Using both Old and New Lee Dippers!

[dragon]

I'm not sure if this will be useful to anyone or not...

I have been using an old set of Lee dippers that is metered in .001 cubic inch along with the new ones. The nice thing is that the old ones happen to have volumes that are in between the new ones, so you can get finer 'grained' measurements if you use both sets!

Unfortunately there are many new powders that are not on the slide card for the old set of dippers. Also the VMD on some of the powders still around has changed a bit as well. I finally got tired of calculating the values all of the time and created a spreadsheet to do it for me and entered the VMD data for my most common powders.

I tried to upload the open document spreadsheet, but the site wouldn't allow it. If you would like a copy of the spreadsheet just drop me a PM or something. Here is a sample pdf file export showing the results for some of the powders. This also shows the volume of the old dippers in CCs.

156785

Use this info at your own risk, as I quite likely messed something up!! Remember to always weigh a few charges to make sure you didn't read a chart wrong or grab the wrong dipper, or a new lot is different.

To see a good example of how I find this useful take a look at Bullseye... There is a jump of 2.8 grains between the 1.0 and 1.3 cc dippers. There are two old dippers that fit in between them though and really help to fill in that gap!

-Dragon

[troyboy]

Thanks for the information. These kind of posts with are what made this forum such a wealth of information. It seems that as of late all the substance in posts has gone with the experience elsewhere.

[TenTea]

My experience with the new dippers calibrated in cc's, is that they yield a charge that's ~10% under whatever Mr. Lee publishes.

A supposed 6.4 grain charge of Unique, for example, becomes 5.8 grains.

I've found this with a variety of powders.

I"m supposing it is due to liability concerns, but who knows?

I will be on the lookout for an old set, to increase flexibility without grinding or JB Welding a dipper!

[DerekP Houston]

My experience with the new dippers calibrated in cc's, is that they yield a charge that's ~10% under whatever Mr. Lee publishes.

A supposed 6.4 grain charge of Unique, for example, becomes 5.8 grains.

I've found this with a variety of powders.

I"m supposing it is due to liability concerns, but who knows?

I will be on the lookout for an old set, to increase flexibility without grinding or JB Welding a dipper!

This is also correct for the auto disk by Lee, I generally go up one size from what they recommend and weigh the average of 5 charges.

[dragon]

The 'margin' is in the VMD chart. This is what Lee has to say about it...

The powder manufacturers allow themselves a 16% tolerance in the density of their powder, from lot to lot. We have to calibrate our chart to show the high side of that tolerance, so you should never get more than what the chart indicates, but you will sometimes get less. Believe the scale. If your measure consistently throws less than what the chart indicates, try going up to the next larger cavity. If the powder measure throws more than what the chart indicates, please let us know.

You can also find the most recent version of their VMD chart... http://www.leeprecision.com/cgi-data/instruct/VMD.pdf

And instructions on how to calculate the VMD for your specific lot of powder... http://leeprecision.net/support/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/245/27/vmd-explanation

That is where the spreadsheet helps... you can type in the VMD that you calculate from your lot of powder instead of the one on the chart and it will recalculate all of the dipper values for you! This also makes it much quicker for setting my Perfect Powder Measure ;)

Troyboy... The wealth of knowledge here is amazing and I have VERY little to contribute. Though I have been a member for quite some time I rarely post since doing a search usually finds that almost all of my questions have already been answered! I wish there was a way to convert the knowledge of a forum into something like a wiki though, so that it was more accessible and you wouldn't have to wade through long threads to get to the 'punch line.'

-Dragon

[Doc Highwall]

Remember that the density of the powder changes slightly from lot to lot along with burn rate, and how the powder is stored after opening it affects it's moisture content which affects the density of the powder.