Over the last few weeks, I have tumbled almost 700 empties of five-five-six, trimmed or culled them to 1.760 inches plus .001 or minus .002, swaged the primer pockets, and chamfered the necks. Note: Hirtenberger's primer pockets are rather loose; that must be why they are crimped. Lake City's are tight. Swage them all, they seat without a hitch. There's remarkable variation in rim thickness too, so be careful trimming on case trimmers that grab on the rim.
Today I dusted off and reassembled the Suburban Clandestine Arsenal of Liberty, otherwise known as the Dillon RL550B progressive reloading press.
The first station is set up to prime only: CCI450, small magnum rifle. Though the RL550B can decap and resize, it is more consistent to do all of the resizing, decapping, and primer pocket swaging on the Rockchucker a few inches away (a slice of it is visible to the right in the photo).
The second station drops a charge of 21.5 grains of WC846, which is just a hair slower than BL(C)-2.
The third station seats the bullets, which today are bulk 60-grainer soft-points that were made from swaged lead cores jacketed by extruded twenty-two long rifle empties. The "H" on the casehead is still visible, meaning these were Winchesters, IIRC. Corbin offers the kits and press to make these bullets, but that's fun for someone else with more time, who sells them to me.
The fourth station is the Lee factory crimp die, then the dump into the Akro-bin.
It took more time to set the press up, adjust the propellant charger to the right volume and set the seater and crimp, than to roll one hundred rounds. Don't tell Chuck Schumer.
A small dab of a loud-colored nail polish in the cannelure tells me which load to look up in the notebook.
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