Reloading Process

[Garrett Gee]

What’s everyone’s process for reloading?

[Sam Phelps]

Clean

Deprime

Anneal

Size

Mandrel

Prime

Charge

Seat

[Anthony Wychules]

I do what Sam does.. except I deprime first.

[Brian Larson]

Anneal

FL Resize

wet tumble

trim/chamfer/de-bur

Neck mandrel

Prime

drop powder

Seat bullet

go bang bang

[JON PEDZINSKI]

I decided to start utilizing my Dillon 550 for precision loading a year ago so my process is a little different than others.

From fired cases:

Anneal cases

First pass through the Dillon 550 deprimes in position 1, full length resizes and brushes the interior of the neck in position 2 and position 4 neck expands.

(If brass needs to be trimmed it would occur here along with deburring.)

Brass then goes into the dry media tumbler loaded with walnut media for 60 minutes.

Then it’s back to the 550 with the tool head changed out for loading. Position 1 is again a universal deprimer to assure no media is in the flash hole and priming takes place on the down stroke. Position 2 is my powder die where I drop the powder charge from my autotrickler. Position 3 I place a bullet on the case. Position 4 seats the bullet.

Total time on the press for both operations form start to finish, a fired case to fully reloaded cartridge is about 27 seconds when averaged over 100 rounds and only requires two press handle strokes. This has cut my loading time down by about 70% and brass handling from 5 to 2 compared to how I used to load on my single stage.

Note, I don’t include annealing, trimming or tumbling in the above time line as it would be the same for my old loading method verses using the Dillon.

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