So....cam over ?

[Old Navy]

Got it. Thinking about it with my RCII I have always just stopped when I felt linkage stop contact. Doing that, I do not see a twist, and my sizing seems to be OK. Recently I bought a new RCBS press, the Rebel. The thought was to keep the one that seemed to be the best. I kept my old RC and returned the new one, for several issues that I won't go into here. One that I did not list when I returned it was that it acted like yours at the bottom of the stroke, doing a twist that my older press does not. Funny thing, the ram fit on the new press is slightly tighter, the reason that I think that it did it was that unlike the older press the stop surfaces were not machined. The were just as cast, with powder coating. Unlike the older press they did not make contact at the same time, which is what I believe caused the twist. I was disappointed with how this detail was handled on the new press. My advice to someone getting started would be to look for a clean, "low milage" RC II like mine.

Does the linkage on yours look like this.

 

[BoydAllen]

Does the linkage on yours look like this.

Yes, and the primer catcher.

 

[Old Navy]

Yes, and the primer catcher.

Thanks.

 

[MagnumW]

From your post I get the idea that you actually do not push your press handle down until it hits the linkage stop. I think that that is not the way that the press was designed to be operated.

Reading a number of the posts in this thread I see something in common. Guys do not seem to understand that the instruction by the die maker to adjust the die an eighth to a quarter turn past the point where the die contacts the shell holder is essentially bad information, an oversimplification of the proper way to set a die for a specific rifle. Doing it that way pretty much guarantees that your ammo will fit in any standard chamber, but in that is not our goal for precision reloading. We are generally looking for a more precise approach. What really amazes me is that anyone would use a quarter turn past touch as a starting point for die adjustment. for a long time we have had excellent affordable tools with which to measure fired cases, so that we can set our dies so that the shoulders of our cases are not pushed back too far. The reason that we do not want to repeatedly push shoulders back too far is that doing that repeatedly will lead to case head separations, with the attendant sharp reduction of case life.

One thing that I often wonder is whether a reloader really understands how much farther into the press one turn of the die moves it. It is .071". What this means is that if you are trying to hit a precise adjustment, to say .001", moving the die that much feels like you may not have moved it at all. Generally speaking, here is the way that I tell shooters to adjust their FL or body dies.

Frist set your die about an eighth turn up from touch. From there you size and measure adjusting in tiny increments until you get the shoulder bump that you want. For once fired cases I suggest you duplicate the measurement of the fired case with your sized case and try it in the rifle. This is because it usually takes more than one firing for a case to get tight at the shoulder. There are some other little details worth discussing but I will leave them for answers to specific questions should anyone ask.

Everyone that has bought the shellholder assortment used to do it this way and switched to hard contact with proper shellholder and found this works better. Have you tried it?

 

[BoydAllen]

Everyone that has bought the shellholder assortment used to do it this way and switched to hard contact with proper shellholder and found this works better. Have you tried it?

No, but I have not really had any issues using standard shell holders, that in most cases have not made hard contact when dies were set for proper bump. In some cases I have had to shorten a standard shell holder, but not for any unmodified factory barrelled action. For many years I have been careful to shoot and size cases within a given set in rotation so that at any time there would be a maximum of one firing difference between cases within a given set. It has been my observation that as cases work harden from repeated use, that die settings have to be adjusted to maintain the same bump. With regard to the Redding Competition shell holders, I believe that they are a good idea if one can get an improvement in accuracy by using them. I have been able to meat my goals without them, but if I had a problem that I thought their use would, or even might solve, I would buy a set.