I've owned my LNL AP for a long time now, and like many others, mine was giving me high primers, no matter how hard I pushed forward on the upstroke. Not every round (maybe 1-2 in 10), but often enough where I had to check every round. This absolutely killed my loading time.
I tried all the "fixes," and they didn't work. I tried shimming the sub-plate inside the drive hub, but that just bound up my press so it wouldn't index. Lately, I've been using a hardened steel washer under the primer punch, and that really got me some extra height on the punch in the priming stroke, but for whatever reason, the primers just wouldn't go in reliably. The "wisdom" of the internet hypothesizes that this is due to the press losing or wasting its mechanical advantage after a certain amount of force is used on the priming stroke, but based on the fix I worked out today, I don't know that this is correct (although I'd like to hear your thoughts, see below).
Like many others, this has been aggravating me. Like many others, I got tired of calling Hornady and them acting like it was all in my imagination and refusing to acknowledge the problem. The last time I came here for help on with this issue, a lot of people told me they switched to priming with a hand tool. This is sub-optimal for rifle reloading, and totally unacceptable for pistol reloading. I bought a progressive, and I expect it to load like a progressive.
I also own a Redding T7. It primes like a champ. Every time. I was thinking today... why is it that my T7 priming works so well, and the Hornady doesn't. They both use more or less the same mechanical principals, so why does one work so much better than the other. And then I just had this crazy idea: I removed the primer punch from my LNL AP, unhooked the primer punch from my T7, and clamped the Redding punch to the frame of my LNL AP (after lining up the punch with the hole in the LNL sub-plate).
NOTE: If you're actually going to try this fix, I had to remove the outer sleeve from the T7 punch to get the punch to fit through the hole in the Hornady primer shuttle. If you have another brand of punch, this may or may not be necessary.
I used some dead primers to test it out, and it sat them deep... WAY past flush (like .010" to .015" deep). I note that the T7 punch was sticking through the primer shuttle hole approximately as far as my Hornady punch with the steel washer underneath, but the Redding punch was seating much, much deeper. Too deep.
So, to fix this problem, I put some small washers around the punch to limit the operating handle's travel on the upstroke. Then I used some feeler gauges for the fine adjustments to get the depth just right. I just unscrewed the feeler gauges from the set, and put the anchor holes over the primer punch (in the same spot as the washers), so now there's some feeler gauges sticking out of the side of my press.
See the first two pictures to see how this works. Feeler gauges are kind of hard to see. I'll post some better pics tomorrow.
I needed to play around with this a little to get the right depth. But now everything is seating at .002" past flush, with the occasional +/- .002". Not one high primer so far.
I should also note here that, once I got the punch seating at the right depth, it was hardly sticking out of the shuttle past flush at all. Just a few thousandths. If you're still reading this, you've probably seen other posts hypothesizing that getting more travel out of your Hornady primer punch is necessary to get the primers past flush, and based on what I've seen today, this is not the case. I'm getting great results now, and the punch is traveling only just barely above the shuttle.
There was one more problem though. Unlike the Hornady primer punch, which is actually attached to the bottom of the sub-plate (meaning it travels up and down with the plates as the ram moves), my T7 punch is attached to the frame, and does not travel up and down with the sub-plate. Due to the way that the primer shuttle guide wire is shaped, it has the shuttle return too "early," meaning the ram is too high when the shuttle returns to the home position and (since there's nothing there to stop it) the primers just fell through the hole in the sub-plate (where the Hornady punch usually is to catch it).
I fixed this by hot gluing a small round file to the guide wire in such a way as to force the primer shuttle to return home later in the return stroke. See the last picture. I had to play around with this a little bit too. If the shuttle returned to the home position too early, the primer would still fall through. If it returned too late, the punch would bind up the press while the shuttle was trying to return home. Once I got the timing just right though, it started running smooth.
Right now, my press looks a little janky, because, well... this isn't the prettiest fix. But it actually works! I'm thinking I might try to make the modifications less intrusive and ugly, now that I've seen that the concept works.
I should also note that I've only actually loaded about 50 or so rounds so far, so I need to see if this will actually hold up with real use, and that the results are 100% with more samples, but so far, so good. I've depth tested every single primer and they all came out good.
It seems to me that this all disproves the whole line of thinking that the LNL loses its mechanical advantage after a certain amount of pressure is applied to the handle on the upstroke. If that were true, this fix shouldn't have worked...the same loss of mechanical advantage should have occurred using the Redding punch, and the primers shouldn't have seated to flush, much less past flush. Clearly this didn't happen, since I was getting double digit depths before I started limiting the travel.
This leads me to believe that whatever the problem is, it's in the Hornady punch itself. But, it does not appear that the amount of travel is the problem, since my Hornady punch was travelling much farther on the upstroke than my Redding punch is now, yet it couldn't even seat the primers flush reliably, much less past flush.
Anyone have any thoughts on this. I would really just like my Hornady punch to work, as that would definitely be a lot less effort than all this, but Hornady doesn't seem real interested in identifying the problem, much less fixing it. Maybe if I knew what it was, I could work on that instead! I would love to hear your thoughts!
