout station four is bullet feed and station five is seating and crimping so identical configuration to the to the Dylan I will say I do like the Dylan plate retention or case retention method on the shell plate more than the Hornady spring I've lost count of how many Springs I've gone through because as soon as you take the plate off you're bound to find some kinks in the spring and very easily replaced item but also just just a different implementation and as I go through the comparison I'll discuss what I like or worse or indifference on each of the presses so on to the set up so I really have no set order excuse me on how I do things whether it's powder first primers first cases first or bullets first but since I had the tripod set up next to the press I thought I would do powder I'm doing unique roughly 5.1 5.2 grains of unique and I have to give a super shout out for what was the name of the company I bought this from can't remember just do bullet strainer bullet powder strainer this thing was a godsend because yesterday as I was trying to fine-tune my powder drop and get the right grains because obviously when you test and you do reality testing and actual reloading or two different things Murphy's Law and things just don't want to work like they did when you set it up so this thing was awesome for popping bullets in just taking it straight from the bullet puller like I have it on my bench so taking it straight from the bullet puller and dumping it right in and not having to worry about catching the bullet in my hand that I do with my Hornady I ordered one for the Hornet II - unfortunately because I had a custom lid made it doesn't fit inside so I'm looking to have either the custom lid modified or I'll just run the Hornady with the strainer in it while I'm reloading and the cap when I'm done so that was that was a good thing okay this is what I'm going to do for the powder set up the original powder cap that came with the horn ad was a cheesy piece of plastic and I had this custom-made for me with the knurl and when I was looking at options for and it's been great for years when I was looking at options for the Dylan that's when I found the strainer and I did find a company that produced the very similar little different kind of milling on the on the aluminum but I found a company that did the same thing for the Hornet II because obviously the tubes are different sizes wouldn't want to have same size tubes so there's a bullet strainer slash powder strainer for correcting bullets or checking your your weights on your powder and such unfortunately that doesn't fit so I either have to figure out a way to shave this shave this hard to look at what I'm doing and that's the on camera I'm maybe they're gonna have to shave this or have them make another one with different dimensions but I found that for what I'm doing I'll just run the powder strainer while I'm doing my reloading session and then just throw the strainer in one of the bins when I put the press away so my workaround is adequate no showstoppers or big deal so kind of who cares also running for what I load on 45 ACP I'm a fan of either 231 or wst and that's a consistent burn for me clean enough I'm used to it I get very good results in my opinion and it's something I've used for years and thoroughly enjoy using that powder if that makes any sense all right so that's about what I feel yesterday with the unique I always keep powder on my bench and I only use one powder at a time I only reload one caliber one one session at a time so that I avoid any confusion and I'll do the same thing I did yesterday with dropping powder but let me get that set up okay so because I don't yet trust this machine and by that I mean I haven't worked with it enough that I'm comfortable normally on my lock and load I'll put powder in as I just did and then I'll cycle the powder drop a couple of times so I completely empty my powder drop anytime I have finished a reloading session so what I'm doing now is just dumping powder back into the press with that powder strainer but I'm trying to get a now that I've what I'd call primed the powder drop I'll show you what I've got on the bench here there's my scale so what I'll do and we're zeroed out is I'll do what I just did to a powder drop a manual powder drop and hopefully this comes in at 5.1 5.2 okay 4.8 let's see if I did that a little too fast or didn't all right that was a slow steady full push on the powder drop alright five-oh Hubbard at five one just leave that down there because I know I'm going to throw powder on a camp and if it stays at 500 I'm fine with that and there's my 500 again and I'll do one more for four giggles and even though I'm doing this manually on my first few rounds of brass I'll do the exact same thing for nine four nine five oh so slight variations that I can live with all right to the next task normally what I will do to prime the and this is where I like it's a little easier to place brass inside the shuttle or the shell plate dealing with the shuttle for the Hornady not dealing with pins so again half a dozen oh one six of another so normally what I'll do is I'll take an old piece of brass that is yet to be deep rhymed and I will carefully do a couple rounds on that and then I will throw that in again and we'll we'll weigh that and I've got my scale here so let's see if I can get the cam around so I'm in back of everything around here looks like we get a little flutter there and I'm running four point three grains on that particular