Shot Show: RCBS 7 station Pro Chucker Progressive

RealGun said:

All the popular presses are aluminum castings except the RCBS, which rarely even gets mentioned. If cast aluminum, top-of-the-line presses are breaking all over the planet, wouldn't we kinda know about it?

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http://www.dillonprecision.com/My_650_Arrived_Broken-98-11-2068.htm (Dillon 650)
http://www.brianenos.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=157392 (Dillon 550)
http://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=202620 (Rock Chucker turns out to be an Alum. Partner press.)
http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=630025 (Hornady AP)
http://www.thefirearmsforum.com/threads/hornady-lnl-ap-broken-drive-hub.124130/ (Hornady AP)
http://www.ar15.com/archive/topic.html?b=6&f=42&t=405195 (Hornady AP)

Only if you choose to look will you know about it....somes just choose not to look. Google and see. The blue press picture in this thread, showing a broken casting is an example. Nobody seemed to care in the thread, I mean Dillon replaced it free of course. That isn't 1 of of million.....and I'm sure more break than are ever posted about. There are more examples you can google, some on Brian Enos.

It's great that Dillon no faults such breakage and just replaces them, but the user still has to deal with the stress and the down time. I can't find similar cast iron press breakage examples on Google.....please do look and if you find one post it.

Beyond all of that.....for reasons of their own, the press manufacturers are indeed going aluminum.......and then there is Lee who started it, and they suddenly starting making some cast iron stuff that hit the market running with popularity in the stratosphere! Even the Lee laughers don't laugh at those two presses.

Pete brings up the other point.....we like and buy what we perceive as best for us. That's why I bought a Pro 2000, and cast iron was only one part of the equation.....APS, simplicity, and quick caliber changes were other parts. My press is for a guy who hates to load and shoot 1000's of one thing, then repeat. That might have something to do with how my Saturdays are spent (NOT at competitions....I had enough of that, when I was younger, coaching baseball and riding motocross).

I see two possible outcomes of this:

1. Solid cast iron presses, like solid thick sheet metaled and framed cars are going the way of the Dodo bird. Eventually we won't have a choice from any company.

2. RCBS will make a major mistake with this aluminum press comparable to Pontiac, when they brought back the GTO in a blasphemous Australian blah car form, and had practically zero sales! Did that having anything to do with the company being shut down by GM? I'm thinking it did...along with other similar bone head decisions. Pontiac officials replied to un-customers that they weren't interested in "retro" designs....... what, like Camaro, Charger, Mustang?

RCBS Special 5 Aluminum press

Price was one of the things I looked at when I was in the market for a progressive. The 2 finalists were the Dillon 650 and the RCBS Pro 2000. I've already suggested why the Pro 2000 won me over.....simplicity, cast iron, quick caliber changes.....I didn't mention price but that was actually decisive for me. The 650 was not cheaper.....at all.

To make the 650 comparable in function, caliber-change-wise, one would want to have a quick change kit for each caliber. That means a separate powder measure for each, exactly the gripe heard in this thread about the Pro Chucker 7!! That's expensive, and not needed for a Pro 2000....so Pro 2k caliber changes were a lot cheaper and that was the straw that finished off the 650 in the running for me.

People think the stationary station on a Pro 2000 is somehow a disadvantage. For loading pistol, the ideal is using the powder die and powder thru expander on station 2, which frees the stationary station three for a lockout die. I buy a powder die and expander for each caliber's die plate, but not a whole new Powder measure.

For rifle I have a choice of charging on station 2 again using its own powder die, or I can use the stationary 3 and just change the mic settings. I prefer to seat rifle with a Gold Medal seater because it's super fast and seats them as straight and accurate as a straight line die. It has no crimp feature, but that's fine by me....I usually don't have a need to crimp a rifle cartridge.

BTW, I don't size rifle on the Pro 2000.....no point since I want to trim and prep the brass off press before I prime, charge and seat. My Rock Chucker does those honors. However............those who use an X-sizer do so without needing trimming or case prep on cases reloaded once already. For them the cast iron frame is a peace of mind advantage.

buckbrush said:

I do not think the Pro-2000 is comparable to a 650, there is no case feeder available for it.

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Shucks, buckbrush! You really need to spend the $110 for the Auto-Advance kit, so you won't think that! The Pro 2K is a 5 station press with a bullet feeder option and a wonderful primer system!

The 650 doesn't come with a bullet feeder or APS. Every press is different with different features....one fits me to a tee and the other fits someone else to a tee. None fits everyone equally as well.....not the new Pro Chuckers, not the very much cast iron Dillon 1050s.

On that different strokes for different folks idea, I actually originally bought the manual Pro 2K version.....not because I wanted a 550 style press, but because I couldn't find an auto-advance version. But I was able to buy the upgrade kit at the same time......so I tried it out manually for about day and a half, and upgraded to auto-advance with the thought that if the automation was too much too fast I could change it back. There was no further thoughts about manual advance. The giddiness took weeks to get over.

