Pig Gets First Taste of Lipstick
June 1st, 2010Shopmade Primer Feed Cap
I made a cap for the primer feed on my Hornady Lock-N-Load press. Pretty exciting. By my standards.
I took a piece of aluminum bar stock and turned it down to 0.875″, within a thousandth or two. I used the lathe to drill a 0.316″ hole down the length of the stock. I parted 2″ off and put it in my rotab. I used a 1/4″ mill to bore it out to 0.625″ inside, to a depth of about 3/8″. Then I stuck it back on the lathe, faced it down to size, and put a nice bevelly surface on the top. After that I stuck it on the drill press and used the slide table to put two holes in it for set screws. Now I have to tap the holes and get two screws.
Problem: my tap handle won’t deal with taps as small as the one I need to use, so I have to go to the hardware store and see if they have a cheapo I can get.
This should be pretty sweet. The set screws are a little bit of a risk, since one of them could deform the primer tube, but I think that’s incredibly unlikely. It’s pretty sturdy, and the screws don’t have to be very tight.
If this works, it should solve a lot of the problems caused by Hornady’s cheap plastic primer feed cap and the lack of any meaningful attachment at the lower end of the tube.
Photos eventually.
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Here’s a photo of the part I made. The blue thing is a coat hanger segment I put in there to keep track of the number of primers in the tube (and to supply the force to push primers into the slide–another thing Hornady didn’t provide for).
If you make one of these for yourself, make the outer diameter about 0.850″. This one is 0.875″, and it almost touches the powder measure on the way up.
The hex screws are not a problem, and they never will be. The amount of force needed to hold this part in place is tiny, so it will never be necessary to tighten the screws to the point where they damage anything.
This thing is infinitely superior to the one that came with the press. It even has more area up top so you can easily feed primers by hand when you need to.
June 1st, 2010 at 7:18 PM
I may be wrong, yet I feel that Hornady designed the plastic top as a blow off cap in the event of a primer explosion.
By adding a secured metal top you have effectively turned your primer tube into a grenade should a primer detonate in the tube.
I had this happen and because the tube was open the explosion was much less severe than it could have been, most of the blast being directed upward into the ceiling.
I still caught enough shrapnel to decide automatic primer feeds were no longer my cup of tea.
June 1st, 2010 at 10:26 PM
Ok… that’s pretty cool. Overkill, but very cool.
June 1st, 2010 at 10:53 PM
“By adding a secured metal top you have effectively turned your primer tube into a grenade should a primer detonate in the tube.”
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It’s still open. How do you think the primers get in? You can even see the hole in the photos. However if you’re still worried, I can fire up the rotab and add snazzy side vents.
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“Overkill, but very cool.”
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It’s thick because I used hex screws. It had to be thick in order to have enough thread depth to secure the screws. If I had used a different method of securing it, it would be smaller and thinner.
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It would probably have made more sense to put a single set screw in the bottom thing the tube slides into, but I was so obsessed with the cap, I didn’t think of it. And the old cap was really half-assed, so it needed to be killed.
June 2nd, 2010 at 12:20 AM
Looks a lot like a product. I recently realized that even the most modest lathe chuck will easily accommodate any case chamfering tool you can drag home. Or primer pocket cleaning tool.
June 2nd, 2010 at 1:12 AM
Hope you used plastic coat hanger as feed weight, metal would make a nice arrow/projectile. Dillon has a good one that actuates the primer buzzer when close to empty.
June 2nd, 2010 at 9:48 AM
I posted before you had the picture up.
Didn’t want you digging primer shrapnel out of your hide if the blast didn’t have a place to vent.
It is a very nice job of machine turning.
June 2nd, 2010 at 11:27 AM
It has to be heavy and rigid, so plastic won’t work. I don’t really care what hits the underside of the roof.
June 5th, 2010 at 9:48 PM
My progressive press was the high dollar press and is considered by many as the best on the market. I fought the priming problem to a point where I finally gave up. My solution was to use an RCBS hand primer for that job and just consider it to be the least frustrating way to go. Granted, it made for an additional stage, but it made it where I didn’t mind reloading. I suspect that the time was a wash since the powder clean-up was a big factor in my loading plans.
After I began having primed cases run through the press, loading hundreds of rounds became “almost fun.”
There may be better hand presses than the RCBS, but I don’t think so by much. It was good enough for me. I ended up with four, one for each caliber so that I didn’t even have to swap a case holder to start priming.
An additional benefit was that there is a certain feed-back one gets when using a hand primer so even the tiniest glitch sets off an alarm. Didn’t happen often, but was hard to miss when it did.