Lee Deluxe Perfect Powder Measure

so today i want to talk about the lee deluxe perfect powder measure so this deluxe perfect powder measure is the deluxe version of the standard lee perfect powder measure this is not exactly the current production they've switched over i think lee's switched over to this style of powder hopper on pretty much all of their of their measures and lee seems to have a lot of different powder measures it's a little bit confusing so perfect powder measure this is their least expensive option for about 25 bucks it comes in their like their breech lock challenger kit which is a great kit to get started with reloading so this is this is the perfect powder measure and it's it's pretty darn good powder measure but it's made cheap and the ergonomics like especially the little dinky little handle kind of hard to get a hold of sometimes like i said cheap construction very basic mount for your bench so that's where the deluxe comes in mostly metal construction a little bit more robust nice uh longer wider more substantial handle to get a hold of a much easier adjuster here with this little rotating brass bit with the scale and this is about three times the price i think this one goes for around 25 bucks and then this one goes somewhere in the 75 dollar range so i currently have this one in this little redding stand for the bench lee sells a stand there's a little rcbs stand so quite a few options most of these are universal i guess the one big difference if you're going stand shopping is like here's my my big rcbs one and you'll see this one is not threaded the powder measure just slips through and then you use a lock ring to tighten it in while the shorter rcbs has threads now this one does not have threads which is not really a big deal either one either style would work fine with this measure but i think i prefer the ones that just slip through like this one's it's easier to uh to adjust and to get in and out of there so let's tear this apart and i'll show you what's going on in here before we do that though let me show you this this is a lee quick change drum set which is uh it's a set of four four plastic drums so we'll look closer and talk about these as well i really like these so first let's take off this oh i forgot to show you guys the cool thing about these new bottles these new hoppers that they have you know the bottles are fine and work pretty good but this threading is the same that you'll see on like a hodgdon powder bottle so you can just remove the lid from your powder screw this on and you're good to go i don't like doing that really really cool idea but it's like whenever i'm setting up the powder measure i'm always going to have some waste powder as i'm dialing it in or testing it and then you can't put it back in your bottle so you almost have to have a you know waste reservoir handy like maybe a little bowl like this that i use a lot for powder i might keep this handy to keep all of the waste in so that then once i'm done i can dump it back in in the bottle which normally you know just dump the powder into this and then have the actual container on the bench for for waste as i go so that's the way i've mainly been using these is with the bottle and they're definitely a little bit clingy i think i finally got this one dirtied up enough to where powder has stopped clinging to it so much because if you're new that that's what you'll you'll find with pretty much any powder measure you take it out of the package first thing you want to do is just degrease everything or any area where powder is going to be in contact and then you've just got to use it until it gets a coating of powder dust on it and then things will stop clanging there's some some stuff you can do to help a little bit but it's kind of like cooking with a cast iron pan all of the magic how to season your pan videos like the best way just use the damn thing and put up with stuff stuff sticking for a little bit you know all right so next step in disassembly is that right there that's what she looks like so this guy is held in there with a clip doesn't look like any of the rest of this is supposed to come apart now if i go back to the standard perfect powder measure it's got a phillips screw here on the side that serves the same function which is a little bit of a pain in the butt because that screw is also important during adjustment so here this perfect powder measures definitely got some miles on it you can definitely see some some wear on the plastic bit of wear on the plastic but it's not bad and you might see some powder granules stuck to this little chunk right here this is actually a rubberized this is like rubbery soft so good knock those off which one i finally did after years of thinking i should is i finally got just a little brush that i use for cleaning this sort of stuff you're never going to get away from this no matter what powder measure you go with you're still going to need to tear it apart you're going to need to clean it because they've all got little spots where stuff likes to accumulate so that little rubber wiper back to our deluxe perfect measure same thing in there so it's kind of got pinched a little bit right there so okay why is this rubber piece in here as far as i know none of the other powder measure manufacturers used this i don't know if it's if it was patented by lee or maybe it attracts ladybugs i'm not real sure these things are awful house is just full of them nothing you can do would vacuum them up all right go away so what this rubberized piece here does this is the the shearing point whenever the there we go here's our rotor and then here is the you know the adjustment cylinder i was talking about which if i spin this down near zero something like that then we should be able to see the top come up here flush or more or less flush so that's how our adjustments work this wheel moves that farther down into here and the volume of this sets our powder charge right so this so during the charging part of the stroke that reservoir rotates up to here and gets filled with powder and then rotates in that direction so a normal powder measure if you imagine if this was all metal and if you imagine an extruded powder which are little sticks you're going to have some number of sticks that get sheared and broken as the powder measure rotates that's what this little wiper is all about it stops that shearing from happening so these powder measures are much much much easier to use with extruded powders and i love them for that same thing with the you know just the plain old 25 dollar perfect powder measure it works pretty good with extruded powders now the biggest complaint i've seen with these is that they leak and i think the cause of that is you know that this needs to be held the two tapered you know this tapered fitting needs to be held tight if there's any room in between powder can get in here and where you can see mine you know that that plastic's already definitely got a little bit of wear if you get powder granules in there i think it scores it even more and you end up with you know your mating surfaces are destroyed so it's always going to leak so i think it's important with these powder measures to keep that yeah to keep this tight you know obviously it needs to rotate but it needs to be kept tight so that powder can't intrude into the area between those surfaces so much less worry about that here with our metal deluxe powder measure and here is its standard drum same sort of deal i've used this one a fair amount and uh still looks and feels pretty good look at this one particularly shiny groove here i think it's okay like i don't think that's anything of significance but i can definitely yeah i think it's just you know this surface right here or this part of the cut out that's where that rides but so far so good haven't really had any leaking but the main problem is that i've never really had much leaking out of the standard perfect powder measure but let me show you on the standard one the taper goes all the way out to the edge and on the deluxe the taper comes out and then there's this groove and the marketing materials calls that an anti-leak groove and they tell you to clean it out so if you're switching between powders or just cleaning your powder measure every once in a while and you're noticing powder accumulate in this ring that is a feature not a bug and you're supposed to just clean that out so got to be honest with you it doesn't seem like they really like fixed the problem or anything they just kind of did added that ring to make it a little less obvious during operation perhaps i don't know all right so our standard drum our standard adjuster this is all fine now this is in increments of hundredths of a cc and if we look in the lead manual all right we're loading 44 remington magnum and if we were using blue dot the manual tells us our volume cc for starting would be 1.51 at about 17 and a half grains so 1.51 i mean like okay there's one and now we're at zero that should be 1.5 and then that should be 1.5 that should be 1.51 should have our charge weight in the right ballpark and then we adjust from there however the .01 cc adjustments depending on the powder or sometimes more than a tenth of a grain like if we're trying to dial in a measurement in grains we're not always going to be able to hit the exact number we want here and like what i'm actually loading today is some nine millimeter another god forsaken ladybug hanging out so i wanna i wanna put four grains of tight group into each of those cases there it is right there yeah that stuff 4.0 grains now if you're familiar with the lee scoop kit there we go call it the powder measure kit is a big set of scoops and it comes with one of these old school slidey things where if we can find tight group which i checked earlier it's definitely in here somewhere there it is right there so it's telling me the closest scoop to 4.0 is 0.3 so 0.3 0.4 is about where i want to be but you can see that those jumps would just be bigger than i want right now i'd like to dial in my charge to see what's our difference between three and five here it says 2.4 which means 1.2 is about the halfway point so yeah it looks like 0.40 cc's would be about 4.7 grains now we'd never go by this exactly that just tells us our ballpark and then we would verify with a scale but what it really tells me is that this just doesn't quite have the precision i'm after for today's task so that's where this quick change drum set comes in so there are two that are large and two that are small and each one comes with this little adjuster thing here that you slide into here and then you have a little more fine control right we can dial in anything we want now you'll notice this other plunger if we pull it out and then slip it down inside of here that is what makes it