SeabeeMan
02-24-2014, 10:17 PM
So I was in a case prepping mood a while back and figured I'd get a Lee Unviersal Decapper and start getting some of my ice cream pails full of 223/5.56 and other brass ready to load at some point in the future. It arrived in the mail and I threw it in my LNL AP with a shell plate and fed a LC 5.56 case into it...and promptly broke the pin. ON THE FIRST PULL! I was livid but cooled down and sent a nice e-mail to Lee the next day, to which I never received a response, which made me unhappy all over again. I did some research thinking that a crimped primer broke it but they market it as being able to handle crimped primers "easily."
I shelved the whole thing and haven't thought about it until I was ordering a new mold from Titan Reloading on Friday. Awesome shipping, BTW. I got it today! Decapper pins were $2 each so I got 5 with the thought that if I break them all, I'm buying a different decapper. Threw the new pin in and broke a second one. I about threw the whole set up in the trash.[smilie=b: But then I got to thinking: only one of those stations has that fancy, new-fangled hole in it to let the primer drop through, I should probably put the decapper in the that station, not the last station where I had the past 2 times.
The moral of the story is: don't be an idiot. If you try to press a primer out of a piece of brass that is resting firmly on the foundation, you WILL break your pin. Trying it a second time does not change the fact that skinny little pin will lose against heavy a heavy press frame. I'm glad I got this kind of idiocy out of my system (hopefully) with something harmless like a decapping pin and not measuring powder or smelting.
I shelved the whole thing and haven't thought about it until I was ordering a new mold from Titan Reloading on Friday. Awesome shipping, BTW. I got it today! Decapper pins were $2 each so I got 5 with the thought that if I break them all, I'm buying a different decapper. Threw the new pin in and broke a second one. I about threw the whole set up in the trash.[smilie=b: But then I got to thinking: only one of those stations has that fancy, new-fangled hole in it to let the primer drop through, I should probably put the decapper in the that station, not the last station where I had the past 2 times.
The moral of the story is: don't be an idiot. If you try to press a primer out of a piece of brass that is resting firmly on the foundation, you WILL break your pin. Trying it a second time does not change the fact that skinny little pin will lose against heavy a heavy press frame. I'm glad I got this kind of idiocy out of my system (hopefully) with something harmless like a decapping pin and not measuring powder or smelting.