Charging Frustration

[Guest macmonkey]

As I stated in other posts I'm brand new - bought my Lee Classic single stage kit last week. Up to this point I've got my brass cleaned, deprimed, primed, sized and expanded. Things are going great. I've got about 200 38 special rounds ready for charging and about 150 .40's.

At this point I'm ready to charge. My lee classic kit came with a powder dispencer and I read the instructions from start to finish.

I've consulted the Lyman 38th and established the fact that with my Hornady 158gr HP's I'm due for 4.7-5.0(max) grains of powder.

Using the powder dispencer I set the dial to something like .5 according to the formula (I'm using Unique powder) in the manual for the powder dispenser.

I'm using the scale which is extremely prone to user error to measure out the charges and each time I go to measure a charge it comes out everywhere BUT right on target.

As I'm sure most of you know the powder dispenser has a little ruler-rod that when turned gets shorter or longer respectively. I spent at least an hour today trying to get my charge just right and continue to come up with the wrong charge weights.

At this point I'm ready to invest in some high tech powder dispenser/scale that will save me hours of frustration every time I change rounds.

I'm obviously doing something wrong but just curious if anyone else might have some tips.

Thanks for letting me vent....

jw

[Guest Mugster]

Try going outside and smoking a cig or something. Take a break.

First, a powder thrower throws by volume. Some powders do better than others. What type of powder are you trying to throw? I have pretty good luck with accurate #5 and #2.

My advice is, zero your scale out and then set it at the minumum charge your manual lists and triple check it. When you can throw 10 charges that are under in a row and don't move or barely move the balance, you are getting close. Then try tweaking the knob about a 1/8 turn at a time. You should get to a point where the scale will move but not always balance, and maybe a few charges will be real close to balanced. That's about all you can get out of it, depending on the powder your throwing. If you have too many charges over, you know to back down an 1/8 turn and try again.

What I do is throw under and use a powder trickler to trickle up dead on the money. It has a spout that allows you to drop individual ganules of powder onto the scale by turning a screw. A must for working up max loads. With min loads (plinking ammo) some variance is probably ok.

Also, you might choose a powder that has a grain difference between min and max loads, so you have a bit more slop to add tot he safety margin. Loading handgun is pretty hard...I mean we're talking 5-10 grains of powder per charge. Lot of guys blow stuff up, so be careful.

A couple of tips are:

1. Keep the powder level in the thrower consistent.

2. Use the same motion and force on the thrower lever.

3. Turn off the air conditioner.

[Guest Grout]

Lee makes good dies.......every thing else.......meh.

[DWARREN123]

I set the powder dispencer to where I think it should be and make adjustments from there. I fill the dispencer and make sure I keep everything the same when I crank the handle, this is very important.

I then load my first five checking each charge, once everything is good I check every five after that.

You can adjust the tension for the crank arm but this may change the charge dropped. Must crank it the same everytime!

Just how I do it.

The scale must be level and out of all wind, drafts A/C air movements.

[SpacemanSpiff]

I'm not sure which of Lee's powder measures you have, but when I was researching powder measures (I've been reloading for about 3-4 months), I looked at MidwayUSA and read the customer reviews. I saw that a lot of people that purchased the Lee powder measures had to modify them in some way to get them not to leak or work better.

I ended up buying a Lyman#55 powder measure. It's more than I wanted to spend, but now that I have it, it's well worth it. The only plastic part is the hopper. The guy that taught me how to reload has the #55 and others that I've talked to at the range have it also.

[Im Neero]

If you have the money, buy some better gear. It's not that Lee cannot work well, but based on my experience trying to set up a Lee progressive, the money spent on better gear is well worth it.

If you don't have the money, follow Mugster's advice.