the small version or maybe that's the large i don't know i want to say let me look at the instructions it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense because let me grab another one here okay now i'm seeing what's going on so this is the yeah before before you put that in this thing's got all that volume available for powder okay so the large yeah here's the large i did smallest adjustment it's already got all that volume okay that makes sense where the small which i've got a couple of these like this one right now is set up to to throw 14.5 grains of alliant 2400 but i don't really need that load anymore so i'm going to pull that off real quick so we can have a look at the plunger in this one yeah okay so that's our three configurations this is the drum for the light charges which is easy to spot because it doesn't have a little post here so light charges this one's got the little post to hold the plunger thingy but we've got the plunger installed so this is the heavy charge drum with the light charge adapter and then this is the heavy charge drum in its normal heavy configuration with that being minimum volume makes sense and then our little plunger like i just mentioned we can put onto that little stake for storage and then whenever you're done adjusting these little things go there for storage pretty darn cool like i like these these take two seconds to swap out the kit of four of these let me see how much these are i think it's like 20 bucks yeah right now i'm seeing them like 18.99 so having some of these laying around pretty good idea if you ask me okay so i mean that's pretty much the overview so what i want to do now let's try and load up our tight group load our 4.0 grains of tight group is what i'm after all one other thing i noticed in the instructions i didn't even notice it before so this has got a big o-ring on it you might notice and if we screw that in there so the tightness of this absolutely directly affects the you know the tightness of our drum obviously so this needs to be tight enough like i had you know mentioned earlier to where there's just not that much slop here where our little granules of tight group which is you know very fine powder we don't want that to be able to get in between so whenever i'm tightening this that that's that's the main concern and then the secondary concern is friction felt when you're running the handle these are always going to feel a little bit draggy if you're not feeling it dragging like if you're adjusting it so that it's you know flopping very very easily like you might think is necessary you got too much slop you need to need to tweak it just a little bit but the instructions tell us that whenever we go to one of the the drums like this one right here that we're supposed to remove this o-ring i haven't been doing that like i've used this quite a bit in the past i just didn't even know i was supposed to do it but even with the o-ring like it's still like i still feel like i have the adjustment i need to get rid of that slop i was feeling it earlier without the o-ring which this comes out pretty easy not a big deal so tightening it in that configuration yeah i i don't see functionally what changed but it definitely does give you maybe a little bit better feel on getting just that right tightness so that you're not introducing any spots for leaks i'm thinking that's that must be what it's about not real sure so i'm sure the documentation tells us exactly where and where to go yeah so here's here's one of our large charge drums with the little insert installed i'm not sure if that volume is small enough for four grains of tight group i don't think it is so i definitely need to use one of the actual small ones which yeah that's the one i pulled the sticker off of so i want to make sure this is low enough so that it isn't going to hit on anything yeah there it is right there so we'll dial this in for four grains of tight group and we'll also verify that this one will not dial in four grains of type group which what did that say i should write this down that's reloader 17. where did tight group go there it is so 0.3 cc is supposed to be 3.5 and 0.5 cc is supposed to be 5.9 we'll measure those out and see if our reality matches that okay standard configuration that's what we'll start with and let's go ahead and dial in point zero three or i'm sorry point three okay that's exactly point three let's see what it throws so i'll tell you what for the novelty of the thing we'll go ahead and just use our powder bottle make sure that our flow is turned off yeah that that way's on and that way is off on there like that and then twist open it up so we should be flowing powder so for a scale i'm just going to use the rcbs charge master light there's a two grain check weight 2.0 and then here's another two just make sure that it's reading correctly this morning looking pretty good here's another half grain 4.5 looking good this kind of brings me to my first problem with this powder measure is the the drop tube or the drop spot it's perfect for putting a case there like if you want to dump powder directly into a case it's perfect but when i'm dropping into a pan i always seem to to spill stuff and it just it's kind of hard to get the pan up high enough right if this was just a little bit longer it would be easier but it's not a big deal we'll try and use it here and see what happens so to start i want to just