Homemade Stand With Hold Down For Wilson Trimmer
Pictures in a few days.
For sometime I have been yearning for a stand for the Wilson case trimmer. I have been doing my rough trims on a Lyman Universal and then taking the last couple of thou off with a Wilson. Even that way I get tired holding it.
Well, the Wilson can do it all now!
The stand was no great shakes. I used a suitable length of 3” steel channel iron. Cut the same length of thin walled rectangular tubing and tacked the tube to the underside of the channel. The channel and tube are tacked to a thin steel plate and holes are drilled in the four corners of the base plate so I can bolt the welded portion of the stand to a larger base for clamping to my load bench. The top of the channel is drilled for the Wilson trimmer to bolt to the stand.
I also scalloped the middle of the channel iron like Wilson does their stand to reduce the likely hood of skinning my poor old knuckles on them while turning the crank.
The stand is a great addition but a hold down rounds the setup out.
I wanted to make my hold down different from Wilson in some ways and that took some head scratching.
Basically I constructed a crude but effective two piece affair that cams the hold down arm onto the case holder sufficient to keep it in place and also to not allow the holder and case to rotate with the cutter as it is rotated.
The lower piece of the hold down is first rotated onto the case holder and the top pivoting piece is next rotated into position. The handles are orientated such that the camming action and thus the hold down pressure is at its greatest when the handles are both in alignment. The two rotating parts on the pivot are ground and sanded where their surfaces meet to create the lock down.
The two pivoting pieces with their handles are held in place with a long 1/2” diameter carriage bolt that screws into a coupler nut that is welded into a 3/4” pipe nipple which in turn is welded onto a piece of steel strap. The strap is bolted to the steel base plate on one side of the stand (the off side). A jam nut secures the height adjustment of the rotating parts and a flat washer and a compression spring hold the cam parts up until it is time to lock down the case holder.
The vertical movement is only about 50 thou or less.
The main base which the fab steel parts are bolted down to is a plastic cutting board from my wife’s kitchen discards. I got the idea when I saw the demonstration video from Sinclair using the Wilson trimmer. The metal base had a plastic disc fastened on the operator side of the stand for tapping cases in and out of the holder. I thought with my poor “aiming skills” even I could not miss the better part of a cutting board!
Best regards
Three44s
