Attention all engineers

[Old Jim]

Why don't one of you come up with a "drop in" racheting device that will attach to the linkage on an RCBS LAM II to advance the pressure piston every time the handle is activated? You would obviously have to determine a gear tooth count so that sufficient pressure would be maintained for each bullet.
Seems simple enough to me but I ain't an engineer.

[Swagerman]

Why not mosey on down to Sears and buy a wrachet wrench that has the automatic take-up as you crank it back and forth. It soon becomes apparent that 2 or 3 wratches pulls (clicks) is all is needed to keep the ole lube flowing to the next bullet.

You develope a feel for this by experience.

Good luck lubing.

Jim

[Johnch]

Why don't one of you come up with a "drop in" racheting device that will attach to the linkage on an RCBS LAM II to advance the pressure piston every time the handle is activated?

It would have to be ajustable .
When sizing the %&*^$ little 22 cal slugs I would need about 1/10 the lube I need for the 450 gr for the 45/70

Johnch

[Old Jim]

I already have a system of 4 bullets hit the handle, 4 bullets hit the handle but I'd like for it to do it for me.
A simple screw adjustment to my device would allow the rachet arm to be closer to the gear for more teeth and thus more lube each cycle or farther away for less.

[Bent Ramrod]

Old Jim,

I have a Lachmiller bullet sizer-lubricator that has such a feature. (RCBS bought the design, painted it green, and dropped the feature, but if you have seen one of the RCBS lubrisizers, it's still very close.) The link on the right side of the Lachmiller was made with a two-fingered pawl with the fingers pointing up. The handle of the ratchet wrench was placed between these fingers (after the void space between piston and lube was taken up) and the bullets inserted into the die and the lever pulled to size them. Theoretically, every time the lever went down, the pawl finger pushed the side of the ratchet wrench, forcing lube automatically into the grooves of the bullet. When the lever went up, the pressure of the first finger would slacken, reducing the lube pressure, and the other finger would hit the other side of the wrench, and when the wrench had moved in enough of an arc, the contact of the second pawl finger would click the ratchet over in the wrench, maintaining the steady downward motion of the piston and ensuring the lube continued to come out.

So much for the theory. In practice, the pawl and the clicks on the wrench were necessarily sized for some sort of "average" bullet, and of course weren't adjustable. As a consequence, when I sized .32-20 bullets, the pressure on the lube would build up until the o-ring on the die burst and lube would squirt out of everywhere. When I sized .45-70 bullets, the bullets would quickly starve for lube, and I would have to play "catch-up" with the wrench. I never did find a bullet that worked exactly for a long string of sizing/lubricating; they all either ran out or overpressured, generally within ten or twenty bullets. Eventually, I learned to hold the wrench to just the right pressure for a bullet or two, to vary this pressure as the lubing progressed and the lube got warmer and more fluid, and to slack off when I raised the bullet out and put a new one in. I became a fuzzy-logic part of the sizing/lubing process, working better than the auto-lube feature of the Lachmiller ever did. It's still on my lubrisizer, but I don't even think of using it any more.

Even if you could set up an adjustable one, as the lube warms up by moving in the lubrisizer from use, you would have to readjust to take care of this. It would be worse than a powder measure with the coarsest powder available, a constant tweaking and readjustment. If you changed lubes, all the adjustments would have to be redone. Not to mention the expense.

I don't hold out a lot of hope for anything like this in a mechanical form. If you had a pressure transducer in the lube cylinder hooked to a computer which activated the wrench between pressures x and y, then, maybe.

[Dale53]

Star's pressure spring works quite well in conjunction with it's unique design.

Dale53

[BABore]

Buy a Saeco sizer. 40-50 bullets, give it a half turn, run another 40-50.

By the time you design and build something workable, and easy to adjust, you could probably buy a Star with pressure feed for the same cost.

[jhalcott]

SHEESH,! AND i THOUGHT i WAS LAZY!

[johnho]

the Star air pressure piston saved the day for me. Never relube a bullet anymore, as fast as I can go and everyone perfect. the price seemed high until i got to use it and appreciate the difference. Strongly recommend it to all Star users.