I've been quite late to the bullet feeder die party, mainly because I needed to get the collators right first. And too, I had Hornady dies for pistol and RCBS dies for the two rifle calibers I load most of.....and I admit I was just a little leery of plastic feeder dies.........so I could afford to be leery since I didn't think I needed them.....what a mistake.
So now I've printed two pistol versions......and I'm totally impressed! These are more, no,
way more reliable than the Hornady ones, and dang near free.....what's not to like? Even color-coded by caliber.... I love these things!!
Thank you TylerR for sharing this bit of light!
These plus two more future prints for .357mag and 9mm, will be used on my modified Hornady Pistol Bullet collator, which I converted to a much more efficient bullet flipping tool about a year before I even knew about 3D printers.
A page back, I posted a first try disaster printing the green one. It took me two days to figure out what the problem was. Like I said.....ever learning....
https://castboolits.gunloads.com/sho...=1#post5264941
Still being pretty much a novice at 3d printing, my slicer was finally successfully adjusted a few months ago to get rid of a bad case "stringing" on prints. Thought I had it all figured out with some serious filament retraction settings. It worked well on big prints, but printing these skinny cylinders was another thing since it tried to retract at each layer.....and a new layer happens every 4 seconds or so, or less.
That caused the filament to grind, over and over, at the top of the Bowden Tube....and very quickly quit feeding filament.....see the picture (last post last page). So I learned the hard way, that retraction that works for big models doesn't necessarily work for real small cylinders. So I settled for a little stringing, and actually found that these feeder dies and adapters print beautifully, near perfect, if you print ONE at a time.....instead of the stringing between die and insert trying to print a set.
I still printed the set for the green one too, but for the rest I will print them one at a time for the best print. See pictures of what I mean below:
Notice the stringing and thread damage that has to be trimmed with a knife, vs. below how beautiful the threads are if I had printed it alone....