powder don't copy my loads these are published loads though I take no responsibility I find it so interesting that people have to say that now but whatever 4.2 four-point-two so 4.2 4.3 of WSP for 45 ACP and I would say that I'm golden there so now we've done powder I'll move on to primers shell and probably bullets here in a minute maybe because of where the tripod is set up I'll do bullets next so let me turn this off and get this out of the way so I'll do I'll show you how i do bullets so years ago when I got into the bullet feeding tube for the Hornady block and load press and did my janky little spring contraption I found that just as pickup tubes I don't like to single load bullets into a pickup excuse me - a bullet tube like a pickup for primers so I made I took a 2x4 and made route it out the the space so that I could slide I could fill this this groove up with bullets and since you can't see the edge let me try and maneuver this a little better the edge is cut out a little deeper a little wider so that I can set this in here and it's like my bullets in so large numbers of bullets the most time-consuming thing is just set them up here which goes pretty quickly I like throwing primers on a tray and getting them all situated the correct facing unfortunately 9 millimeters a lot thinner and you can see the bullet jumps around a lot more so i've debating do I make a second groove for 9 millimeter and you do it on the other side I don't know so for right now what I do with us 45 size tube and a 9 millimeter tube are a little bit different so I've found that if I flip this around and again just use the 9 millimeter to at the end it's you know it's it's doable and when you have a bunch of bullets pushing it kind of works so I haven't figured out what I'm gonna do more longer-term for how I address feeding bullets but I'll do that off screen because that's Murphy's Law says the bullets will go everywhere and it won't go as smoothly as I just demonstrated so back in a minute alright so very similar to yesterday when I showed you what I was doing with my bullet tubes and my cast Malick coated I usually just throw a bunch out and then this is the most time consuming but again to me what I do for for reloading is my therapy and this is what I enjoy doing so I'm still debating how I'm going to do the 9-millimeter I don't know if you can see this yes you can did I pop this in and that's what I'll do to fill the two all right so now technically time consuming got repetitive so I will take a handful of bullets and I will prime the bullet feed tube excuse me the bullet feed die before I throw this tube on and clamp it on so I will do that now clear this off and then head over to primers so I talked about this previously that I hate pickup tubes for progressive presses for any type of linear tubular reloading or excuse me primer and I think they're just not my cup of tea and I'll leave it at that so that's essentially all the primers facing a direction this is my s this is my L so I will take the gate and toss it or at least cover the L like everything aligned and ready to insert into the LIBOR crime and it's as simple as making sure you have your cotter pin I normally don't run it with this plastic thing on my preference is to have the bottom of the primer - for the vibra Prime touching the primer tube in the in the press but maybe for a visual I'll leave it in so you could all right so taking the tube the vibra prime tube popping it in and hopefully be able to see this I make sure I'm an so i tilt sometimes I'll shake it a little depending small upon which seem to work pretty quick and easy once you've had this set up so there's all my primers in the tube I'll reset you eight the camera and you can see how I'm loading the press okay exact same process as what I was doing with the nine-millimeter on the frankfurt ourselv I broke I'm I don't have a powder alarm on this press excuse me a primer alarm on this press so I use a visual aid for two things when this is actually when this is in the primer tube I've got it little painted so it's my dipstick I know when I'm getting low on primers and I don't need an audible message to tell me that our audible response plus the little noise is kind of driving me bonkers so that's my pet peeve that's the exact same tray as yesterday this might go a little smoother than the small pistol primer simply because I've used this for years with the large pistol primers and my large size and again I'll put the gate on the small side so the fit is a little smoother just because I've never used the small until till yesterday and this also fits in terms a little easier but again same mechanism bigger primers this is where the little bit of jiggle comes in and I did I think I said yesterday the video years ago on comparing the time of doing a primer tube pickup with the laboratory method for this and it just beats it hands down stress wise you name it so I will show putting this in my primer feed tube as well and again I use this to help facilitate the primers dropping in the tube so I'll show that and I'll move the camera and tripod around hangout so let's be interesting as I try to maneuver around the tripod because it's so close to the press I what I normally do is I'll put this in the top of the Frankfurt tube just to give the tube a little extra gravity push I guess is the right way to say it alright so this will be a first time for me let me try and get out of the way well again I don't usually use this plastic thing so and that's