arbor press

[muleman]

I've always wanted to add an arbor press to the kit for range work. It would be portable and work really well to work the OAL into an accuracy node at the range. Find your best charge weight. Load all your ammo to magazine length or what ever starting point. Then shorten and shoot till you find a node and then verify - all in one trip. Just thinking..........

Scott

 

[Guy Miner]

They're very popular for loading at the shooting range...

It's done by quite a few benchrest guys. You can help things along by bringing already-weighed powder charges in small pill bottles, labeled of course!

Guy

 

[joelkdouglas]

I also use an arbor press. I have the 21st Century arbor press. It works well.

After some playing around with the press for sizing and seating, pretty much the only thing I do with it now is seating. It's no problem to size brass at home in your preferred method, and you can even prime at home. Then you can seat bullets either at home with the Wilson dies or seat at the range after charging. Or if you're good with a powder charge and want to test OAL changes you can charge and seat bullets long at home, and then seat progressively deeper at the range.

I seat all my 6 BR range rifle bullets with a Wilson die, because I haven't convinced myself to spend the money on a traditional seating die for my 6 BR, and the Wilson does a good job. I like that I can lock the Wilson die down and it will repeatedly seat a bullet at the same length. I shoot the same bullets out of my 6 BR each time. I just acquired another 1000 6 mm 105 Nosler Custom Comps from SPS. When I use a traditional seating die I seem to need to adjust the OAL every time.

For my 25-06 and 30-06 I don't use the Wilson dies nearly as often, as I change bullets more frequently. One day I might settle on just one bullet for one of those rifles, but maybe not. And I have good traditional seaters for those rifles, so I don't break out those Wilsons very often. My Sinclair concentricity gauge tells me there's no advantage to using the Wilson die over a Redding or Forster competition seating die, but the Wilson performs as well as the Redding and Forster competition seating dies. I believe the Wilson would outperform other seating dies, but I have no evidence to back up this claim, other than testing against a traditional screw-in Lee seating die, and it was terrible.

You can see it behind the powder measure here:


Here's a pic of my sometimes range loading setup (though I do most of my loading at home):