I have several single stage presses in a wide variety of gauges...I shoot them all. Anyway, the focus here is the PW 375. A fine press in its current iteration. The old model, without the taper crimp upgrade can be a problem. But I digress. In 20 ga, my new hulls are all Fiocchi. That and Cheddite are pretty much all you can find. On my PW, the 8 pt crimp starter that is standard, almost always makes an ugly mess of these hulls. Previously fired Federal, Winchester, Remington and factory Fiocchi hulls always load perfectly. Only the new hulls are prone to bulged and misaligned crimps. I bought the new adjustable crimp starter and things were a tad better, but still there was a high failure rate. Then I tried crimp starting on my Mec and finishing in the PW. Perfect every time. So, why? The PW cup looked very similar to the Mec. The difference seemed to be that the Mec was about 1/8" longer and was much tighter on the hull. It was a fairly snug fit. So, genius that I am, I just placed a Mec cup on top of the hull and used the PW cup to seat it. Voila! Perfection every time. The rest was easy. PW cups are held to the stem by a machine screw. I simply drilled the Mec cup to fit the machine screw shaft and Bob's your uncle, it worked. Now I get perfect crimps every time....almost.
You see, once fired hulls stretch. Not much, but enough to make swirls in what should be perfect crimps. Making it worse, the plastic does not stretch evenly around the rim, some sides remain unstretched. So, I bought the hull trimming tool from Creative Reloading. Bingo! perfectly even hulls and perfect crimps.
The third issue was that Fiocchi hulls are primed with Fiocchi primers. These are made to Euro specs and are a tad larger in diameter. You can stick these in a US hull but once you do, that hull will require Fiocchi primers from that time on. This is of course, a huge hassle as Fiocchi primers are like unobtanium. So, what to do? Enter Creative Reloading once again. They make a very handy decapping assembly for Mec and PW machines. This assembly not only opens and conditions the hull mouth, but it also swages the primer pocket making it possible to use Win, Fed or Rem primers in Euro hulls!.
Thought I would share this info JIC anyone found it interesting.
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