why I don't use that plastic thing so look it there notice how we have a [ __ ] ton of small primers bundled up so live and learn alright take two so this is what I normally do with my Lock and Load bear Madol the bare metal and again I've got the whatever this follower thing is called for the primer alarm and that is that and that's all good to go and just to sound like other folks who love this hate that sound all right that's that's priming so we got powder priming and I didn't show you but I do have bullets in there as well I'll move the camera around here one second so hopefully this will be in focus the primer feeding mechanism linear vertical linear slash priming system on the lock and load is in the back whereas on the Dillion it's in the front if I had to make a choice I'd prefer to be in the rear because I like being able to grab the press and not having anything in front while I'm working the RAM and in the ergo handle but it is what it is so I'll take this as I said and I will try to make sure I'm on screen here I'll pop that in so that it's holding and let's see how well I can do this because normally I'm where the tripod is standing so I'm going to you have to do this little backwards so forgive me if my head gets in the way so same thing and then I leave the dipstick in always put the cotter pin in and then I toss this off to the side again depending on what I'm reloading so if I'm just doing a session of a hundred I am done with that so that takes care of primers powder primer powder bullets primers and I'll move the camera around for filling the case feeder and hopefully that's in focus so I tinkered with this a bunch when I first tried to fine-tune this and this thing was giving me the most problem because without the tube in they work flawlessly as soon as I put the tube full of bullets in whether that tube was half full 3/4 full or full it just wasn't playing nice wasn't dropping a bullet I couldn't figure it out you know rechecked everything on Hornady site about just touching the flared case half a turn plus or minus you know sixteenth of a turn to fine this was said so that very little wiggle between the a and b collets inside so that in the collet for the B collet was touching the bottom of the dye so everything was set correctly and as I said when I primed the dye with say eight bullets I think it takes eight bullets it was flawless and then as soon as I put the bullets on in the tube and onto the dye it just wouldn't feed so one of the things I discovered was that if what which is what I do with my 45 is I always fill the tube the dye with bullets and then I fill the tube and then I pop the tube on whereas with this I found I was having better success if I do not prime the dye with any bullets and just put the I think it takes roughly forty nine millimeter but let's just put the 40 bullets in here and let it slide down into the dye itself and then maybe say put the other eight or so bullets at the top of the dye so that I have roughly you know close to 50 in terms of loading up the bullet - all right on to brass okay so this case feeder and I've done videos on this years ago brilliant design by I'll call person and engineer so to figure that out and not have to do a [ __ ] case feeding mechanism I like the fact that the Dylan has the case feeding capability built in and you get a tube so it's better than what the Hornady ships with native but I also like this adaptation of what this guy did and making a third-party add-on adapter for the Hornady without having to go to an electronic solution like Hornet YZ or some of the other bullet feeders cool really good stuff so and again I love having the trays with a couple of components right next to me just in case and to feed these tubes is a lot easier than to feed the the double alpha because the double alpha is manually the double alpha is more robust than the lis tube and this printed mechanism versus the molded polymer that the double alpha is made from so again this is some guy doing this in his basement with a 3d printer and for what it is completely awesome but I use the Lee I want to call this a KO later but this just pops on the top of the four tubes and as Genki is the method to as it sounds to fill these four tubes I'll do this real time so you can get a feel for actually how quick it is surprisingly quick so let me go ahead and get more brass than is in this and we'll go ahead and do that okay for brass on the Dylan I do the exact same thing as I do for bullets and that is to take advantage of this channel for the bullets and I just align my brass this I don't like as much as I do say the Li feeding system or at least the Lully tubes in a modified mechanical feeding system I have for the Lock and Load I cannot say enough about this double alpha brass feeder worked great absolutely great so I when I load I pick any tube other than this main tube that's aligned to at least one of the the the tubes this hole that's aligned to one of the tubes and the reason I do that is because there's no on and off button for this thing so you load a tube and if you happen to load the tube that you're it's aligned with the hole you're kind of screwed so I'm going to stop looking at the camera trying so that's essentially what I'm doing there is each tube holds 25 nine-millimeter casing so I'll load this up with a hundred to match my primers and that's not all three six tubes so obviously only four tubes so I won't load the tube with the hole so that I don't have to worry about brass going