Punch press

[bandmiller2]

Any of you guys ever messed with a punch press to draw cases or form bullets.?? The jewelry trade uses cute little presses that would be good for our purposes, used machinery dealers get them all the time. Frank C.

[nhrifle]

I have been thinking of using one of the smaller arbor presses and rigging the die and punch upside down. Never considered a punch press but it's a neat idea and would probably save some effort.

[aaronraad]

Any of you guys ever messed with a punch press to draw cases or form bullets.?? The jewelry trade uses cute little presses that would be good for our purposes, used machinery dealers get them all the time. Frank C.

I think the Bonny Doon Pro 25-Ton Electric Press Item Number: 110463 (http://www.bonnydoonengineering.com/Products/Presses/110463.html) or similar would be ideal with extra support/alignment posts, but at +USD$7,000 not particularly good value compared to a Corbin HydroMite and not far off the Hydro-Press Corbin hydraulic presses (http://www.swagedies.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=CBST&Category_Code=POWERPRESS). The RCE MultiSwage II (http://rceco.com/MN.asp?pg=Multi) is probably the best vaule of them all.

They aren't giving away the Bonny-Doon Pro 25 Ton Manual Press 110462 (http://www.riogrande.com/Product/Bonny-Doon-Pro-25-Ton-Manual-Press/110462?***=1) either. Part of the problem with 'Jewllery' presses I think is that they are charging you like you're making jewellery.

I think BT Sniper was the first I saw on YouTube using 20T bottle-jack with a spring return. Similar in concept to a H-frame shop press, but upside-down Ms Jane as we prefer to have a fixed top-plate and ram driven lower-plate.

I'm not sure what the drive conversions costs are for something like a Rockchucker/single-stage press to hydraulic/pneumatic/electric and how they compare in cost?

Still Jewellery presses are worth looking out for, sometimes you can get lucky and the seller doesn't know the market value of what they have.

[ReloaderFred]

Most commercial bullets are made on punch presses. I've toured both the Nosler and Sierra bullet company's factories, and they're full of old punch presses merrily making cup and core bullets. When I toured the Sierra factory back in the late 1970's, they said they went to all the machinery auctions, looking for old WW II punch presses, and had two machinists who rebuilt them for making bullets.

So the bottom line is, yes, punch presses are good for making bullets.

Hope this helps.

Fred

[257]

if you look around you can find old table top punch presses 1,to 5 ton for scrap prices. it cost to much to make them osha compliant so they sit around, I've been to auctions where they sold 100's of them for scrap 5.00 to 30.00 dollars each