https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment AllGunStuff Discussion Board en-US Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:21:49 +0000 wpForo 60 https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/favourite-productivity-tools Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:41:24 +0000
Yesterday I started prepping all the fired brass for one of my rifles.

Working with the Hornady Pro-Jector to decap, size an mandrel in one stroke, I finished what I would normally stagger over a few days in a couple of hours.

I used a Lee case length gauge to trim all the brass.

The RCBS case prep station made the trim, chamfer, debur and primer pocket clean effortless.

For priming, I use a ram prime on a single stage press, which has proven to be the least effort, quickest priming method out of all that I've tried.




]]> Equipment 414gates https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/favourite-productivity-tools https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/mandrels-for-neck-tension Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:52:21 +0000
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHEEdawt17U]]> Equipment Tripodmvr https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/mandrels-for-neck-tension https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/resurrected-press-useage Wed, 18 Feb 2026 05:30:28 +0000
This week was I processed the first batch of magnum bolt-face rifle brass this way.

The deprime, full length size and neck mandrel work very well.

Priming on the press is not as good or as repeatable as I would prefer. There is not enough leverage on the reverse stroke to overcome tight rifle primer fit, resulting in variations in seating depth that I can feel by running my fingertip over the seated primer, and some primers fractionally proud. I had to uniform the seating depths on my ram prime setup.

Going forward, priming on the press is not feasible, but still get 3 operations per ram stroke - deprime, size and mandrel. 

It's a big time saver, performing those 3 operations in one stroke.

]]> Equipment 414gates https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/resurrected-press-useage https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/lyman-auto-scale Thu, 04 Dec 2025 08:57:46 +0000
I wonder why the design was never refined. Using optical sensors and a variable speed trickle, it can be as accurate anything else.

]]> Equipment 414gates https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/lyman-auto-scale https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/reloading-press-resurrection Mon, 03 Nov 2025 03:31:27 +0000
Couple weeks ago I was prepping a batch of brass in single stage fashion, looked at the retired old Pro-Jectors and had an idea.

My target rifles are either 308 boltface, or magnum. I have shellplates for both. One press is setup for large primers, one for small, so I made a large primer seating stem and primer holder from a small bolt with the correct thread, and a fired .22 LR case. I pressed a 5mm bolt shank into the cut .22 case, and after springback, it fits a large primer perfectly.

And it works.

Then I put the sizing dies in the presses to set headspace, brought out the rifles, some fired brass, and found that with both setups, the sizing dies contacted the shellplate before the required sizing was reached.

First issue is the shellplates have a higher deck than a single stage shellholder, which interferes with the die, preventing the correct headspace being reached on full length sizing by only a few thou.

I delivered the dies to a machinist to take 0.5mm off the bottom of each die.

Second issue was one case holder recess on the shellplate was a bit smaller than the others, so my belted cases were not fitting, even though they fit in a single stage shellholder.

This I rectified slowly and carefully with a dremel tool. One light pass at a time with a grinding bit, followed by a polish, till the handful of fired cases all fit into every recess on the shellplate.

What makes these old presses very suitable for working with rifle brass, is the strength built into them.

1. the shellplate carrier is connected directly to the bolt in the center of the ram, no drive hub to bind up or break
2. the shellplate carrier is machined from a block of steel, there is no flex against the ram when sizing rifle brass
3. there is no ejector nub on the shellplate carrier to wear down and bind the press on ejection
4. the primer punch is threaded, with a locking nut, for repeatable primer seating depth control

The downside is the complexity of setting up the priming system. Several parts have to be correctly aligned and bolted into place exactly for priming to function correctly.

The LnL is far superior in it's simplicity and ease of priming setup, but not as robust. If any powder gets into the LnL primer punch assembly, the press binds up and parts can break. This older press design remains operationally unaffected by powder spills.

The idea is to deprime, full length size, prime and neck madrel in progressive mode. 100 pulls on the handle compared to 400 for every 100 pieces of brass on a single stage.

