Pneumatic press for swaging?

Bought a small 5 ton BTM pneumatic press for the shop to upgrade my manual / hydraulic bearing press, but I don't think that it will work well for that application. I prefer the controlability of the lever system when I'm pressing bearings into housings. That leaves me saddled with a nice little air driven press, I bought it at auction from a manufacturing facility here in town where it was set up with a die punch set for stamping out filter screens for medical equipment filters. The die set is pretty heavy duty, the ram has a 4 second cycle time. . Is this the sort of thing that swagers might use? It would take some modification, but was wondering.

If you were going to sit down and punch out a whole bunch of them--
It'd sure help ya keep from having arms like Popeye the Sailor.

I doubt it would have the needed power for swaging. even a 10" piston at 200 psi is only about a 1 ton rating. But as a bullet sizing press for cast bullets???? The other stumbling block will be length if strike if the press, with the mentioned 4 sec cycle time Im thinking its a fairly short stroke. the cutting medical screens also indicates that.
For swaging you would need enough stroke to have the bullet length and operate the ejector.

Would be interesting to know stroke stated tonage at what pai and needed cfm

BTM's are pretty stout, very well built- I believe this is a series 5 will confirm that, runs on 80 PSI
https://btmcomp.com/presses-and-pres...tem/8-series-5

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Originally Posted by country gent

I doubt it would have the needed power for swaging. even a 10" piston at 200 psi is only about a 1 ton rating.............

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Actually, a 10" diameter cylinder at 200 psi will deliver 15,707 lbs / 7.85 tons of force.

That 2 ton press would be great for swaging lead cores and de-rimming .22 brass for jackets.

BTM's have an internal toggle, not a cylinder. LOTS more mechanical advantage.

I have a pneumatic lee press for deriming brass and it works, never tried actual swagging with it.

Thanks, I'll try an ad in S&S.

Yep 10” is a monster. I run a 4” piston at 90psi onto a punch of .199”. It has a 4” stroke but 5” would be better.
This will do 22LR brass without issue.

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Originally Posted by beezapilot

BTM's have an internal toggle, not a cylinder. LOTS more mechanical advantage.

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Assuming the cylinder is directly operating and not a linkage that creates greater mechanical advantage.

A reloading press would really suck if all the force one could generate is that they could push down with by their weight.

At peak mechanical advantage, even cheap flimsy presses can create a 1000 psi pressure at the die with an input force on the handle of 30 psi. Same principles work if air is the provider of the force.

Don't short change pneumatic cylinders just because they can do it faster with little effort. When you get older the muscle mass declines as well as the endurance. Pneumatics can put you back into the game.

Built my first build in 2012 by attaching a 2-1/2" bore 4" stroke pneumatic cylinder to an inverted RCBS Rock Chucker Press. Named it, "Ram Chucker" and posted a Youtube Video. I used ram chucker to size powder coated bullets as I had to get back into casting to have something to shoot (thank Sandy Hook). I fed the sizing die with a simple PVC tube glued at a 45° angle to a welding magnet.

A short time later I could see the press itself wasn't needed and built "Ram Sizer" using a 3-1/2" pneumatic cylinder w/4" stroke. (see photo below) Ram Sizer also did double duty for "Bulge "Busting 380 acp, 9mm & 45 ACP straight wall cases. The extra power came in handy for severely bulged cases, restoring them to a like new condition.

After that there was "Ram Checker III", which used a 30 cal. Freechex III tool and now sits on Charles Darnall desk. The 2nd photo, "Ram Checker IV", using a larger but very short stroke cylinders and the Charles Darnall's Freechex IV prototype tool. The IV tool was the very best of the Freechex line, it never went into production). Then "Ram Tapper" came about to pneumatically open the H&G 8 & 10 cavity bullet molds because old age made the manual tapping too much for me.

Sorry, but when Google acquired YouTube the old videos vanished.

Attachment 299532 Attachment 299533Attachment 299534

Brett Gibbons (papercartridges.com) recently posted some video of his pneumatic Corbin swaging press making Whitworth bullets. It wasn't having any problem doing them at about 4 seconds each.

Cleared my post. I just read the whole thread and Red River already corrected the fallacy of a 10” diameter cylinder only creating 2000 lbs of force on 200psi.
A 3.5” D cylinder will do that.
I had an aneurysm at first because I used to design/build pneumatic automation and fixtures.

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Originally Posted by Nobade

Brett Gibbons (papercartridges.com) recently posted some video of his pneumatic Corbin swaging press making Whitworth bullets. It wasn't having any problem doing them at about 4 seconds each.

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I could do 28 bullets a minute by dropping bullets by hand into the feeder tube. A younger person with more dexterity could improve on that.