Cheap Ammunition Makes You Pay Dearly

Yesterday I made some .45 ammunition, and as usual, there were little problems. I won’t mention the accident in which the clear plastic cylinder on the powder measure fell off and covered the floor with Unique. We’ll just omit that. There were other difficulties.

I have a Hornady Lock-N-Load AP, built before they decided the ejection wire was a bad idea and got rid of it, making upgrades to existing presses necessary. It is a turret press. There are, I guess, six stations on a little turntable (drive hub plus shell plate), and you pull a handle to turn it, and each station does an operation on a casing. For this to work, each casing has to be lined up pretty well under the tool that alters it, so the turntable has to stop at the right places. When it does this, in response to various mechanical doodads that are supposed to make it line up, it’s called “indexing.”

If your turntable doesn’t index right, you have problems. First, the sizing die will miss the case and possibly deform it. Second, the primer will miss the case and fail to seat, leaving a hole for powder to dribble out of. The powder will eventually find its way into crevices and cause friction, making the indexing problem worse. It’s a nice cascading effect.

If you don’t push the lever pretty hard on the upstroke, your primer may not seat completely. If this happens, the primer may project downward in a way that blocks the table’s movement. Or you may end up with no primer in the pocket, and the primer can also pop out of the press and find its way into various places where it will drive you crazy.

Pushing the lever hard on the upstroke–I am pretty sure–is hard on the left pawl. Pawls are little things on springs that turn the table. Once the pawls are out of position or damaged, everything goes to hell. And I believe the instructions for adjusting the pawls are backward. Until you realize that, you will find yourself making things worse by doing what Hornady tells you to do. I’m looking at a PDF of the manual, and it appears to be right, but I think the printed one I have is wrong. Maybe they changed it, or maybe I misread it. Anyway, I had to write my own notes in the manual to resolve the confusion.

On top of all that, the shaft that turns the table has a lot of friction, so the pawls have to work hard under the best of circumstances. And there is no bearing on the shaft, and while there are grease fittings, they appear to have no relationship to the driveshaft. So grease away; nothing will happen.

I think my problems are worse, because my press is bolted to a somewhat springy bench edge. The Lock-N-Load likes to rock and throw powder around, and bench movement just generally degrades the way the press functions. I am going to reinforce it today.

I got the press working yesterday, and I ran off around 70 rounds, and then the press started balking. I fiddled with the pawls. A pawl allows things to go by in one direction, and it may push them in that direction, but it shouldn’t push things in the other direction. I had a situation where the left pawl was hitting the drive wheel (“index wheel”) in both directions, so the tip of the pawl got eaten off.

I ground it down and replaced it, and it worked for a while, but eventually, things became hopeless. And while I was fooling with the press, I put pressure on the drive hub, a part with which Hornady has had serious problems. There is a little key sort of a thing on the hub that drives the shell plate that holds the casings. It broke off. Now the press is useless, and I have to wait for a new hub and pawls. I ordered two sets of pawls; I can tell this is a problem that is likely to happen more than once.

I’m really irritated with this thing. I don’t understand why they would build a rotating part that takes a lot of effort to turn, and which has no bearing and no means of lubrication or cleaning without disassembling the machine. I can improve it by taking it apart and sanding down the drive shaft so there is less friction. I think. still, I’m out thirty bucks, and I can’t reload, and this should never have happened. I’m sure the folks at Hornady are doing their best, and I understand that they give fantastic service, and the machine has a lifetime warranty (which does not apply to my problems). But this is bad.

Last night I realized how much better life would have been, had I had machine tools. I could have popped the shaft out and machined a couple of thousandths off of it to make it turn easier. I could have done the same with the drive hub. I could have made a new drive hub after it broke. Making pawls would be a piece of cake. If I really got mad, I could change the machine so it would accept bearings. And all this work would have been enjoyable and satisfying. As it is, I have to screw around with sandpaper and a bench grinder.

I have come to a tentative conclusion, and maybe my machinist readers can tell me if I’m right. It seems to me that it’s better to spend a few thousand dollars once, on a lathe and a mill, than it is to spend your entire life buying parts for things and putting up with frustrating things that a machinist could easily fix.

I suspect that my press is just plain defective, and that the defect is tightness in the lower hole the driveshaft goes through. I can’t think of any reason why the shaft would need to be hard to turn. I’m going to have to take it apart, and it’s held together with snap rings. I hope the pliers I have will fit . Otherwise, I’ll have to strip naked, set my hair on fire, and run down the street screaming. And in Coral Gables, that means pulling a permit.

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I want to be sure I don’t across as an angry Hornady customer. I said I suspect this press is defective, but I don’t know that, and if it is defective, the defect is pretty small and easily cured. There are some things about the LNL that could be better, but I don’t claim it’s a bad product. Lots and lots of people use them with great success. And because my problem happened on a Friday night, like all warranty problems and veterinary emergencies, I did not call Hornady for help, so I don’t know what they could or would have done to help me. As I said earlier, they have a great reputation in the area of customer support.

It’s possible that I contributed to the problems I’m having now, back in the weeks when I was basically trying to make the press work by grunting and beating it with a stick. I feel safe in saying the machine has more friction in it than it should; if you could see it in front of you, you’d realize it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. Maybe that wouldn’t matter if I had been more experienced when I bought the machine.

In any case, putting new pawls in is a three-minute job, and once you understand what they do, adjusting them is not a complex task. Neither is replacing the drive hub. Lots of people do these things. So I’m not going to wreck it by putting these parts in, or by smoothing the hub and shaft down a little.

I screwed a block to my workbench to make the press more stable. I think once the new parts are in, everything will be swell.