Lee Auto Breech Lock Pro - Setup and tweaks

so welcome to my video on my new reloading setup I apologize now for cuts in the video I only have one camera to work with so I will be repositioning it throughout this video to give you a better view as I'm talking after a lot of questions and a lot of research I ended up settling on a Lee Auto breech-lock Pro progressive press and I'm going to go through my process of installation and hopefully my experience with this will help others looking at the same hardware I will be leaving a list of the parts in the video description below well when I started unboxing this thing I decided to start from the bottom up just like building a Lego kit now the first thing I started with was actually the bench plate kit the bench plate kit comes with the bench plate itself the hold down clamps and a set of Phillips screws for those and it comes with the press mounting plate and the press mounting plate hardware which are a set of three elevator bolts and nuts and washers now with the bench plate when you go to mount it to your work bench top you want to get this edge as close to flush with the edge of your workbench as possible you might also give it a little bit of an overhang and the reason for that is so that you have clearance for the the central RAM and the decapping tube I have seen some people actually have to cut notches out of the Younger their desk down here just so that they don't accidentally catch the decapping tube and break it off and as you can see it's just held on with a little plastic ring and I imagine it's quite fragile now when I mounted my bench plate I actually used some button head bolts and the reason I did this is I like the rounded profile on them and I find it less likely that I'm going to snag anything and I didn't want to risk any interference with the mounting clamps along with the button head allen bolts I also used some fender washers and nylock nuts to provide much more secure hold down for the press onto the mounting clamps Lee actually provides for pan head Phillips screws for these and as you can see they're they're very tiny and I didn't like the idea of having the keep and Phillips screw driver around so I actually followed the recommendation from another YouTube video and replaced them with some quarter-twenty shoulder bolts these lift the head up quite a bit and make it accessible for loosening and tightening by hand you can actually get knob caps that go on these to make it even easier for you now with the mounting plate itself Lee provides the required hardware three elevator bolts and the nuts and washers and they just slide right up through the bottom of the plate tighten them down and then slide the press into into place and tighten down the locking clamps now that we've got the press securely mounted to the bench let's go ahead and take a look at the the press itself I'm going to go ahead and remove all the pieces and parts that I've installed and we'll go through it step-by-step now when you first get your press the handle will actually be spun around backwards so all you have to do to fix this is to loosen this bolt up and then turn the handle 180 degrees and then retighten that bolt if you notice the clamp on this arm it'll actually allow for adjusting the length of the handle up and down quite a bit but you should be careful that if you shorten the head the arm too much the handle can interfere with the slide here for the case feeder as you can see the arm for the press actually does come down pretty low from my desk if this is too low for you there are some companies that actually make stands that will act that will raise the press up about 10 inches and that should help quite a bit now as I move up the press through the installation process I would like to briefly touch on something that I feel is a marked improvement over other li presses and that is the case feeder this connection on the previous progressive presses was a solid rod li has actually changed this out for a spring and the reason this becomes important is that if you have any sort of malfunction or Jam with that solid connecting rod it would Bend and in this case you never have to worry about that now moving bottom up the next thing that we should be taking care of would be the shell plate unfortunately there's actually something else that has to be done first and that is the bushings so the auto breech-lock Pro comes with three of their breech-lock bushings and one of their lock ring Eliminator bushings as you can see the lock ring Eliminator bushing was in position for whatever bushing is in the number four position has to be removed before we can install the shell plate the reason for this is that the bushing actually locks down the indexing rod once the bushing has been removed you can operate the handle of the press and the indexing rod will pop right up so now that the indexing rod has been removed we need to go ahead and install the shell plate we'll go ahead and drop the carrier just a little bit and brace the arm against myself so that the carrier doesn't move around well we need to do is take off the case ejector arm and it just pops right off this knurled center piece we're going to take our shell plate make sure that the number is stamped facing up I'm going to take the allen wrench that came with our press and I'm going to put it in right down the center piece and brace it against this arm now from there we'll just take the shell plate and spin it counterclockwise to tighten it down as I do that you can hear the indexing detent clicking and nice and snug take the allen wrench out then we will put the case ejector arm back in place and make sure that we get this little pin on the end in that little cup from there spin it around till it clicks into place on a detent drop the RAM and you'll get the indexing pin pop right up through that alignment hole if you can't drop it all the way it means that this thing is not in alignment and the pin is stuck on the underside of the plate from there we will go ahead and we'll take the indexing rod and drop it right down through the center right into the hole and push it down now as I mentioned before the auto breech-lock Pro comes with three of these steel breech-lock bushings my recommendation for you is to remove them and then reinsert them before you start seeding dies in them the reason for this recommendation is that in my press these bushings were inserted incredibly tightly and when I attempted to remove them with the dies I actually started unseating the dies instead now along with the press