throw a couple until i'm getting consistent reading so this first one was 3.1 this next one is 3.1 the next one is 3.1 so getting very consistent 3.1 let's do a couple more 3.1 okay that one's 3.2 that one's 3.2 so i haven't done anything other than just put the bottle on and turn it on but maybe if i maybe give it some taps to settle things in a little bit let's see if that changes to anything 3.2 next one's 3.2 okay so it looks like we started with 3.1 settled in and then now we're getting 3.2 now our our lookup table was saying 3.5 okay so let's jump up to 0.5 0.50 and this should be 5.9 suspect it'll be a little bit lower as well 5.5 5.7 5.6 all right so i've just kind of realized that i'm an idiot let's go to like 0.38 okay there's about 0.38 i'm thinking this might be right about four grains four point three four point three okay let me go down so let's go down point zero three cc's so now we're at point three five cc's first one's four point zero next one's 3.9 4.0 4.0 4.1 so i want to try and go so let's go off by one more so 0.01 cc's so that's 0.36 so that should be just a little bit higher let's see what the what each step is giving us that's 0.42 i'm sorry 4.2 that one's 4.3 the next one's 4.2 okay let me go on the other side so let's go down two tenths or two one hundredths expect this to be just a little bit light 3.9 3.9 3.9 okay so it's perfect exactly so it looks like you know so each 100th of a cc is a little bit more than a tenth of a grain maybe but not by much i think this 0.35 cc setting is what i'm actually going to use to load my ammo it might be just a smidgen high but not much 4.1 4.1 4.0 okay so i got a little bit confused there with the numbers but hopefully i managed to make my point here after all there's a limited amount of precision that you have with this adjuster each increment is you know depending on powder and you know the density of the powder and all that it's in the neighborhood of a tenth of a grain and sometimes that's just not going to be quite enough precision for what you're after now in my case for this ammo i'm loading right now this would be perfectly fine 4.0 to 4.1 or kind of a heavy 4.0 i would be totally fine with but if maybe i'm a little closer to max or i just want to nail my numbers down a little bit more precise this isn't going to do it so 4.1 so to switch out this drum we twist this to shut it off and i guess i can just go ahead and use my powder which is what i or my uh bottle which is what i've been dumping the excess powder in okay i think i got it all now since we're not changing powders i don't need to go any farther than that but this should just slip right in here i'm just going to leave the o-ring in place remember that o-ring we were supposed to remove i'm not going to worry about it but this is so like with this measure i always want it to where there's enough friction where it never falls on its own if i loosen it up here a little bit that's too loose at least i think it is if that's where it feels the best like it would be easier to use this way but i just i feel like we've got too much slop there and we're inviting leaking so just kind of where you get it to where you feel some drag and that slop is pretty much gone so let's try and dial this one in for point four i think i've got it pretty much need to turn the powder on okay powder on 2.5 grains 2.4 so definitely a little bit low so now with this guy i think i showed it earlier in the close-up but it says right there each flat .01 cc what they mean by flat is this is it's got flats so i know that point or i'm sorry .01 cc's i keep saying point one yeah .01 and we know that that's more or less about a tenth of a grain so now i've already forgotten what my number was it was two point something right all right so one turn i guess that would be about eight tenths we were two point something i'm going to go to two full rotations see where that puts us four point nine yeah i mean i don't know i think my brain temporarily was trying to dial in five instead of four this should be a little closer 3.7 3.7 i've actually got this a little bit looser than i would like it's it's moving a little bit too freely we'll tighten it up just a little bit 3.7 getting so this it's extremely consistent especially with these fine powders 3.8 okay i'm going to go ahead and go up let's see two flats that's about it right there should be pretty close 3.9 4.0 4.0 3.9 3.9 4.0 so okay so i'm getting some 3.9 so i'm actually going to come up just just a little bit like not a full flat turn just uh just the tiniest little bit 4.0 4.0 4.0 4.0 4.0 hopefully you get the idea extremely consistent and one thing you might notice if you've seen some of my other videos or seen me use other powder measures i'm usually much more aggressive like i'll tap at the bottom tap at the top like i've said it many times i still stand by it it is all about technique with a powder measure you have got to do your strokes the same every time you have to whatever that means you know do them soft and easy do them really hard do them whatever but just do them consistently but i just have found that this one doesn't seem quite as susceptible to issues with technique let me see if i can throw a heavy one here so keep in mind like right now at the bottom of the stroke nothing is going on here well i guess that's one thing we should check do some jiggling there no powder came out whatsoever so we're