progressive questions

[The Bushmaster]

Oregonian...Out of Coos Bay. Temporarely stuck in The SSR of Cal. I WILL escape!!

 

[HKGuns]

Do you tumble before you start working the press?

Yes, clean brass is required so as not to ruin your dies with dirty casings.

At what point do you trim?

At this point I reload only Pistol casings so I don't trim the brass, or haven't had the need to trim yet.

When do you clean the primer pockets?

I don't clean the primer pockets.

Do you crimp on a seperate press? There aren't enough stages to use my Lee FCD.

The RCBS should have a crimping stage included with the bullet seating, the dies are set to seat and crimp at the same time (Stage 5). (At least it is that way on my little red progressive)

Single-stage affords many opprotunities to inspect the cases (typically at each seperate process for me). When do you typically inspect during multi-stage?

I inspect when I'm boxing them up. I've never really found that many bad rounds. I usually check OAL on a few rounds at the beginning and again at the end. But haven't found any out of spec rounds thus far.

I use a Hornady LNL AP press and really like it a lot. Here's what I do.

Pick up brass at range. Bring it home and sort it by caliber into ziplock bags. Dump some brass into the tumbler and let it run until nice and shiny. I use a mixture of mostly walnut with some corn cob thrown in because I initially got corn cob but was dis-satisfied with the cleaning. Walnut is far more effective at cleaning.

After clean, I put into clean ziplock bags and store. When ready to load I put a bag of cases on the bench and pull out some Ranier TMJ bullets. Load up 100 primers into a primer tube and dump into the press and start pulling the handle.

Stage 1 Deprime and resize.
Stage 2 Priming.
Stage 3 Bell case mouth for bullet.
Stage 4 Powder drop.
Stage 5 Bullet seat and taper crimp.
Stage 6 Drop into the little pastic tray.

When I'm finished with 100 I pull out a couple of empty boxes and start filling. While filling I'm inspecting the rounds for anything obvious.

I hope this helps.