I've matched my neck trimming mandrels to the neck expanding mandrels, so can take a fully prepped, neck sized brass off the press and trim it without having to resize the neck a second time.

I'll be doing a test run when I get the dies back.
]]> Equipment 414gates https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/reloading-press-resurrection https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/sa-made-multi-press-lucky-find Thu, 30 Oct 2025 01:59:24 +0000
I picked up a little used SA made Multi-Press which I think dates from the early 90's at the very latest. I remember seeing one once on a serious reloaders bench when I had just started out collecting janky second hand gear to start out and that was >30 years ago.

I got it from a guy who knew that it was a reloading press but had never used it and had got it at a scrap yard. I can only imagine that it was part of the clean out of a deceased persons reloading room/workshop/scrap pile or something. I paid about what the cap screws holding the thing together would cost so I think it may represent the biggest bargain of my long career of being an ultra short armed bargain hunter.



It's absolutely rigid with less play on anything including the ram and linkages than I can detect and weighs close to 10kg. After a thorough degrease and lube its butter smooth. I plan to try it out this weekend sizing some 270 brass and suspect that it will be up to swaging which I have always wanted to try my hand at but have shied away from mainly because of the sort of press I'd need to buy to try.





(Pics embedded from Onedrive and apparently some people are blocked from seeing them)

]]> Equipment oafpatroll https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/sa-made-multi-press-lucky-find https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/another-case-prep-tray Wed, 22 Oct 2025 23:16:17 +0000
I showed this to my wife. She said I have a strange habit for drilling holes in odd pieces of wood and varnishing them.

]]> Equipment 414gates https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/another-case-prep-tray https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/mp-molds Fri, 03 Oct 2025 08:42:16 +0000 Equipment oafpatroll https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/mp-molds https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/machines-for-reloading Wed, 13 Aug 2025 12:28:40 +0000
Waterbury Farrel]]> Equipment 414gates https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/machines-for-reloading https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/labradar-mark-1-review Sun, 27 Apr 2025 08:31:57 +0000
Before I bought it, the first thing I did was try to understand why the unit had a bad rep. There are two main reasons : the unit positioning in relation to the bullet flight path, and the unit not picking up the shot.

In the early versions, the bluetooth app was also heavily critisized. Battery life is known to be terrible using the AA's, so I used an external battery.

To avoid the positioning problem, I made a four legged stand out of aluminium tubing that positions the unit centered above the scope, just in front of the elevation turret. The legs are to the sides, out of the way of the prone position, but narrow enough not to pick up muzzle blast from a brake. I made it out of what bits I had lying around, with an adjustable tripod head that I used to have a small telescope on.

To avoid the shot recognition problem, there is a R.A.T .

The first thing I did was update the firmware to 2.0.0 . It took a bit of time, I had problems with the unit not reading a 32GB SD card. I reformatted the card several times, the unit refused to read it. I remembered that back in the old days of Windows with FAT partitions, 4GB used to be a partition size limit for reliable functioning, so I partitioned the 32GB SD card with a 4GB FAT32 partition, and it worked perfectly.

The bluetooth app works. You can arm / disarm, navigate between shot strings and create new shot strings. The connection to the Android phone does not drop periodically, as some have reported. There was a problem of constant disconnect / reconnect going on, I had started the phone app twice, so it seems each instance was taking turns to connect. Shut down all running apps first and make sure only one instance is started.

Using the stand and the R.A.T attached to the bipod leg, it picked up every shot of the day, and was unaffected by the muzzle blast from the rifle next to me. I had a 6000 mAh battery, and it used 25% over the few hours I had the unit on.

I had no problem "aiming" the unit at the target with the notch in the top.

I wanted this particular unit to get a good estimate of bullet BC during load development, and particularly the BC at my velocity, elevation and atmospheric pressure.

Using the data on the SD card, I can derive a close-enough-to-my-reality BC number for use in ELR, giving confidence that one more variable is well defined.






]]> Equipment 414gates https://allgunstuff.co.za/community/equipment/labradar-mark-1-review