getting a complete dump i do have some other measures where there's like uh yeah sometimes powder gets stuck here at the nozzle just you know small amounts doesn't seem to be a problem here so all right so let me go up and then tap it again so tried to settle as much powder into there as i could and then we'll drop that that is 4.1 do that again so up and a tap and then down 4.1 and let's go all the way to the other side of things and let's go like as easy as we can up give it plenty of time to fill but then come back down 4.1 4.1 now we're just heavy no matter what we do now we'll say though like tight group would be the least susceptible to this sort of problem because it's so fine that it already packs pretty well on its own right next one 4.0 you take something like a big extruded powder which we'll do that here in just a second i think we're you know hopefully i've shown you here with tight group very very consistent forgiving on technique 4.0 i love the you know the quick change auto drum sets where for 20 bucks you can have you know four charges that are dialed in just like you like them yeah i like my 25 and a half grains of reloader 7. lots of things to love about this about this powder measure one more check and it's 4.0 so i need to take my 25 cases and actually dump my charges real quick all right so that's my 25 charges of tight group i'm going to see these bullets real quick and then we'll go through emptying this guy and then we'll we'll switch over we'll weigh out like 100 grains of h1000 or something something really big to give you a look at that before i do that do one more verification load 3.9 not perfect let's do one more 3.9 3.9 good enough so they're all 3.9 now but it's gotta be wondering because we were we were dumping three point nine or four and then i did that whole tap the whole assembly deal let's see what it throws now i bet it goes up heavy for a little a little while again maybe 3.9 3.9 okay so i think what i would definitely want to do if this was going to be my four grains of tight group drum might make a tiny little adjustment there to bring it up just a little good enough for me all right i'm going to see these bolts real quick then we'll switch over to some extruded powder okay basics of this or what we've already done just shut off the powder and then get under here with this guy and keep cycling it until it's empty that took 17 cycles so a fair amount of powder you know held up in that general region okay so now we should be able to just lift this off and flip it over i did notice a couple granules of powder raining down but nothing too bad and that came off reasonably clean a little bit uh a little bit going on in here where'd my little brush go there we go yeah it's just a happy little accident pull out the drum it's mostly clean a little bit a little bit of powder dust here and there and in here there's not really that many nooks and crannies right i think i have ended up with some powder like along that rim from time to time and like i showed earlier in the video cleaning the wiper that seems to be the most common place for especially the the ball powders to collect yeah not much to it right everything's nice and open it's pretty easy to clean i haven't found it a burden at all well i've been earlier like i was talking about how this stand is a is a slip in perfect example of where you know if i had to unscrew the thing all the way out like i would have to do with this little rcbs that's a little bit annoying so we're ready to move on here from tight group and looks like yeah i'm spilling more powder right now than i have through the whole video got uh yeah so it just it's static cling and i think over time hopefully that'll mostly go away so that's it for tight group so next and hopefully quickly let's just dial in a quick 100 grain charge of h1000 i don't even know if 100 grains yeah i don't have the product i don't have the product sheet up anymore but i don't even know if it's supposed to be able to do this but i think it should we'll go big see how big we can get well i'll tell you what let's start out with the the drum from the kit the quick change drum kit and let's just back this thing out kind of as far as we dare and let's see how much it holds and in the meantime go ahead and get our jug of powder on there i guess we probably should probably should finish reinstalling it here there we are i threaded it out that far and then i came across some resistance here so i don't know what's i don't know what that's all about but i'm not going to go any farther we'll call that maximum let's see what that gives us okay that feels about right all right let's turn on our powder and then flip it up now big charges like this you got it you got to wait a second takes a minute to get filled up and it also takes a minute to dump the charge and that charge weight is 87.6 yeah i don't want to go farther there's those instructions i was talking about let's see maximum capacity is 6.49 cc's who knows all right let's dump a couple so up give it a second and down 89.5 90.3 90.0 89.3 89.7 so it looks like we're around 90 just a little bit low but at this huge volume definitely seeing some variation with a stick powder like this next one's 89.5 89.9 90.0 so maybe a half half a grain of variation 89.5 up to 90 somewhere in that range now if you're shooting something with charge weights this big it's not a big deal yeah 89.8 so half a