Rifle, even the lowly .223, is most definitely a pain compared to pistol.
Progressive machines and bulk processing are the key to efficient rifle reloading. I use a system similar to ZXD9. I have 5-gallon paint buckets to store all my .223 brass in, one for each stage. Dirty, Tumbled/Sorted, Sized/Deprimed, Trimmed/Deburred.
- Brass goes from the Dirty bucket into the tumbler (I have a small cement mixer that can handle 2000+ cases,) then gets sorted after cleaning (I separate out all my LC06 brass for long-range accuracy loads.)
- Tumbled/Sorted brass gets lubed and thrown into the casefeeder of my Dillon XL650. For this stage, I use a spare toolhead with only a sizing die. Brass gets sized, deprimed, and dumped in the next bucket. I can run a thousand cases like this in well under an hour.
- Sized/Deprimed brass gets inspected again at this point, decrimped on a Dillon Super-Swage, trimmed on my Giraud, and tossed into the Ready-To-Load bucket. This is the really time consuming part.
- Trimmed/Deburred brass goes back into the XL650, where it is primed, charged with powder, has a bullet seated, crimped, etc. The completed projectiles go back into the tumbler for a quick cleaning, then are inspected one last time and either boxed up, or put in an ammo can for storage.
If you have a Dillon Super 1050 with a case trimmer, you can bypass most of the intermediate steps and go from clean, sorted brass to finished projectiles in one trip through the reloader. Expensive, but if you're shooting high volumes the time savings are worth it.
- Chris