Meanwhile I began to address "other" bottlenecks that the new progressive brought to light....you know like trimming & case prep. IME the Pro 2000 is equally good at rifle and pistol.....but rifle brass needs case prep......usually. Nope I haven't tried a lube die or X-die. Maybe I should.....

"can't push a rope" referring to? APS or tubes?

APS's demise reminds me of the comic strip "Dilbert." Too often in big corporations, somebody powerful, above the experts makes the decisions.

Peter M. Eick said:

Lifetime warranty and cast iron blocks are great. I still wonder about the aluminum frame. I will still take the wait and see approach for a while.

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I'm leaning that way too,. For sure I will wait to see if the "assembly" disassembles. As for the metal mix, I always thought using a stonger part in a weak system just shifts the weakness to somewhere else in the machine.....guess we will see.

All of the above. Plus Using Aluminum sure hasn't hurt Dillon sales inspite of the breakage, while using cast iron went mostly on deaf ears, buyers not really understanding that the product life of every (quality) cast iron part usually exceeds the user's in a reloading press application.

So then, making them cheaper and selling them not any cheaper is a win, win Dillon discovered long ago, not to mention that enticing died in the wool reloaders with 7 stations is a more sure bet compared to trying to convince them of the many merits of APS. Business...just Business. I give up. Life goes on.

I'm just hoping sales of APS bench and hand primers will keep them coming long enough for me to get a good supply of "other" colored strips! I have plenty of standard pistol white (large and small). I just need more standard rifle yellow, a few magnum pistol and rifle red & blue, and maybe even a few military orange. I'll never need any benchrest black. New prices on new strips from Midway is high $5.60 for 8 measly strips! Ebay prices on used strips is worse!!! Best to order the pre-stripped primers to get them.

I'm having a hard time talking myself into the merits of 7 stations, over the 5 with a video powder level display. Keeping my display and using it on a Pro Chucker 7, makes me wonder what in the world to do with seven stations! The Pro Chucker 5 with a case and bullet feeder (and a video powder checker) is equivalent to what I have now, but mine is not the stock Pro 2000 either. I am hoping they get the Pro Chucker case feeder to work better than Hornady's does with multiple caliber changes. It's one thing to be set up for bear in one caliber.....entirely another to be equally set up (trouble-free) for several calibers.

higgite said:

I would think the "retooling" cost would be the same regardless of frame material. They aren't retooling the Pro 2000 line to make aluminum frames, they're tooling up a new line to make Pro Chucker frames.

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I understand your logic higgite, but it's not the same price. It's just flat cheaper to machine aluminum than cast iron. I just finished applying Aluminum eyebrows, and Alpolic panels to "modernize" an older "Dairy Queen" this week. I was able to cut the material with just carbide wood cutting saw blades in a skil saw. The blade I used cost $60, and can cut through solid 1" thick material if I needed it to. (didn't of course on this project). Had the material been steel, everything would have been harder to do. $200-$500 blades in special equipment with liquid cooling, and the blades still would last half the cuts or less.

The cost savings is real....but the press buyer won't be seeing the savings, RCBS will.

Walkalong said:

I would be interested in the 5 over the 7 as well. But then I size, tumble, trim etc, and prime before running the brass through to load as well. I don't need all 5 on my LNL.

Folks who like to do more at once, and want a powder cop die etc, would like the added stations.

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Yeah, ditto for me too loading rifle, except that the Pro 2000 does primers so well, that I don't use the hand primer like I used to.

And seating using a Gold Medal die is sooo easy, I haven't yet been coerced into building a rifle bullet feeder yet....but when I do it will use the G.M. seater....I'll just figure out a way to dump bullets case-activated like RCBS does into it.

Pistol's another matter: I use every station for that, and that's where 7 might be a good thing. Right now I deprime and bling in a wet tumbler. On the press I size (1), prime, expand, charge (2), bullet feed (3), seat (4), taper crimp (5). Between 2 & 3 I watch the big video picture of the filled case rotate to 3 to prevent squibs or dbl. charges.

If I didn't use video, an extra station would be for a lock-out die. Station 7? Well.....somes like to expand separate so that would shift all the stations one more.....but with RCBS's new powder thru expanders that work so darned well at the bottom of a Uniflow, I question the need for that.

A built-in swager could be nice for some, but brass varies so much in hardness and spring back that swaging is not always a sure thing. In progressives that's a crash and burn moment that stops the momentum instantly. Very annoying to say the least. I found this out swaging old 1967 LC brass once, then later 1972 LC brass.

Personal druthers? I like my bench swager finished by barely touching it to a military reamer on the way to being uniformed in a Trim Mate. The reamer does two things by just touching......1. It shines up the edge with an ever so light bevel, making a swaged case show that it was swaged. And 2. It guides both the uniformer AND the primer to the center of things. No more cases catching an edge on the uniformer and jerking a case out of my arthritic hands, and no more smushed primers that didn't make it to the center in time.

Now then....lets talk 12 stations! Two tiers loading two at a time. Okay, yeah, that's nuts.

Really now, the most interesting thing about the new presses is no bumps! No ball and spring! I do want to see one in action!......boy would I love to be able to retro fit my Pro 2000 with that!