Hornaday powder drop find

How much did you spend on the AutoCharge? I hope yours holds up!

rdnktrkr said:

$150, Is there a problem with them?

Click to expand...

I seem to recall people complaining about them failing after a year or so. That said, I've never owned one and I may have heard or remembered incorrectly (i.e. I may be wrong).

rdnktrkr said:

$150, Is there a problem with them?

Click to expand...

I had 3 of them, each of which died within 18mos a piece. My first died only a couple of months out of warranty, and I unfortunately bought a second. The second died within the 12mo warranty, which Hornady replaced - and the 3rd had the same failure within 16mos. The 3rd actually had two failures - the controller glitched repeatedly, but could be limped along, for another few months until the digital motor tanked too. When I complained about the issues, two other guys in our rifle club mentioned the same failures.

I actually liked the unit for how easy it was to tune for pre-trickling to hit the target more often and more quickly, but the reliability just wasn’t there.

rdnktrkr said:

Is there anything I can do to help with it?

Click to expand...

Some of them obviously work for a long time, and I really don’t know what caused the failure in mine. I thought it might have been dirty power on the first one, so I put a clean power UPS under my bench by the time I got to the second one, but the second and third still spit the bit.

Like I said - I really liked the unit other than the failures. I thought they were a little wonky like if I didn’t start them as autodispense, they wouldn’t switch to it later, but they’d always switch to manual dispense (one extra button press per charge, not a huge issue), but I REALLY liked how easy it was to change the trickle target, so I could precisely control the likelihood of over or undercharge. My Chargemasters aren’t so easy, nor the Lyman (although the Lyman almost never misses - but the reading will drift down a tenth of it sits for more than about 10sec). And I’m generally a Hornady fan - great people behind (usually) great products. I’ve been tempted to get an AutoCharge Pro just to test it out, hopefully all of the kinks are cleaned up.

A good friend of mine bought the Frankfort unit last year, instead of buying a 3rd Chargemaster, he swears by it.