I'm not sure what happened but I don't have any ammo loaded for my old M1 Carbine. Seeking to rectify this I bought a big ziploc bag of brass off gunbroker.
The brass was polished but otherwise unprocessed and all mixed head stamp. Much of it is Lake City from the early 1950s but there is also FA and WCC headstamps. Earliest is 1943. Latest is 1973. Thirty years of history all in one bag!
Being a mixed batch of brass, case lengths are all over the place. Most I checked were 1.285-1.286" range. Some a little shorter and some at or even slightly over 1.290" which is SAAMI max.
Being that I don't plan on loading a ton of this stuff I don't want to invest a bunch of money. Being familiar with and generally happy with some other Lee stuff I decided to buy the Lee Quick Trim die for 30 Carbine as well as the power adapter that let's me chuck the Lee cutter into a drill motor.
Rather than use a bench press I'm using my old Lee Hand Press. It took a little fiddling to get the trim length set but it seems to actually be working pretty well. There's no real way to tell when a case is fully trimmed so I just count to five with each case. All the cases that were in the 1.286" range are trimmed to 1.280" while anything that's pushing 1.29 might take another second or two to be fully cut. I've found I can trim cases too short but pushing down on the drill so I'm just sort of letting it work under its own weight.
The process actually goes pretty quick. I have sized and deprimed brass in a plastic bag. Once trimmed they get put into an empty butter tub. So far I've trimmed 300 cases and have only 700 to go.... Ugh!
So how does it work? The Lee cutter is a flat bit with four cutting edges. Pinned into the bit is a couple little pieces of sheet metal with springs inside. The flat cutting edges do the actual trimming while the flat bits of sheet metal deburr and chamfer the case mouth. The Lee trim die is specific to whichever case is being trimmed. It is of a specific length. The cutter is the same across the various cases and final trim length is adjusted by a threaded collar on the trim die.
Is it perfect? No. The deburring is a little rough and sort of has a wire edge afterward. I don't see how this will hurt anything and will likely be gone as soon as the case is actually loaded. Also, as mentioned, I can cause variation in OAL by pushing too hard or not letting the cutter run long enough.
Of course the quickest way to go would be a short trim tool head and trim die for the Dillon trimmer. But the only place I can find making Dillon 30 Carbine trim dies is CH4D and he's out of stock. He says he probably won't run another batch of Carbine trim dies for 18 months....
Sent from my SM-A505U using Tapatalk