I would caution against doing this...a lower charge of a much slower powder is the way to go for light loads (especially if you are new to reloading). With such a small charge of 700X you could easily double or triple charge a case and visually not notice. That is a quick way to get a new 44...Originally Posted by LHS
I have one of these. It does a pretty good job of keeping the dust contained and out of your face.
I do all of my dry media tumbling outdoors, and store the tumbler and media in the garage.
In the last couple years, wet tumbling has become popular. This process uses the rotary tumblers with dish soap, Lemi-Shine crystals, and stainless pins to get brass looking like new. Youtube has several videos on how to do this and there are kits on the market. For rifle or match grade brass, where someone would want the primer pockets sparkling clean, de-priming before the process is required but the results are very nice.
One thing I have found is that just soaking brass in a half gallon of water mixed with a squirt of dish soap and a 1/4 teaspoon of Lemi-Shine crystals will get brass looking about 90% again. Shake the container every 15 minutes or so, total soak time of about an hour. After that I rinse the brass in clean water, shake it in an old beach towel to get it mostly dry*. Dump it in the dry media tumbler, with corn cob and a brass polish, for another hour. Brass looks brand new and the media lasts forever because most of the crud comes off in the wet process. Also, I never put the lid on the dry media tumbler. This helps the dust to escape and the brass comes out with less of a film.
*Living in a high desert helps things dry faster so you may want to leave a little more time depending on the relative humidity in your area.
-Seconds Count. Misses Don't-
That's definitely something I'm concerned about, and for this particular batch, I will be putting every single charge on an electronic scale (700x doesn't meter for crap anyway). I'm doing a small enough batch that I still manually weigh every finished round as well when I'm done. I'm definitely not taking any of this lightly. Hopefully I can eventually find a more suitable powder for light loads that fills up more of the case, but in today's environment, I was lucky to even find 700x.
This is the best, most concise answer to that question I've ever seen. Tons of information in there, yet not long-winded like I would have replied.
Still, those who find a long reply boring tend to be attention-deficit afflicted and have no business reloading...
Bravo, Corvus; excellent response.
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Caliber changes on the 650 cost almost twice as much as on the 550; no free lunch. And that Hornady LNL thing... well, it ain't no Dillon.
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Aaaaand my little Hornady kit electronic scale seems incapable of measuring. I was getting variations as much as a full grain with the same exact charge of powder when I measured them repeatedly. So I emptied them all and took a short drive up to Dillon to get a real scale. Just my luck, they had a few in stock, as well as used 30-cal ammo cans for $5 each, so I nabbed a few of those too. I also found that, with this light charge and flake powder, it was easier to load the measuring pan with the powder trickler rather than the full-size measure. It actually went fairly quick, even with repeated measuring and verification. Problem solved, 20 test rounds loaded.
I'll wager large that most of the current crop of e-scales are made in the same Chinese sweat shop; and that includes the Dillon. I've gone through THREE different RCBS units, all of which failed within six months, and a Dillon that gave it up within ONE month. By "failed or gave it up" I mean various degrees of unreliability suddenly manifest themselves. I have a laboratory grade e-scale by AccuLab that is amazingly precise; it also costs almost $500. Unfortunately, it is not calibrated to read grains. The one they sell that does is another couple hundred bucks.
These "reloading" scales are made to a price point, as opposed to a level of quality. IMO, they are, in the main, junk. I went back to a simple mechanical beam balance scale. Even most of these offered by the reloading companies are cheap as shit and have a lot of plastic in them. The Redding offering is an exception and is what I went with. What I would give to have my old RCBS 510 back...
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I went with the Dillon balance beam mechanical scale. I figured no electronic scale within my price point would be worth a crap, and I don't want to blow my guns up (or myself).
I have an RCBS Chargemaster and a tuned RCBS 1010. I use the Chargemaster, even if it's just for the scale.
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