I have mixed feelings about this. I love that they made the handle adjustable length (although if they wanted t get really anal, they should have put it in the middle). The primer catcher looks slick. The quality of the stuff they produce is solid, so I would expect nothing less here. I like the innovation and attention to detail. And it just looks nice.
But...
I totally disagree with the philosophy that floating things is a cop out. It's not. It's good engineering. Why would you constrain something that doesn't need to be constrained? That is how you introduce unwanted stress into a system. You can minimize (but not eliminate) that by making everything ultra-precise, but all you've done is made something worse (because you can't make everything perfect), and that costs 10x as much. Soemtimes you need to for one reason or another. But there is no need to locate a die within .0005". This is how you wind up with a $1200 press.
There are times when float is appropriate. Other times it really bad idea.
I will illustrate with an example from my professional experience leading a team of engineers in the development of high pressure common rail diesel fuel injection systems. These systems are required to precisely meter fuel to the milligram at pressures up to 2600 bar, while lasting 20,000+ hours. The materials and tolerances are state of the art. We’re talking mass produced parts with internal clearances of a tenth and a half. So managing dimensional variation is within my professional competency.
Float is a double edged sword. It saves you or it kills you. Consider the case of mounting a hydraulic accumulator to a modern Diesel engine. The plumbing to and from it is entirely rigid steel lines of ultra premium specification, as the lines must have an infinite fatigue life while enduring a constant water hammer effect at frequency and pressures that triple the pressures at the deepest point in the ocean. (The marianas trench).
Because the plumbing is so highly stressed, you cannot induce additional stress in the lines by having the accumulator position vary by much. The first instinct is to have a tiny clearance of the mounting bolts in their holes to hold a tight true position error.
But this turns out to be a recipe for failure because you can’t control tightly enough the “stack up” of all the other parts; lines vary in length, and are fastened to parts that vary in true position while secured by brackets and clamps that induce their own true position error and associated assembly stress. You need to allow the position of the accumulator to “float” a bit to normalize the stress from the high variation in the other degrees of freedom in the system.
So you end up mounting your accumulator with large clearances between the mounting bolts and their flange holes so that it can “float.”
But then you face a head-scratcher: the measured stresses in the lines went up instead of down. But some went way up, some went down, some showed no change. Why?
It turns out that simply having float doesn’t solve your stress problem. You have to tighten those bolts last so that all the other degrees of freedom are constrained FIRST. Then the float will average the stresses. But tighten those bolts first and it exacerbates the stress problem it was supposed to help.
So float can help OR it can make things worse depending on the amount of variation elsewhere in the stack up and where the float occurs within it.
But is absolutely true that float is only even possibly beneficial when your other tolerances are insufficient (“sloppy” isn’t quite right, but it sort of is).
So if you can control the other tolerances but don’t and elect to use float instead, it is a cop out. But if you have an otherwise unsolvable problem, float is clever engineering.
As shooters we see this double-edged sword all the time. Arguments about bushing dies causing runout vs curing it by their “float.” Making dies “float” vs locking down via improved ways to mount them.
The biggest weakness in a press is the threads. Holding concentricity in threads is almost impossible. Threads inherently float, but in a way you can’t predict or control. Now, if these were ACME threads like on a lathe, the tolerances could be excellent. But they aren’t.
Fundamentally we are trying to keep a die and a Ram concentric. But the die is threaded, so we can’t. But if we lock the die down tight so it doesn’t move, the error is fixed and repeatable. And having a little float in the shell holder is all you need to allow for this.
This feature of my MEC press was important to me.
The Area 419 press is what happens when machinists turn engineer. Superb tolerances where they don’t matter.
The only tolerances that matter are in the ammo it produces— it remains to be seen if this press will be demonstrably better at all.
I suspect it may underperform.
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