Store Ammunition Suddenly Looks Mighty Good

I am so bummed out. I got all my reloading crap, and I put together data, and I got the press mounted to my workbench. And it still does not work.

It turns out that the Hornady Lock-N-Load AP manual doesn’t give you unimportant information such as how the press works or how to assemble it. I mean, sure, it has bad diagrams and incomplete and self-contradictory assembly directions and some general suggestions regarding operation, but you can’t take your load data and Hornady equipment and powder and brass and lead and primers and actually DO anything. It doesn’t even tell you the order of the dies the ammunition goes through.

I finally figured out the die order, after spending hours putting the press together. I got a few clues from the manual, and the rest I figured out on my own. Then I ran some stuff through the press without powder, and I managed to ding up the seating die. It may be ruined. Not sure yet. I jammed a bullet about an eighth of an inch too far down into a case, which is a lot. Ruined two cases. Lost a primer. Hey, that die was only forty bucks. Hornady probably saved over seventy-five cents by not providing a real manual.

The documentation says virtually nothing about how deep to seat the dies or how to adjust them. Is there a special, super-premium Hornady manual that contains this information? If so I would like to buy one. I have a reloading book, the documentation that came with the press and powder measure, several mini-reloading manuals that were provided with the press, and the Speer manual. And none of them actually say how to reload. Which, you would think, would be among the topics the manual might cover.

Maybe you have to hire Mr. Hornady himself to come out and tell you how your expensive machine works. Am I crazy, or is it a little weird to sell a complicated machine, in pieces, with a manual that doesn’t tell you how to assemble or operate it?

The first case I put through the machine ended up with a big giant belly in it. The top half was normal size, but the bottom half was much bigger. I kept thinking it was my fault, but apparently, I picked up a piece of stray brass some nutcase had overloaded and blown up. I guess it had been stretched all to hell, and the press only managed to resize the upper half. Or something. I don’t really know.

This is starting to look like one of those activities where you’re supposed to be born into a family that already does it. Like being a sherpa. You want to be a sherpa? Forget it. You can’t go to vocational school and sign up for sherpa class. Either you’re a sherpa or you’re not.

It reminds me of the misery I went through, trying to find basic metalworking and machining courses in Miami. They DO NOT EXIST. I like to be positive. I like to think you can do anything you want to in America, if you have the time, the money, and the ability. But you can’t! It would be easier for me to become a professionally trained circus clown (Sarasota, two hours west) than it would for me to learn to run a milling machine.

People say, “Go hang around machine shops and ask them to teach you.” Uh…are these people from earth? You can’t just wander into a machine shop and hang around. It’s called “trespassing.” It’s roughly equivalent to begging strangers to beat your ass and hand you over to the police. Do you let random strangers wander into your workplace, hang around, and ask you to teach them stuff? NO, I don’t THINK so.

Back when I was getting my physics degree, I took a course in electronics. The text was a classic: Horowitz and Hill. Completely worthless. Because it was sold to beginning students, and it was written so that you could only understand it if you had already learned everything in it. If you were an EE with twenty years at Motorola under your belt, meaningless nerd jargon like “sourcing current” (which can’t be looked up in any dictionary, anywhere) might mean something to you. But to someone who only speaks English, the book was basically a fifty-dollar doorstop. Hornady has revived those fond memories.

That’s what the Hornady instruction manual is like. “We won’t bother wasting your time with actual step-by-step instructions, since you proved you’re an expert by buying our weird, esoteric products. So we’ll just give you a few vague hints and tiny diagrams in which the machine is presented from the wrong angle, and you’ll be on your way. We’ll be happy to replace the parts you destroy while trying to figure things out by trial and error. If you pay us for them.”

If anyone knows what book I was supposed to buy in order to understand how this thing works, please let me know. I am not yet ready to believe that it is only possible to reload ammunition if you know someone who will come to your house and teach you.