NEW: AutoTrickler V3 Powder Dispensing System (full details)

[Music] hey there Gavin gear here from ultimate realtor.com I'm here with Adam MacDonald the guy behind Auto trickler we got some pretty cool stuff to announce today yes we do I'm really excited to be here showing for the first time the pre-production unit of the Auto tricular v3 okay so V 3 this is the third revision what are the new features we've got three pretty major improvements here the first one is there's Bluetooth Hardware onboard which connects to a companion app on your iOS or Android mobile device so I can basically take my tablet or my phone and control the auto trickler system yes via that free app makes things what much easier and the second is a completely redesigned auto throw CNC machined aluminum and the third we have an adjustable tricular base which just makes things much easier for fine-tuning flow rate okay so we'll cover all of those features and details in depth but first to help us paint a picture of how this came to be tell us a little bit about yourself okay so I'm from Canada I shoot f-class long range competitively and you know I really needed a way to load powder charges accurately to the kernel and quickly you know because we need to load fifty or hundred rounds per match and it really helps to save time but also have the most accurate powder charge you can those were long range shooting so you know I came up with the system about three years ago and the core idea is that we have an automated trickler with a motor and a really really accurate scale and they work together to measure powder charges down to the to the kernel in you know 10 seconds or so so I in the last three years I've made constant improvements and I'm just constantly iterating on the design and it's been a really popular system among among a lot of competitive long range shooting all the while I'm getting a lot more serious about the research that I'm doing and the analysis and the stories that I'm telling about rifle shooting and Rifle reloading so I'm actually really excited to adopt this system into my workflow so that I can have that same level of precision and really have the kind of scientific data that I can stand behind and do it in a timely manner yeah exactly we both approach shooting long range shooting very scientifically powder measurement is one of the most important things that you can control for any sort of shooting you know PRS CLR f-class research any sort of low development that you do if you can make sure that the amount of powder that you put into your case is exactly right it's just one less variable to worry about every kernel of powder is worth around one to two feet per second depending on your your caliber you're using so if you can get that velocity spread down from 10 or 20 feet per second just talking about the air from the powder charge measurement itself down to you know one or two or three feet per second that basically makes a huge difference in your group sizes because it's compounded that long ranges right the further you go out it becomes more and more and more of a factor very aggressively at long distances right right okay so let's talk about an example scenario I just shot a PRS match where I needed about 120 rounds a precision loaded ammo and one of the ways you could do that very precisely would be with the balance beam scale you dump a charge and then you trickle up to weight it could take about what a minute per per round to measure the powder right so if I need 120 rounds for the match ammo alone no practice rounds that's about 120 minutes worth of powder measurement time right now if we use the auto trickler we can get the same result right yeah yeah so with this system the basic concept here is the auto throw on top will first dispense most of your charge into the pan so let's say you're loading 40 grains then you might set the auto throw to drop 38 and that will immediately go as soon as you put the pan on the scale it will immediately drop 38 grains into the pan and then the trickler will ramp down very precisely to 40 grains and stop within plus or minus one kernel of your target almost all the time and that whole process takes about 10 seconds so so it's almost the same way then right you could do it manually by dumping with a powder measure and trickling up on the balance beam this is just completely automating that with electronics right we're replacing the the precise needle that you have to bend over a you know a table to look at with a really really high-quality lab scale and then the trickling process is completely automated and designed to be really efficient at getting you to that target weight in in about 10 seconds so for your hundred twenty round example that's like 25 minutes awesome so let's talk about the evolution of the auto tricular okay so at first before the auto tricular a lot of long-range can shooter's we're already using a type of scale like this that can plate to the kernel but the process was about manually trickling up using the scale as as precise measurement but they were really just waiting for someone to come along and automate this it really needed to happen yeah so so where I came in as I the first thing I did was I made this electronics board which fits inside the scale into its expansion port and it receives the weight from the scale in real time and then runs a stepper motor at a very precise speed in order to efficiently ramp down to the target you know as quickly as possible mm-hmm and so the trade-offs there obviously are if you go too fast if you're too aggressive you'll overshoot right and if you're too slow it'll take forever to get up to the charge weight right so there's two adjustments that you make to solve that problem the first one is your your course adjustment the first thing you look at is the the overall flow rate of the trickler so when it's running at full speed it should be dumping about a half a grain per second into the pan okay and and you adjust that by tilting the trick look forward or backward so the tube angle is changing right deepers more shallower less exactly okay and that's kind of the main way to prevent overthrows and to ensure its consistent so with the original design we had a flat base and the process was generally to shim the the base slightly with a sticker or a piece of paper and the one of the major improvements here with v3 is a redesigned base that has a screw which has a rubber foot on the end of it and it's at a 20 degree angle so you can turn it very slightly and it will very fine-tuned adjust the flow rate so so this mount has three rubber feet it's a nice strong triangle base with a screw for adjusting the flow rate very very quickly and then the second adjustment is there's a slider on the electronics so once you have it pretty much dialed in and you're loading and you realize oak goes over by a little bit or it's taken a little too long then you can just move that slider very slightly to the fast side or at the slow side and and try to get it to be exactly where you want it gotcha so it started with the trickler itself then came the auto throw tell us about the auto throw right so the auto throw was meant to address the problem of dropping your initial bulk charge so normally you know originally you would scoop you would the the trickler was only to trickle up the last couple of grains but you would scoop manually or you would use another system to get your bolt charge so it's faster and a little bit less tedious right this makes it a completely hands-off automated system ten seconds it drops most of your charge and the tricular will finish up as soon as the scale says zero it just all happens so if I'm working at the reloading bench that allows me to multitask sure listen to the unit when it's done then I just stop it yeah or you could have two or three of them set up side by side and always have one finished ready to go into the next case so tell me about the first iteration of the auto thorough so the original design for the auto throw was it was a li powder measure off-the-shelf powder measure which I adapted a motor to and I chose that specific powder measure because it's the only one that has this internal rubber wiper at least the only one I know of that that really makes it so Colonels get pushed out of the way instead of requiring excessive force to overcome jam or to slice it in half that's a key part of having an automated powder measure but there were issues with that design I mean that powder measure is not really meant to be automated with a motor like sure so you know very fine ball powders would tend to leak in between the sliding surfaces and there was a tension adjustment that you'd have to tighten and if it was too tight it wouldn't work at all and so there's a lot of manual I mean it can work and it does work really well for most powders but but there's a lot of manual adjustment that makes it sort of just a little bit more work than really ought to be so the real solution here that I came up with was to completely design my own powder measure from scratch with completely machined aluminum it's it's very precision fit so there's there's a rubber wiper as part of it it's in there and the the motor will cycle very smoothly with no adjustments and it's got actual ball bearings on there too right ball bearings hold everything exactly in place there's a rubber piece there's a seal inside and it just runs really really well and it works well with all sorts of different powders so Bluetooth you've been telling me this is your number one requested feature for v3 tell us about it right so initially the traditional way of setting a charge weight into the scale since the scale doesn't really have a keypad for typing it indirectly is you would manually put the weight that you want on the scale so you would trickle up by hand and then you would press a button and it would lock that in so from that point on you just have to do that once for a loading session but it will automatically run up to that target the problem with that method is that if you want to change charge weights frequently say if you're doing a ladder testing and you want to load five rounds at one charge and then move up point one grains then it's a little bit extra work so people have been asking me for a long time to have some salute to make this easier so for v3 we have Bluetooth integrated electronics connected to any Android or iOS phone tablet as long as it has Bluetooth Low Energy support Bluetooth 4 which is a fairly modern standard at this point it's an app you download the app is free and it will let you type in a charge wait cancel it and you can increment or decrement by one grain point one grains point zero one grains it also works in grams basically anything you need to do you should be able to do it in like five seconds we also have manual control of the motors so the idea here is if you need to prime the tube with powder you want to clean out the powder quickly you want to just cycle the auto throw a few times you just press a button and it'll happen it makes things are just a lot easier it's just an easier system to manage yep awesome okay so let's walk through a complete end-to-end scenario let's say I've got a load I'm working with where I lead to load a whole bunch of rounds with 52.6 grains a powder all right so you would generally start by filling the hopper with powder and and turn the valve open okay and fill the auto trailer with powder and just make sure everything is positioned correctly there's a tray there to hold the cup in the center so it always goes back into the right place mm-hmm and then the next thing is to adjust the auto throw to drop roughly two to two-and-a-half grains below the target weight so in this case fifty to fifty point five grains okay so there's an adjustment on the side that you would turn to the five mark because there's marks every ten grains or so gotcha so then you can use the the Bluetooth app to cycle the auto throw to make sure that that's right so you'd press the cycle auto throw button and it would run and it would drop 50 point five grains and then you can adjust it as needed mm-hm then you would enter the target weight into the app 52.6 okay and hit the start button and it's good to go from that point okay so now it's gonna go ahead and dispense 52.6 grains when I take the cup off the scale and charge my case put it back it's going to be back at zero and then the auto trickler knows to initiate a new cycle right from that point it's automated every time the scale see zero it will run start to finish the only thing is if if you notice it's going a little too fast or a little too slow you know you want to trade-off accuracy for speed you can adjust the flow rate of the trickler and you can adjust the slider on the electronics in the back just to dial it in the way you want and once you get through five six or seven charges it'll be pretty much ready to go for your whole session gotcha so that's super helpful to see the entire Auto tricular v3 system in action ends to end now if people want to buy the Auto tricular v3 or to get more information where should they go my website Auto tricular comm I've got all the improvements in v3 available as upgrades and also the complete v3 system on my website at Auto tricular comm okay and I'm excited to get started with this system I'm gonna be using Auto trickler and a couple of your other tools for technical articles that I'm publishing and in videos and other stories this is going to really help me take my research in my work to the next level so you're going to want to stick around for that make sure you're subscribed to Gavin tube with notifications and if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up until next time happy shooting and happy reloading [Music]

Channel: Ultimate Reloader

Views: 97,936

Keywords: Reloading, Ultimate Reloader, Reloading Blog, Reloading Videos, Reloading Press, 45 ACP, 9mm Parabellum, m1911, AR-15, AR-10, .223 Remington, 5.56 NATO, 6.5 Creedmoor, 224 Valkyrie, Glock, Adam MacDonald, PRS, F-Class Shooting, AutoTrickler, AutoThrow, AutoTrickler V3, AutoTrickler Upgrade, Rifle Match, 6 Dasher, ShotMarker, Two-Box Chrono

Id: c54nuMXU3Qo

Length: 12min 10sec (730 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2019