Originally Posted by
308Jeff
I have two LNL AP's. One purchased as the raw unit which I added a case feeder to, and one that I purchased as an Ammo Plant. The raw unit performed nearly flawlessly from the get go, the Ammo Plant took some pawl adjustments to get the timing perfect.
For me, the biggest selling point was the bushings. They make it a snap (literally) to make a caliber change, and the dies never need readjustment once they're set if you leave them in the bushings.
I bought two small 6 drawer plastic organizers (one for rifle, one for pistol). I store the dies in their bushings inside zip-loc bags and then store the dies, along with their shellplate and case gauge in their own drawer. Drawers are labeled with Dymo tape for easy identification.
There is only one aspect of the presses that give me grief, and that is the case feeders. Sometimes the case drop "window" has to be set exactly right to prevent cases from feeding backwards or not falling fast enough to prevent the feed plate from binding due to a case that didn't make it into the funnel fast enough. Once that's dialed in, it's 99%. The other issue with the case feeder, and this will be an easy fix once I think about it a little more, is sometimes the case drops onto the base plate too close to the edge and will fall off of the base plate. I've seen at least two fixes for this on youtube, I just haven't implemented anything yet.
One more thing I like about the LNL AP press - in my experience, the powder measure will measure EVERYTHING pretty darn close to dead on. This includes all rifle and pistol ball powders, Unique and Longshot which are flake, and most extruded rifle powders. The only powder I've tried that gave me any trouble was VARGET, and while that was generally +/- .1gr, I didn't care for the force/binding that occasionally occurred when it needed to cut grains to throw the charge.
One more issue that I did have on one of the two presses, now that I think about it... After 15,000 rounds or so, I was having an issue with rounds not wanting to eject. They would ride over the ejector boss and bind the shellplate. I fixed this by carefully taking a file and resquaring the edge of the ejector which had smoothed over and was acting like a ramp for the cases.
I have no experience with Dillon presses, but I would have no qualms about owning one. A Super 1050 with a trimmer would be a dream come true for me considering how much military 308 and 203 brass I process. It would be sweeter than sweet to fully process the brass on once machine.