Dillon 550 problems.

[medalguy]

Given some of the brass I've seen lately probably an off-center priming hole. Seems the manufacturers are getting sloppy.

BTW I have several Dillons that get a LOT of use and yes sometimes parts do wear out/break. After all, they're mechanical. HOWEVER, after a fast call to Dillpon they have always made good their warranty, no questions asked. Just this past week I had the spring under the locator ball bearing break and the shell plate was turning loosely. I called Dillon and got a replacement in 2 days. Of course no charge.

[Gyrogearhead]

Given some of the brass I've seen lately probably an off-center priming hole. Seems the manufacturers are getting sloppy.

BTW I have several Dillons that get a LOT of use and yes sometimes parts do wear out/break. After all, they're mechanical. HOWEVER, after a fast call to Dillpon they have always made good their warranty, no questions asked. Just this past week I had the spring under the locator ball bearing break and the shell plate was turning loosely. I called Dillon and got a replacement in 2 days. Of course no charge.

"Off center priming hole" sounds really reasonable to me. And while we are on the subject of priming holes and shell plates I want to tell you about a problem that jumped up and bit me at my last reloading session. I was moving right along on a freshly cleaned lot of 45 ACP range brass when on the priming stroke my 550B would not fully seat the primer.

Had to take the shell plate out to remove the offending case having a fresh primer lodged about half in, half out. Put the press back together and a few rounds later same thing again. After two more iterations of this evolution (sometimes I can be a real slow learner) I stopped reloading and sorted through my pile of brass to remove a double handfull of potential problem cases.

What was happening was that some cases, the problem ones, had a red laquer sealant applied to the primers and during the depriming stroke the force from the depriming pin separated the primer face from its body ring leaving the ring in the primer pocket to jamb up the fresh primer as it was being seated.

When I finished my reloading session I manually deprimed each of the problem cases and about half of them deprimed normally and the other half had a "primer separation". All the cases in question had a head stamp of "S & B" and a little symbol looking like a Micky Mouse profile along with the usual "45 Auto".

Don't know if these are ex-military or someone's idea of waterproofing their ammo but I sure gave me a headache. I guess from now on I'm going to have to specially cull these out of my cleaned brass box before I start reloading.

Gerry

[NcongruNt]

S&B does that to all their ammunition. I've never had the issue you describe with mine, though.

As for the off-center flash holes, I've noticed that as well in my 5.56 brass. But only from Winchester WCC 5.56 NATO-stamped cases.