Lyman Universal Electric Case Trimmer

[26Charlie]

Got one of these in nearly new condition. About half retail price. Here's the things I learned using it so far:

It only turns about as fast as you could crank the hand one.

You can easily stall the motor or cause the cutter to dig in & stall. A light to moderate hand pressure on the feed is required.

The Allen wrench and the set screw in the cutter head which holds the pilot in place are not matched quite correctly - too loose, so the wrench jams and skips in the set screw socket.

There is no place to buy a set screw Sunday evening.

Shells should be sized, deprimed and expanded prior to trimming. Otherwise a little leftover crimp may jam the shell on the pilot, or the universal holder may not hold the shell straight due to a centering ball indexing in the primer pocket.

It was not cutting very well, and pushing up burrs, and shells seemed to stick on the pilot. Aha - put a little bullet lube on the pilot. WRONG - now it did not cut hardly at all. Wait a minute - wipe a little cutting oil on the cutter with my finger tip (I used a sulphuretted oil called Sulflo, but any cutting oil would probably work). Now it would cut very well for three shells. So I saturated a patch with cutting oil, and used it to wipe the case mouth inside and out lightly for the depth of the cut. That works for each case very nicely.

I started with a big can of .44 Mag and Special splits, getting about a box of .44 Specials and a box and a half of .44 Russians out of it, as well as learning the tricks.

[Steelshooter]

26Charlie
I bought a lyman power trimmer back in the early 90's. Went thru the same things
you just described except I could never get it to cut the cases the same lenght each time. To make a long story short, sent it back to lyman, they said they fixed it but it still did the same thing. I ended up selling it for almost what I paid for it. Soured me on buying lyman stuff till this day.

[Kraschenbirn]

My experience with a Lyman power trimmer was about the same as yours and Steelshooter's...not terribly impressive. Ended up buying a used RCBS hand trimmer...one of the old ones with the "universal " collet-style shellholder. Made a mount from 1" aluminum bar stock to attach the RCBS shellholder to the table of my drill press; tossed the rest of the trimmer into the scrap bin; and have used nothing but Lee Case Trimmers ever since.

Bill

[1hole]

In my opinon, and based on the results of using several other trimmers, the Lyman Universal Trimmer is about as good as it gets UNLESS you use a Wilson. That is better, by a little, but at a significant increase in cost and compairitively slow operation.

Lyman's universal shell holder is very handy. AND it holds the case head firmly against a solid stop, giving us a more consistant trim length. No factory rifle will ever know the difference in cases with a plus or minus trim tolerance of .002", or more, and the Lyman is easily capable of better than that.

I wonder if your allen set screw and wrench are correct? Improper size screw and/or wrench would account for your problems there.

Raising small burrs on case mouths occurs with any trimmer and it gets worse as the cutter dulls; get a new one. Lyman has an (optional) carbide trimmer cutter head that will last forever.

[Sundogg1911]

My Lyman works ok if you don't put much pressure on it. A friend gave me one that goes under a drill press. This works much faster for large quantitys. (As long as the stop on the drillpress has a fine adjustment) I think it's a forrester, but i'm not 100% sure of that without going to look and i'm too lazy to do it now ;-)