everywhere but if I was going to have a larger loading session I would so that's enough babbling for now I'll finish loading these and then the press will be ready to go all right so I will take this and start dumping it in that little red tube you just saw little red and I'll call that dunnage there's always one that wants to hang out in a full tube alright so now I have that all ready to go you can see that it's already primed the mechanism so the downside to this is there really is no off you would have to just rotate this off to the side so that it's not feeding anything but the other positive is if it does feed it's very easy to grab it on the Hornady and pull it out as opposed to the Dylan because the Dylan has a channel that the brass glides in which is that's a positive but if you need it to pull that casing out it's easier said than done doable but just a little a little more challenging alright so we are ready to go I I will move the camera so that you get the same angle as how I was loading with the Dylan so hang on a second alright so it looks like all systems are kind of ready to go I will drop brass and see what kind of problems we run into or how smooth things go usually at night I'll have the light on it's daytime and it's not dark in air but that is the difference maybe I'll leave it on for a little bit all right let's see what we get here and I'm noticing that my handle is loose from the other day so let me pause for a second and we're back which is kind of interesting because I did lock tight that when I first put it on so I've not completed the first stroke so that is the very first piece of brass for today's session and I will pause for a second here to weigh this powder 5.3 which is okay for me I don't like to run any loads hot and more about safety than anything all right so this will be the and my father powder check slash powder lockout die I guess you call it love this thing and the visual alright here's where all the money is am I gonna get a bullet yes all right now look at that one bullet that's all I got all I got and I did find that if you'll see if this bullet feeds I also found that if I force a bullet into the bullet feeder so I think I'll be looking at the double alpha bullet feeder so I don't understand what would cause this to not function properly I really don't so what I'll do is I'll show you how it runs with no too because that's where the confusion is so if I have bullets and I run this puppy with no tube seems to operate kind of flawlessly so the bullet feeder that doesn't feed bullets unless you don't fill the tube so that's kind of useless to me and I don't want to go in groups of eight and my bullet feeder so I'm going to attempt to put this back in and I've heard people say you should prime it and you shouldn't prime it so I don't know what the right solution is I'm also thinking that maybe because it's new new in the sense of fresh fresh steel not polished needs to get a workout let me turn the light off so you get a better or different view I don't know if that's better at all different and I notice that I've got a couple of bullets that are this bone that missed a bullet so I've got some powder to get rid of as I missed one guilty of that on the Hornady as well to get a little bucket of powder more focused on watching that than anything else go ahead I don't know that's encouraging all right so you've seen some of my pros and cons I will say that when I first got the bullet tube feeder and dye combination for my Lock and Load I had lots of challenges with that because I run cast led moly coat and these are for jacketed smoother bullets so again I may be running into it just needs time to work through its pains and frustrations of newness and kind of like a car break-in don't know don't know what to say there and it's interesting when things don't go according to plan no that's probably why that's a really effed up primer I don't know where that happened not the press's fault so I mean the press operates as I would expect it's it's a press and again I'm not doing anything any different than I would on my Hornady that to me it feels exactly the same so yeah no bashing just the press I wouldn't I wouldn't get rid of my quantity for this and I don't dislike this so no dings no harm no foul let's take a peek at what that and then powder level it is if I point to alright I'm good happy enough with it but yesterday when I was tweaking or at least going crazy trying to understand why the bullet feeder didn't want to play nice beside myself trying to understand what I was doing wrong when I followed all the directions and kind of like the most recent videos of some of the new pythons still enough not rotating or not firing so I was having a not firing when it comes to the bullets and I think I'm out of bullets here so stop there you get the idea press is working I'm happy with it but I am probably going to give the double alpha bullet feeder a try especially after how well the double alpha case feeder has done for me so I call that a winner but yeah price price is cool no complaints it's just another press okay and away we go just as a side note this is the first time I'm using this press since using the 750 so everything about the 750 in terms of feel and I guess operation slash whatever is pretty fresh that was yesterday and here we are today and we'll see how this feels so I will say more consistency and my bullet feeder out of the gate that's also because I've been using that tube for years so it is I guess