I was explaining to my son that laziness is the mother of invention (supposedly it's necessity, but my case it's definitely I don't want my time wasted on something).
I over-do my case prep- especially for 'bulk' loading (223 for example). I anneal every firing. I clean, dry, deprime, anneal, lube, size, trim, chamfer, and clean again. Then it goes into an ammo can to be ready to load at any point.
Though I do have some efficiencies, such as sizing and trimming on my 550, using my Lee APP for depriming, and my Annealeze to anneal, there's a lot of me picking up cases and feeding them into the Lee APP tubes, or stacking in the annealer, and one-at-a-time putting them in the Dillon.
What I'm doing is going to build some automation, I'll probably do a blog post on it, but will show some of the steps here. I'm a big fan of 3d printing, and many things are available to download free of charge- such a bullet feeding die and a case collator. I've already printed the bullet die, but need to make a bullet collator, and since I was doing >1000 223 cases, I decided I'd make a case collator first.
Here's the case collator: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2868908
Just the printing of the parts has taken days- each wedge takes about 8 hours to print, so I've already invested days in just getting the parts printed. Secondly- there's no instructions- you have to figure it out from the pictures. I downloaded the Autodesk project he listed and even it is incomplete, but I can use some of it to make my own custom components later.
Here's where I am from having the parts printed:
To be painfully obvious- this would be far easier to just buy the Hornday case feeder from (about $500), but I enjoy this kind of thing...
I'm farther along and will post some photos as I go.
I over-do my case prep- especially for 'bulk' loading (223 for example). I anneal every firing. I clean, dry, deprime, anneal, lube, size, trim, chamfer, and clean again. Then it goes into an ammo can to be ready to load at any point.
Though I do have some efficiencies, such as sizing and trimming on my 550, using my Lee APP for depriming, and my Annealeze to anneal, there's a lot of me picking up cases and feeding them into the Lee APP tubes, or stacking in the annealer, and one-at-a-time putting them in the Dillon.
What I'm doing is going to build some automation, I'll probably do a blog post on it, but will show some of the steps here. I'm a big fan of 3d printing, and many things are available to download free of charge- such a bullet feeding die and a case collator. I've already printed the bullet die, but need to make a bullet collator, and since I was doing >1000 223 cases, I decided I'd make a case collator first.
Here's the case collator: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2868908
Just the printing of the parts has taken days- each wedge takes about 8 hours to print, so I've already invested days in just getting the parts printed. Secondly- there's no instructions- you have to figure it out from the pictures. I downloaded the Autodesk project he listed and even it is incomplete, but I can use some of it to make my own custom components later.
Here's where I am from having the parts printed:
To be painfully obvious- this would be far easier to just buy the Hornday case feeder from (about $500), but I enjoy this kind of thing...
I'm farther along and will post some photos as I go.