More On Accuracy - Lee Auto Drum Powder Measure In Turret/Progressive Presses

while shooters done reloaders out there fortune-cookie 45 LSD coming to you in a hot lead zone and today's topic is how do you get the best performance out of the lead auto drum powder measure using the progressive presses that we have well we're not going to use a progressive but we're going to use the four whole Lee turret press which is like a progressive and for all intents and purposes it'll do the same thing that the progressive will do for this test now to get the load that we're gonna be doing out of the way we're going to be using our fine wet tumbled nickel-plated brass and this happens to be Remington Peters brass give you a close-up of that so there you see the primer pockets are all cleaned and the brass casings are all completely clean and polished inside and out from that wet tumbling procedure as you see now you'll see that this brass is already resized and D primed and I did that before I wet tumbled so by doing that we save an extra step I know a lot of you like to decap with a universal D capper and then go ahead and wet tumble your brass but then you have to go ahead and resize it well by resizing and D priming in the normal procedure and then wet tumbling we save the resizing procedure later and this is important for this test so we're gonna load 40 rounds and it's gonna be 20 rounds each of two different powder charges H one ten powder we're gonna use 21.5 grains and 22 grains of h1 1020 rounds each and we're gonna go ahead and use as a bullet the Hornady 125 grain xtp bullet there is the box fine Hornady bullets and for primers we're gonna use the tula small pistol magnum primers so there you see the lis auto drum powder measure installed onto the expanding and mouth flaring dye that's made by Lee of course and it's in the four hole turret but what makes this thing work real reliably is a result of some collaboration between Thor's axe and myself because I was complaining that when you get chatter with this when you run out of a case in here and instead of getting a smooth throw that's very accurate you get a little click a little pop a little chatter and when you get that then you're wondering whether the throw is accurate or not and sometimes it isn't but I discovered that if you get to click and chatter if you run the case in there a second time you don't get the chatter you don't get the click and pop the second time through never gets the click and pop what Thor's axe came up with is if you put up expander die in this position and run the case in the expander die and muffler die first and then running into the same die again in the second position with the powder measure attached then you get the smooth throw of the powder bedroom well but then you lose the resizing die station these cases as we've already discussed are already resized so you don't need the resizing guy because has already been done so you can put the neck expander muffler die in station one and then the same diamond station too to get that smooth throat then the bullet sitting die and then the crimping die so this could be your progressive same idea so we'll go ahead and put a case this is a case that has not been neck expanded or muffler and you run it into the first die and that expands the neck and flares the mouth so that you get the bullet starts into the case it's just fine then if you go ahead and let the turret auto win next to the next station and you go ahead and run that case into the second die notice you get the full throw of the powder measure and notice how it's a smooth throw we really do appreciate the easy full of the hopper with our powder of choice don't we by the way I buy H 110 in 8 pound jugs so this can happens be a leftover can from 1970s but the powder is fresh because I keep refilling this can so of course installing the hopper into the powder measure is a piece of cake and we put the top on we're ready to go so the sequence begins take a brand new case put it into the shell holder and run it into the first neck expander mouth slurring die then put a primer into the primer arm so that we can prime that case on the way down like so then the next would be to go ahead and throw a powder charge now we haven't adjusted the powder measure to give us 21.5 brains yet so let's go ahead and see what we're getting notice the smooth throat now we'll take this powder charge and go over to the the balance scale so there you see that 21.5 grains looks pretty good it took me five throws to get the powder measure adjusted to throw this charge we actually rejected the first three charges once we got to 21.5 and this is the fourth one with a 21.5 and there you see the accuracy of the throw so now let's go ahead and actually load the rounds so we adjust a bullet sitting die so that the case mouth is right on the middle of the kennel or and then lock the die position right there as you see there so then we go ahead and let it index to the Lee factory crimp die okay so the die is touching the shell holder at full stroke and then we back out the crimping stem so we don't over crimp okay so then we go ahead and put round back in without indexing so there was just a little bit of hesitation there as it corrected some minor bulges and no crimp so now we lower the prim stem until the crimp stem hits the case mouth like that then we go ahead and lower the rim and apply a half turn of crimp and check that for the amount of crimp that's not enough so we'll give it a little bit more now we inspect the crimp and that's not bad just a tiny bit more and there it is now we have a loaded round so what we're gonna do now is go ahead and check those powder charges so there is the neck expansion and mouth flare but now we're gonna running running into the same die again but this time just to sort of charge now I'll go ahead and check this powder charge okay that powder charge is right on so here's the next charge we'll dump it into the scalp and care if I don't vibrate the scale and you see that's close enough let's show you the next one and so here's the next charge this is number six looks like it's right on I just knocked over a hex set actually that last one was number five here's number six that's pretty good that's three Monroe that's right on there so that's a pretty accurate powder measure that Lee Otto drum powder measure and we can crank away with our four hole turret or our progressive press with that powder measure installed the beauty of that powder measure is that it doesn't require any linkages it's a free-standing powder measure that can work with any press as long as there's room above the press for the die and a powder measure there's number seven here's number eight well are you getting bored yet prime first neck expansion second neck expansion with powder drop let's take this one over and weigh this one so this is number nine as you can see that's right on also there's a lot to like about the Lee Otto drum powder measure now before you go out and run out and buy the leave for hole turret press you need to know that Lee has come out with a new press that's actually a progressive that costs only a little bit more than this and it's a better press than the four whole turret I mean the four whole turrets couldn't disappear the reason I think that Lee came out with a new progressive press is because the four whole turret was lagging in sales and he needed to boost its performance and they did that without raising the price exorbitantly like is only $10 more for the new progressive so that one's due to come out in April and I'll get one of those to test but for now I got the four whole turret and it might turn into a white elephant but that's okay it'll still do our job for us for what we needed now this project was actually requested by Popeye and II wanted to know how accurate the powder measure the Lee otto drum powder measure was in our progressive presses so this video is an answer to Popeye and Ian happened to be on my idea cue anyway I like the Lee auto drums so much I have it on all my Dillon 550 B's now with H 110 powder you have to load pretty much to 100% loading density and that's what we have here well there's 20 rounds of the 21.5 and it was literally boring the charges were right on all of them now this is all very interesting because it just turns out that Lyman is also coming out with a new press a turret press so this might be kind of like when Ruger came out with the 44 Magnum before Smith & Wesson actually came out with theirs but that's only a guess of course it certainly gives us more choices in reloading equipment so that's always good so show you the last couple of h1 1022 grains charges that's pretty good looks like it's just a hair short oh that might be the reason why we toured a case math on that one that created a kind of error in the in the throw yeah if you're not careful with that long 357 Magnum case we can wind up tearing the case mouth so let's go ahead and check that one here we go we're right back on again well Popeye and II got another project done ready to go to arrange and test and that Lee Auto drum powder measure really is a nice one but like any powder measure you do have to get used to it and use it and the more you use it the better it'll serve you bye for now

Channel: FortuneCookie45LC

Views: 48,218

Keywords: Lee Auto Drum Powder Measure

Id: ObPhL0hJPCE

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 11 2018