I tried all the "fixes," and they didn't work. I tried shimming the sub-plate inside the drive hub, but that just bound up my press so it wouldn't index. Lately, I've been using a hardened steel washer under the primer punch, and that really got me some extra height on the punch in the priming stroke, but for whatever reason, the primers just wouldn't go in reliably. The "wisdom" of the internet hypothesizes that this is due to the press losing or wasting its mechanical advantage after a certain amount of force is used on the priming stroke, but based on the fix I worked out today, I don't know that this is correct (although I'd like to hear your thoughts, see below).
Like many others, this has been aggravating me. Like many others, I got tired of calling Hornady and them acting like it was all in my imagination and refusing to acknowledge the problem. The last time I came here for help on with this issue, a lot of people told me they switched to priming with a hand tool. This is sub-optimal for rifle reloading, and totally unacceptable for pistol reloading. I bought a progressive, and I expect it to load like a progressive.
I also own a Redding T7. It primes like a champ. Every time. I was thinking today... why is it that my T7 priming works so well, and the Hornady doesn't. They both use more or less the same mechanical principals, so why does one work so much better than the other. And then I just had this crazy idea: I removed the primer punch from my LNL AP, unhooked the primer punch from my T7, and clamped the Redding punch to the frame of my LNL AP (after lining up the punch with the hole in the LNL sub-plate).
NOTE: If you're actually going to try this fix, I had to remove the outer sleeve from the T7 punch to get the punch to fit through the hole in the Hornady primer shuttle. If you have another brand of punch, this may or may not be necessary.
I used some dead primers to test it out, and it sat them deep... WAY past flush (like .010" to .015" deep). I note that the T7 punch was sticking through the primer shuttle hole approximately as far as my Hornady punch with the steel washer underneath, but the Redding punch was seating much, much deeper. Too deep.
So, to fix this problem, I put some small washers around the punch to limit the operating handle's travel on the upstroke. Then I used some feeler gauges for the fine adjustments to get the depth just right. I just unscrewed the feeler gauges from the set, and put the anchor holes over the primer punch (in the same spot as the washers), so now there's some feeler gauges sticking out of the side of my press.
See the first two pictures to see how this works. Feeler gauges are kind of hard to see. I'll post some better pics tomorrow.
I needed to play around with this a little to get the right depth. But now everything is seating at .002" past flush, with the occasional +/- .002". Not one high primer so far.
I should also note here that, once I got the punch seating at the right depth, it was hardly sticking out of the shuttle past flush at all. Just a few thousandths. If you're still reading this, you've probably seen other posts hypothesizing that getting more travel out of your Hornady primer punch is necessary to get the primers past flush, and based on what I've seen today, this is not the case. I'm getting great results now, and the punch is traveling only just barely above the shuttle.
There was one more problem though. Unlike the Hornady primer punch, which is actually attached to the bottom of the sub-plate (meaning it travels up and down with the plates as the ram moves), my T7 punch is attached to the frame, and does not travel up and down with the sub-plate. Due to the way that the primer shuttle guide wire is shaped, it has the shuttle return too "early," meaning the ram is too high when the shuttle returns to the home position and (since there's nothing there to stop it) the primers just fell through the hole in the sub-plate (where the Hornady punch usually is to catch it).
I fixed this by hot gluing a small round file to the guide wire in such a way as to force the primer shuttle to return home later in the return stroke. See the last picture. I had to play around with this a little bit too. If the shuttle returned to the home position too early, the primer would still fall through. If it returned too late, the punch would bind up the press while the shuttle was trying to return home. Once I got the timing just right though, it started running smooth.
Right now, my press looks a little janky, because, well... this isn't the prettiest fix. But it actually works! I'm thinking I might try to make the modifications less intrusive and ugly, now that I've seen that the concept works.
I should also note that I've only actually loaded about 50 or so rounds so far, so I need to see if this will actually hold up with real use, and that the results are 100% with more samples, but so far, so good. I've depth tested every single primer and they all came out good.
It seems to me that this all disproves the whole line of thinking that the LNL loses its mechanical advantage after a certain amount of pressure is applied to the handle on the upstroke. If that were true, this fix shouldn't have worked...the same loss of mechanical advantage should have occurred using the Redding punch, and the primers shouldn't have seated to flush, much less past flush. Clearly this didn't happen, since I was getting double digit depths before I started limiting the travel.
This leads me to believe that whatever the problem is, it's in the Hornady punch itself. But, it does not appear that the amount of travel is the problem, since my Hornady punch was travelling much farther on the upstroke than my Redding punch is now, yet it couldn't even seat the primers flush reliably, much less past flush.
Anyone have any thoughts on this. I would really just like my Hornady punch to work, as that would definitely be a lot less effort than all this, but Hornady doesn't seem real interested in identifying the problem, much less fixing it. Maybe if I knew what it was, I could work on that instead! I would love to hear your thoughts!
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