well broken in I'll also mention I noticed yesterday that I was getting a number of bullets completed bullets that had spent primer still in them on the Diller and when I started to look into that I discovered that with the RCBS d primer because it was only happening on the CCI and I'm not a book I'm out of brass there so I mean rotate just like the double alpha what was happening with the rcds sizing / decapping guy was only on CCI primers not be Western or excuse me Winchester I'm looking at my powder only on the CC eye primers the silver primers was I getting this particular scenario where it looked like the decaf didn't be cap but for baby western excuse me Winchester that didn't happen so I spent probably hours taking things apart troubleshooting adjusting and again the die was adjusted correctly for all instructions you know obviously it's not a Dylan die but you don't have to have a Dylan die to work and I jumped online finally to say what are people doing or are other people having this problem and I'll run these out our other people having this problem as well and it turns out that other people did have that problem specifically with the RCBS decap and what was happening was the decaf pin in the CCI primer was pushing it and then because the anvil is so small and the pin is thick enough that it was locking on to it so it wasn't I was holding on to it and when you raise the RAM the primer was then pulled back into the pocket and when you went to prime it was a reprime imir in there so you had the feel of priming because you could feel the the primer being seated so you thought you were priming a new primer into the casing and it turns out that the fix is to just bevel the tip and polish it ever so slightly I did that and I had a straight run of I think 20 CCI primers last night and there was no issue so I think that problem is solved I will say that the presses feel almost identical I mean doing the Hornady right now I don't notice any again no aha like I like my Hornet II better than I like my Dillon I think they both operate the same in all honesty I can't really feel a difference I have a very comparable configuration in terms of the riser a mechanical solution for both bullet and and brass albeit slightly different on the brass everything else is about the same I'm feeding the same with with the primer tubes via the Viper prime I do like the consistency on the Hornady Lock and Load powder charge drop much much more than I do the Dillon I think the design is a little better again my opinions I'm getting much more consistency I found that yesterday if I took a break and then came back on the Dillon I was getting you know upwards of five point eight grains of powder so I don't know why that is as opposed to 5.1 5.2 if I did a powder dump for a couple casings so when everything is you know rotating through I had good consistency with the Dylan powder drop I've never had issues with the quantity again very rare do I weigh my powder I'll do a couple of drops and then I'm good to go and I've been doing that for years and I'm quite satisfied with the consistency of the product so again back to the the presses I wish there was a way to mount and I have to look into that this particular tray or this this articulating arm with the two trays on the Dylan if you buy an inline fab one of their ultra mounts you can do it but I don't have an ultra mount and the way that the Hornady is built for the case feeding excuse me case feeding tube solution the ammo plant that's that's where this would go and this word that that's where this bracket is so I wish I could do this configuration on the Dylan I would in a heartbeat because you saw yesterday there were times where I needed to either grab brass or we have a bullet when the bullet feeding wasn't wasn't happening and I will say one of the things I do like more about the Hornady as I do with the Li and one of the reasons I went with the Lee originally was everything done brass bullet with the left hand for me on the Lee as well as the Hornady the Dylan there's still stuff you do with your right hand so left hand brass and bullet right hand priming and I that's with my Lee and that's with my Dylan and because I'm right-handed I like that the Hornady excuse me that Dylan you do need to use your right hand on some of their presses for other activities in addition to using the RAM again if you're right-handed so I like the isolation of tasks to left hand for bullet brass and right hand for the the RAM and the ergo handle but otherwise these presses are identical there to me there is no difference the 750 in the Lock and Load are to me apples and apples ones a Granny Smith and the the other is a Macintosh or pick another flavor of Apple but they're both apples there there is no to me the red is better the blue is better I've got both they're both comparable models both configured almost identically in terms of what they do and I'm not seeing an aha moment over one press over the other I like what they both do they both do them differently and they're both cool presses so that's kind of my comparison

Channel: Re Loader

Views: 45,953

Rating: 4.6567426 out of 5

Keywords: 416, Barrett, reloading, bench, reloadingbench, dies, Lee, Hornady LnL lock n load and Dillon XL 750 XL750, press progressive comparison primer bullet powder measure, bullet feeder tubes RCBS lockout die, inline fabrication riser, red blue

Id: yT3EhJ1lj8I

Length: 48min 14sec (2894 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 22 2020