Your gonna blow yourself up

[Younggun]

I've got a single stage, turret, and progressive.

I will always have a single stage.

 

[vmax]

I have a few things to say.

First, he needs TO SPEAK UP! I CAN"T HEAR A DARN THING!

I won't say I have not had any issues reloading but I have not had a double charge ever.
the only issues I had starting was proper die adjustments years ago

My Dillon press has a powder check on it. I won't say it will always prevent a powder charge problem, but it is just one more safeguard against it and I always have a LED light shining on my charged case as I place the bullet onto it before seating.

one last thing, is that I usually load 100 rounds at a time, each one I have 100 percent confidence in. Then I run them through a 7 round chamber checker to make sure they are sized right, and I also visually check for high primers and run my finger over them as well. I place those 100 into a 100 round box, close the lid and place a green round sticker on it along with the date.
(bullet and charge data is written inside the box on another sticker) When I pull that box out to go shoot , that sticker tells me that these are as good as I can produce and it reminds me that I personally checked each round.

If I have those separated into 100 round lots, each one quality checked, I won't end up with a freaking cardboard box of 400 rounds to be suspect of.

 

[ROGER4314]

Like VMax says, I uses a gauge to test almost every type of round that I make. I have 13 different gauges and use them constantly. Every so often, I stop, check a round and make sure it fits in the gauge.

There was a problem that cropped up in loading .308, recently. I THOUGHT that the cartridge was seated fully in the test gauge but actually, it was slightly long where the rim recessed into the gauge. It made the rounds difficult to close the rifle bolt! Bummer! My rule of thumb is that if anything needs to be FORCED, something is wrong!

Results? The sizing die on the Dillon needs to be set to come down just before it crunches the shell plate. I set that die a bit higher in error and it changed the headspace of the cartridge. The .308 headspaces on the shoulder and it was allowing the cartridge case to run long! Note....there was NO bulge at the bases of the cartridge.

What to do? I had a butt load of the .308's and hated to pull down the whole batch. Remember, I THOUGHT the cases fit properly in the gauge but they wouldn't chamber in the rifles properly. The rim of the case must fit flush or below flush in the gauge.

I removed the decap pin on a full length sizing die, ran each loaded cartridge through the sizing die on the single stage Rock Chucker all the way to the rim and all was fixed! Of course, I took safety precautions to prevent injury in the event that a round detonated.

A similar problem came up on 9mm, .40 and .45acp. For DECADES, I used what I call "zero bell" crimp on my pistol cartridges. We put a "bell" mouth on the cases (I shoot for about .010" total or .005" on each side) bell mouth or just enough for the bullet to sit squarely on the case mouth. That "bell" or trumpet shape keeps our bullet from shaving as it is seated in the case. I set my crimp/seating die to remove that bell mouth and make NO crimp. I did that for many years!

For some reason, the pistol rounds began to chamber tightly in the pistol gauge. I measured the loaded case diameters and found nothing seriously out of specs but it still fit tighter than I wanted.

Sidebar here...........
Those case gauges are very tight tolerance. If the cartridge is the least bit oversize, the gauge will reject it. That's the point. Final inspection should take place at home and not on the firing line!

I thought the problem may be my "zero bell" crimp, so I removed the decapping pin from my sizing die, ran the loaded cartridge into the sizing die on the single stage Rock Chucker and ................perfect fit! I knew then that my way of crimping "zero bell" had to go!

I ordered Lee "taper crimp" dies for all of the pistol cartridges and installed them in position 4 of the Dillon tool holders which is usually vacant. I use the RCBS seating die to seat the bullet to the correct OAL, (with crimp function set high enough to have no effect on the case) then run the round through the taper crimp die. I had to add one operation to the process but results were outstanding!

Why did a crimp technique that I've been using for decades suddenly go south? I don't know ..... but it did!

Another example of die mystery is having your cartridges ending up short on OAL when loading lead bullets. You'll find a perfect pellet of bullet lube compressed inside your seating die. As it gets thicker, the rounds get shorter and unless you keep checking OAL, you'll make shorter & shorter cartridges! How to fix? Remove the die and heat it with a hair dryer, clean it up and you're back in business!

The reason I bored you with all of this is because there is a lot of stuff going on inside of these dies! Know exactly what operations the dies perform and when you're dealt a curve, you can figure out what happened and fix it!

I use my Rock Chucker single stage press constantly! For me, the BEST answer to the question of single stage/progressive choice is get BOTH!

Flash

 

[Andy]

Ok, after over 35 years of handloading quite literally hundreds of thousands of handgun, rifle and shotgun rounds, here's my opinion.

1. Single stage presses are awesome for everything except speed; I wouldn't be without one, especially for running small batches of experimental rounds where I'm changing the components (much quicker to do on a single-stage).

2. Progressive presses are awesome for just about everything, but they do come with a caveat - and that's that it's real easy to screw the pooch if you either 1. don't pay attention or 2. don't know what to look for. If you're a newbie, you'll do fine with a progressive if you understand what it is you're meant to be doing and go slow; don't get cocky just because you make a couple thousand trouble-free rounds.

Things like powder-check dies and lights on a progressive work very well - I have them myself - but here's the primary rule of reloading:

NEVER put a bullet into the case until you've visually verified the level of powder yourself.

A quick glance will do the trick once you're used to it, and I still do this on my progressive - the case has gone through the powder-drop, then the powder-check die, then it gets to the seating station where I'm waiting with a bullet in hand and I LOOK inside the case (with the help of the LED strip-light) to check that there's powder to the expected level before I place the bullet on top, ready for seating.

I've never had a KABOOM, but around 25 years I did have a squib load get stuck in my barrel in the middle of a competition (hence this advice). Not dangerous all by itself, but 1. it blew me out of the competition, but more seriously it 2. could have caused a KABOOM if I'd thoughtlessly just gone through failure drills (eg. tap-rack-bang), which would have chambered a live round. That's the incident that taught me about visual inspection - I'd just blown off the old-timers back then who had told me what I'm telling you now.

Again: NEVER put a bullet into the case until you've visually verified the level of powder yourself.

 

[Leper]

I started on a 550 and now run a 650. I have had a couple of cases on the 650 get a double charge because I half stroked the handle while looking at another station on the press. I visually inspect each power charge before the bullet goes on, so I just pulled the overfilled ones out of the plate. I use Titegroup powder for pistol, so a normal charge is just barely visible. A double becomes obvious. So far, with tens of thousands or rounds loaded, I have never loaded a squib or a double charge.

When checking the powder charge, I will run 10 charges and weight them combined. I take the weight and divide by 10 to get an average charge per round. When I first started loading, I did this after every 50 rounds. As time went on and the consistency never varied, I went to checking after every hundred, then two hundred. Now it is about every 500 because that is about all I will load at one sitting. There are exceptions. If I have let the powder run below about 1/4 in the holder I will run a check batch after I finish with a primer tube. Same goes for after a fill. Still more exceptions are made for temperature changes, humidity changes, static buildup, or a long time between reloading sessions. Of course if I change the powder, or the powder charge, I go back to the every fifty and work my way up from that.

 

[ares338]

I have a Hornady progressive press and an RCBS RS2 single stage press. When I want to relax and enjoy reloading I use the single stage. When I want to do a lot of ammo up I use the Hornady. Both are safe but the progressive takes more intense concentration for me.

 

[piledriver]

To the OP there is no way you can do that because the weight of the bullet and brass will vary way more than the charge. There is a lot of good info in this thread. A reloader MUST! read the manual. The good info in this thread is covered in the manual. The Manual is your bible. always refer to it for information.