I also picked up a spare set of these breech-lock bushings and when I did I noticed the threads on these are incredibly sharp they're machine cut and the tops of the threads are quite sharp but in the grooves between the threads they are incredibly rough like running sandpaper over two pieces of sandpaper together rough and I think that's actually why when I got these the bushings were locked into place they had dropped in and those rough grooves just bound up so that's the part of the reason why I recommend make sure you can take the bushing out before you try and put anything in them now with the lockring Eliminator bushing being made out of billet aluminum I expect those sharp threads are going to start eating into this fairly quickly as you can may not be able to tell there's actually points on here where that's already happened and that's just from removing this from the press head something else of difference on these even though the threads are cut with the same process these feel like they've been knocked down a bit like with some Emery cloth or six or 800 grit sandpaper or something my recommendation would be to do the same to these bushings one benefit of the lockring Eliminator bushings that I didn't pay much attention to is that you can use the same spline wrench for the dies on the bushing itself since this is used to lock down the lock rings on the dies once you can get your breech-lock bushings in and out of the press without a lot of trouble go ahead and make sure you've got all your bushings inserted twist in twist locked into place and then we're going to go ahead and mount the dies now for my dies I went with the Lee deluxe 4 die carbide set they also have a 3 die set but the fourth die that I got is the factory crimp die and depending on the caliber it's either going to be a roll crimp or a taper crimp everything that i've read has told me that having that crimp die that factory crimp die improves the the feeding reliability the ammo over the standard bullet seating so that's what I went with now the typical order of dies that are inserted in here starts with the D capping and sizing way and that's what I've got here we're gonna drop that into the number 1 hole which is right here next to this case feed hole and then twist lock it into place now on my press I have noticed I always have a little bit of difficulty remember how I mentioned those threads being sharp usually I have to lock this into place just because of one of those threads it always seems to bind up there we go spline wrench on it snap and lock into place now something else of note is that inside the bushing holes there are actually Owings you want to make sure you don't catch those with the bushing or with the die because damage to those may cause the bushing to unintentionally loosen up now from there we go on to station number two and we will insert the flaring and powder insertion now this comes with a little funnel adapter top but we're not going to use that so we will take that off and it will be replaced with a powder measure so on the backside here between dyes one and two there's actually a tab which is where the safety Prime mount screws to I've heard some people refer to the safety prime as a PEZ dispenser which it kind of sort it is so here is safety Prime just clips right there into the bracket and that's it now you will note I have a couple of zip ties on this and this is actually a fairly common modification because the chute here is molded as one piece and then folded back on itself and part of the problem is that the peat the two halves tend to separate so a lot of people tend to put small zip ties on them at the top and bottom just to make sure that the chute doesn't split apart okay now that we can see the the press head again up next is dye number three and this is the bullet seeding die now on the lead dies they have a tapered head on them and the reason for this is for the automatic bullet feeder system which is which attaches to this hole down here and it's actually the one part I don't have but it is on order and you can go ahead and drop this into place lock it down now if you only have the three die set I would recommend adding in one particular die in this place before the bullets eating die and that would actually be a Hornet II bullet feeding guy and what that is it's a hollow die with a tube that comes out of the top and it just dispenses the bullets right down into the casing and then I put the bullet seat right here in the number four spot but since I have the number for the four piece deluxe set I actually have the bullet feeding mechanism on order and then we're going to move on to the crib die now the number four bushing spot on this is kind of important and the reason why is it locks down the auto indexing rod so even if you don't have four diets in use you need that fourth position filled with something even if it is just an empty bushing so now that we've got our four dies in place let's move on to the powder measure what I have here is the Lee Pro auto disc powder measure and the way it can fit comes configured out of the box is that this actuator arm is actually mounted to the powder measure and it's got a spring attached to it right here let me grab the manual here and I will show you exactly what it looks like and there we go so there is what the spring lever return looks like let's see if I can get the camera to focus here nope it won't well the spring lever return is actually designed for use with single stage presses and turret presses and I think it's kind of a bad design and here is why right there now the base of this is metal but the way the spring is attached is right here and then it's stretched across that support piece before it's attached to the catch on this arm and every time this would actually you'll get a loud twang sound where the coils of the spring are stretching across and then snapping off and I unfortunately I can see a point where that spring might break that but thankfully for the progressive press you don't need this arm you need this one one of the other benefits of this particular return arm is that if you push it all the way up against the bottom of the powder measure the disc it actually unlocks the disc and you can pull the disc out and change them without ever having to dismantle the powder feed we'll slide that back in line that slot up on the disc with that arm then push it in and then pull that down there we go now something to note along with the powder measure everything that I had been getting told was that I also needed the riser