My bench is a solid wood door from an old school and anchored to 4×4’s at a height to make it comfortable to use my presses from a standing position. I put it together about 23 years ago, long before the mounting systems we have available to us today where thought of. Sorry, no pics as its a mess and truth be told I could probably cut that door in half length wise and it wouldn’t be such a collection point for odds and ends… but it’s rock solid for loading.
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.
