Sunday, June 22, 2008

The new reloading press works great...

As I mentioned earlier, my new Dillon 550 reloading press showed up a week ago last Friday. I was spraying weeds at the time, which it seems like I've been doing since the dawn of time, so I just packed the boxes into the reloading room and left them on a chair for the moment.

My fourwheeler has been having issues with the heat the engine generates when I'm spraying, mainly I'm sure because of the slow speeds I'm moving at which aren't especially conducive to much cooling. It could have something to do with the fact that the pump on the spray tank sucks enough juice from the battery that it's running almost on a direct feed from the alternator. As opposed to walking back to the house every so often because the beast dies and won't start until it's had some cooling time, I've started a routine of spraying out one load of chemical then parking the bike at the house for twenty minutes or so before I start mixing the next load. That seems to be working. So far I haven't had to walk back to the house once since I started doing that.

What does this have to do with me getting my new press, you might ask? Everything or nothing, depending on your point of view. What this routine does is give me time to work on setting up the press, etc. while the bike is cooling off.

So, this last Friday I finally had both toolheads (.45 Colt and .357) set up, the dies adjusted, and so on and so forth. That shiny blue piece of machinery was sitting there doing nothing so I decided, "What the hey, let's see how it works." And how does it work? It works extremely well. I had a box full of already primed .45 Colt cases sitting there and I've been wondering if the Dilloon powder measure would reliably feed the fake black powder I've been loading for cowboy. The stuff's pretty coarse.

Obviously there's no time like the present to answer one's own questions, so I got out the bottle of powder and dumped some in the measure. It took a couple of casefuls to get the powder bar adjusted to the right load, then away we went. In seemingly no time at all, I had half a binful of loaded shells and I didn't have to dip a single grain of powder. The measure did it all as long as I did my part. The learning curve is actually rather gentle with this press.

No comments: