I used to buy Emeralds in a past life and always had a 10x jeweler loupe on my person. Now I have them scattered all over the place. Truck glove box to tackle box to first aid kit to loading bench! I cannot do case prep without! It dosent take long to get the knack to use one and they are fastest way to inspect things up close.
I have a thing thing about loading super straight ammo and it probably makes no difference for my shooting but I still like to try to be consistent in runout for the challenge if nothing else. What I found years back was I could get a run going at 1 thou max runout and then a 3 thou would pop up in same batch. After this happened a few times I started examining my processed necks with a 10x loupe and would find some occasional micro dents creating inside flat spots, or on the lip, that were not visible with my naked eyes or tiny burr. Or just being able to see that a neck is actually slightly out of round. I am back to using neck bushings and to fix this I double up by necking down with an undersized bushing so I can use my .243 mandrel and then re-size neck with a diff bushing to get back down to my target tension. It is double work for me and for the neck brass but I anneal each firing. End result are straight slick tubes. I use a k&m vld chamfer and I can only cut a perfectly even bevel when the necks are treated this way. I can only see any unevenness in the cut lines with a loupe.
Other uses include: measuring the length of lands scrape mark on bullet for depth of jam. Flash hole inspection etc.
Irony of all this is the LCD eliminated all of the above steps with one process! I am considering ordering an slightly oversized mandrel from Lee to turn 2 steps into one, and then finish with a neck bushing.
I have a thing thing about loading super straight ammo and it probably makes no difference for my shooting but I still like to try to be consistent in runout for the challenge if nothing else. What I found years back was I could get a run going at 1 thou max runout and then a 3 thou would pop up in same batch. After this happened a few times I started examining my processed necks with a 10x loupe and would find some occasional micro dents creating inside flat spots, or on the lip, that were not visible with my naked eyes or tiny burr. Or just being able to see that a neck is actually slightly out of round. I am back to using neck bushings and to fix this I double up by necking down with an undersized bushing so I can use my .243 mandrel and then re-size neck with a diff bushing to get back down to my target tension. It is double work for me and for the neck brass but I anneal each firing. End result are straight slick tubes. I use a k&m vld chamfer and I can only cut a perfectly even bevel when the necks are treated this way. I can only see any unevenness in the cut lines with a loupe.
Other uses include: measuring the length of lands scrape mark on bullet for depth of jam. Flash hole inspection etc.
Irony of all this is the LCD eliminated all of the above steps with one process! I am considering ordering an slightly oversized mandrel from Lee to turn 2 steps into one, and then finish with a neck bushing.
