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Turn Your FX-120i into a Prometheus

6 seconds?

I was being facetious. Of course i will buy it.

This system takes powder charging to a whole new level. Quick, accurate and painless.

Like going from hand trimming brass to a giraud trimmer.
 
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Adam, let me know when you when you finish the upgrade to automatically pick optimum powder & charge, bullet and seating depth.
 
Took awhile to complete transaction (must be lots of orders!!) but count me in too. Great development to learn of, bring to my bench.
 
I ordered last nite...thanks Adam, I appreciate you continuing to make our lives easier.
 
Adam I think I ought to register the domain name "make-my-perfect-ammo-for-me.com" and hold it for you until you need it.... which might not be very long!!! ;-)

What a nice new thing you've come up with; I'm really looking forward to trying it out. As I was saying to people yesterday at Lodi (BTW you were missed there) - "absolutely unnecessary, but completely wonderful and of course I'm getting one...!!"
 
I haven't had enough free time to take any of my rifles out of the safe and go shooting or even work on the automatic powder throw since early December because of ongoing home/family issues, but when I got the email from Adam about the new Auto Throw I decided to check in here.

Adam, great job with the final product and keeping the cost down, what you've come up with costs less than just the Harrell's I used in my setup! Mounting the throw to the scale draft guard was a great idea to keep the throw close to the scale so the dropped powder has less energy/velocity when hitting the container and is therefore much less prone to "splashing" compared to my setup. Your setup also doesn't require any additional mounting parts, enclosures, drop tubes, tuning of servo endpoints, etc.

The Lee Auto Drum powder measure that I bought last year trying to come up with a less expensive automatic throw was not conducive to automating, the way the drum linkage is designed to be actuated by the press upward motion on the die needs quite a bit of pressure to operate-- beyond what any inexpensive stepper/servo/solenoid was capable of. I had zero luck getting my old Redding 3BR and an RCBS measure to run when trying a similar motor/pulley arrangement, the drum to housing friction was just too great and it just bound up and stalled the motor. After that problem I didn't even really consider the basic Lee powder measure as a viable option as I figured it would bind too, so I jumped straight to the Harrell's because of the needle bearings. Guess I shouldn't have made that assumption, because in your video the basic Lee measure works much better than my 3BR did when automated via the same kind of motor/pulley arrangement!

Seeing that you used a regular stepper motor is a "duh" moment for me... totally avoids all the issues of using a limited rotation absolute encoder servo like I did. Just run the stepper enough counts up and down to actuate the throw over its entire range and power it down at the extremes of travel so it doesn't sit stalled drawing current and making heat. If the belt skips a tooth, big deal... the stepper will find its new "home" on the next full cycle of the measure. Your final product is much more end-user friendly than my absolute encoder servo based setup for sure. The servo was my primary fear of building them for other people... because if something worked loose or the belt slipped the servo end points would have to be readjusted in the code to prevent overtravel/stalling/binding-- because sitting in a stalled position will eventually lead to servo overheating and damage. I thought about adding two endpoint trimmer pots to allow easy endpoint adjustments, but because I used about 170 degrees out of a possible 180 degrees of servo rotation the "sweet spot" to avoid binding/stalling on either the stops of the powder measure or the servo's internal stops was rather narrow. Your standard stepper motor drive avoids all of the end point adjustment concerns and makes the final product much more end-user friendly while still doing the same function.

This is yet another reminder of why I really need to get a 3D printer... much easier and faster to prototype this kind of stuff compared to machining motor brackets and the like, really cuts down on the time and effort to go through multiple revisions of parts.

You guys are going to love this thing, the automatic throw makes the process even faster with less effort on your part. Get two weight matched pans so the second pan can be filling while you dump the first pan into a waiting case and seat the bullet and you can really hustle!

Next step of course is to have the device directly dump the charge into a waiting case similar to how the Prometheus does so you don't have to handle the powder pan or funnel... I still have a few ideas for that. It may be less hand motion, but I'm not sure the "direct to case" method will be faster than the "two pan" method. Good excuse to buy a 3D printer though and play with more automation. :p

Again... great job Adam!
 

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