to go with it and I was told that the the purpose of the riser was to lift the powder measure up out of the way of the safety prime system what nobody had mentioned to me was that this is used for single stage presses and it is used for turret presses but it doesn't necessarily need to be used on a progressive and as I discovered I don't think that I will be needing it online drop that back in its tube back over there so from here we'll take my powder measure drop it into the firing die and we are going to tighten it down into place if I can get my fingers on that little thumb screw all right nice and tight now if you'll notice I actually this actuator arm for the reset is actually supposed to be lined up vertically over the top of this little loop right here and the reason for that is how this actuator arm operates which unfortunately I feel is a severe flaw it's it's got a problem and I'll show you what that is so the pro auto disk powder measure uses this little ball chain as a reset mechanism and what you're supposed to do is take this chain feed it through the outside hole and then feed it back through the inside hole and that's a the tension lock for it the other end of the chain you're supposed to drop through this little hole in the carrier and then with the slack on the under I slide on a little tension spring and then lock it into place with this little brass bell which just slides over the chain like so now the reason I say this is a flaw is because if you look at the carrier that attachment point sits right over the top of the mounting bolt and what happens when you bring that carrier down is that it actually crushes the spring and that little locking belt against that bolt and if you do that enough times in my case it only took three before that Bell got crushed and came off the chain and that to me is a problem so here's how I went about solving it let me go ahead and pull this chain out and then we will pull it out of the carrier and oddly enough all I needed to fix it was a washer so here's a slightly different angle of the powder measure and what I did was I actually turned it until the reset arm is lined up directly over the the support rod here for the press head we're going to go ahead and remove that and then what I'm going to what I'm doing is I'm going to loosen up all the Allen bolts for the press head except for this one this one I'm actually going to take out and we reason for is so that I can slip this washer with that hole over that rod and we'll set it back down and we will tighten it up that one tighten up that one and then we would go ahead and put the powder measure back in place and then you know that annoying spring ice that I didn't like I'm going to hook that spring into that hole that I drilled in the washer and then attach it to that reset on there we go now as the powder gets actuated that spring provides enough tension that it will reset properly now I would love to see Lee actually take this idea and make an actual bracket or molded loop or something of some kind to repurpose this spring specifically for doing this after all the spring here on the case feeder has a little molded plastic holder that does something similar for this spring so last but not least is going to be the case feeder and this is probably one of the most annoying things that I had to set up as you can see there are actually two mounting holes on here and the reason why is these new case feeders are actually Universal they have a large hole and a small hole and depending on which bolt hole mounting hole you use determines which hold the brass is going to try and feed from now if you're using smaller brass for like pistol caliber or something you're probably going to be using the small hole and in that case there is actually this little blocking plate that slides into place over the larger one that way you don't have brass falling out the back end now with that bolt you've got three nuts you better have three you need one to tighten the case feeder down to the bolt you have a second one that is going to be used for the height adjustment of the bolt and then you have the third one that locks it down now one of the reasons why I say this is one of the most annoying parts that I've had to put on here has to do with how it attaches it's got this nice little cast mounting hole down here but for some reason no matter how tight that I get that nut I can never seem to get it tight enough but the case feeder won't rotate and the problem has to do with clearances now for the height adjustment it's fairly easy put a case into the case feeder and then raise it up about a Penny's thickness you know a little less than an eighth of an inch but what I meant for alignment is this if you don't get it rotated just right then the black base here will catch on the underside of the press head and do it often enough and I'm pretty sure that it will cause some irreparable damage there we go just barely clears it the other problem is that if you don't get it close enough we'll actually move the front feet tube out of alignment for the case feeder underneath yeah I wish we would come up with some way of making it mouth through this existing hole you know put like a a push button dispenser or something so that it'll drop straight through just like you would when you're manually feeding it oh well and last but not least and last but not least we have my little case cold later on the top as much as I hear people badmouth these things they do save time and they are incredibly helpful now something you may have noticed is one other slight and sort of modification that I've done and that is these tubes if you notice I've actually put a corner twist in the tube some people will put zip ties around them to hold them together by putting this quarter twist in them it actually brings the tubes together but it puts a little bit of a wedge up here and down here from the Cape from the tubes being twisted so they don't pop out unexpectedly which unfortunately has happened when I tested it out initially well that is everything and I hope this video helps somebody somewhere Oh almost forgot one thing that where's my primer there it is there's my primer seat link nism drop it down in there like so and of course because I only raised it partway the plate went out of battery there we go all done hope it helps

Channel: Sartek

Views: 18,391

Rating: 4.8693876 out of 5

Keywords: Lee Precision, ABPL, Pro Auto-Disk, Reloading

Id: yS1ai2U2dkc

Length: 30min 58sec (1858 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 09 2020