Question - star vs lyman sort of thing

[johnh57]

I've never actually seen a star/magma sizer. As I understand it, they feed bullet into the sizer nose first - and subsequent bullets just keep moving the sized bullet through the die until it falls out the bottom of the sizer. Is that about right?

If thats the case - why couldn't you rig a different stop on a lyman/rcbs press (say a collar around the main shaft) and take the piston, bottom stops, and depth sets off and do the same thing with the lyman? With a collar on the main shaft you could set the thing to stop at the lube holes, lube the bullet and carry on with the next bullet. I can see an issue with lube easing out on the nose of the bullet once the ogive passes the lube holes. Maybe paying more attention to lube pressure would moderate this, I don't know. How is this done on the star sizer? It doesn't seem unrealistic to put an offset funnel on the bottom of the casting to collect the bullets as they pop out of the bottom of the die.

I was making up a couple dummy rounds today and was too lazy to set up the sizer - so I just shoved a couple bullets through the sizer. Nose first worked better.

john

[Bent Ramrod]

In theory, your scheme would work, except that unless you had absolute control of the lube pressure, as soon as the ogive passed the lube holes, the rest of the lube would fill the available space in the die. There is a great difficulty making this happen, as the lube has to have a high enough "set" pressure to flow out the small holes, which means a certain residual pressure afterwards. If a big hole opens up, the remaining pressure, even though lower, will squirt the lube out. The people who mention lube leaks in their lubrisizers have such openings in the wrong places.

The Star and Meepos type designs have a main pressure screw (like everybody else's lubrisizers) for setting a pressure level, but also have a gate with a secondary pressure screw that pumps small amounts of the lube into the grooves and stops pumping when the lever is lifted. This keeps the residual pressure in the main lube reservoir and there is not enough lube or residual pressure in the secondary chamber to squirt out if the boolits are put through quickly enough. This keeps the lube off the boolits once the grooves are past the holes (if the system is set up right). If you leave the pressure on when you are done sizing and lubing, a surprising amount of lube will eventually squirt out of the dies.

You could get a solid (non ratcheting) wrench for your pressure screw and experiment with the "feel" of getting enough pressure on to fill the grooves, then reversing the pressure between boolits, but I would think that a long session of sizing/lubrication would be pretty hard to maintain the right pressures.

[johnh57]

I was wondering if the star had some sort of gate mechanism to shutter the lube holes.

Have to think about that for a while.

Thanks