grain on a 90 grain charge not a huge deal but if we're shooting our ar and we're shooting 22.0 grains half grain is very big deal so let me bring it down we'll see what sort of variation we get at lower charge weights you'd think it would be proportional like the more powder there is the less it wants to naturally settle and compact in a consistent manner that's what my brain's telling me i don't know what science would have to say on the subject but feels like it should be pretty close all right all right let's see about where we're at right there my brain was in pistol mode i didn't yeah i didn't wait for the whole charge to dump and i just dump powder everywhere i hate it when that happens okay let's try this again that's still a lot of powder yeah 52 grains okay 52.7 52.9 52.6 52.6 52.7 52.4 so still still seeing pretty good amount of variation here now i put three or four pounds of imr 4895 through this measure a while back and i saw similar results like it was i think i'd finally determined about a 0.4 grain spread that was pretty common and that was on a a charge weight in the in the i was 24 grains 23 something in that range so it's not perfect but one thing you'll notice okay at 35.5 so one thing you'll notice of all the charges you've seen me dump you've never once seen the handle get stuck because that's what happens on a standard conventional powder measure you know earlier we were talking about without that plastic wiper without that rubber wiper whenever it's cutting granules what you'll what you'll do is you'll be coming down to dump your charge and the handle will stop halfway in the middle and you either need to back off and try and get it to get out of the way or you just got to keep on going and cut that kernel of powder you never run into that with this 35.6 so it's almost as smooth as it is with ball powders you know you just come up and then come right back down and there's none of that frustration 35.4 keep on cranking it down here see if we can get it into that 20 range i went too far i was afraid of that so it's why i was trying to just grab the handle easily and it definitely is hitting looks like i went quite a bit too far there it goes okay now it's about done powder everywhere forgot i had powder in the measure there for a second i was like i'm feeling some resistance yeah no doubt you're dumping a charge you let's see what the charge weight looks like so i just ran into like i'm feeling i've never felt this resistance before like i just mentioned i've put pounds of extruded powder through this thing and never run into this so i think i've still got i think i've still got my adjustment too low yeah now it's back to normal yeah i had it bound up hopefully i didn't screw up the the little plastic thingy yeah 35 yeah still about 35 grains so it looks like so let's pull it apart make sure i didn't screw anything up see that time it emptied in only two two cycles nope everything looks good if you don't know what i was talking about i had i had this screwed up and screwed in enough to where it was i think i was getting a little bit of yeah just went a little too far and got that making contact with the drum which isn't good all right so is that about it i mean i have i yapped enough i think this powder measure is my favorite out of all the ones i've ever used which isn't a ton but several leaves a hornady a couple rcbs my grandpa's old reading all like you know pretty standard powder measures with similar features and i love all of them with ball powders or flake powders even i just don't think there's anything else that compares with extruded powders you guys let me know i haven't tried some of the fancier stuff some of the kind of the bench rest powder measures maybe there are some other designs out there that overcome this extruded powder frustration but the little polymer wiper in the lee measures does a pretty good job i really like the quick change drum sets i love that you know you get the standard one with the metal and adjustments that aren't too hard to repeat like it's all good i'm really a big fan of it you know you've been seeing me use it if you watch my normal videos for the last six months or so and you're going to keep on seeing it because it works really well you know since i got electronic powder dispensers you know like this rcbs charge master light i don't use the measure very much for extruded powders anymore almost always use one of those but one of these in a trickler you're in business for your load development and stuff where you really want to get your charges just right so that's it that's enough yapping appreciate you guys joining me i'm not sure what video is going to come out first this one or that nine millimeter ammo i just loaded i got the pistol stuff for my suppressor and i want to do a quick video about that so i'm not sure which one will come out first so if you're seeing this one be on the lookout for another video and then i've actually got a third video in progress so i'm not sure which one will come out on sunday but there's going to be two of them two more in the middle of the week i i believe yeah who knows which one will be done first all right that's it see you guys next time

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 10,323

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Id: p8b_gcHqJWQ

Length: 37min 13sec (2233 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 12 2021