My reloading
table in Minnesota is a simple brown folding office table, but since space is at
a premium in Arizona, I ordered a reloading table from Cabela’s. Assembling the
table was an exercise in frustration, as the directions were terrible. However,
it does have a solid wood laminated top and plenty of drawers to hold small
tools, dies, etc. The red color of the drawers is a bit much for my tastes, but
the unit is functional. Bottom line on this purchase: $350 is a lot of money to
spend on a table that takes a whole day to set up. My guess is you could do
better by contracting with a woodworker or building your own.
After
assembling the table, I unpacked the box of reloading tools. The RCBS
Rockchucker press is an “O” design. My mouth watered when I stroked the
operating lever up and down – the mechanical leverage of this press puts the old
Pacific “C” press to shame. It also seemed as if the tolerance of the ram was
tighter. Next up was the real gem in this package – the automatic powder
measure and scale. I use a lot of extruded powders but have a hard time using a
measure – it is just not as accurate as using a laboratory quality scale.
The RCBS
electronic powder dispenser, called the PowderMaster, works in conjunction with
a digital scale RCBS designates the PowderPro. No assembly is required, and
both units use household current transformed to 9 and 12 volts AC. I was quite
happy to see that there are no batteries required, but a little disappointed
that the units do not use the same power supply. To eliminate confusion, I plug
both transformers into an extension cord, and plug or unplug the extension cord
into the wall socket, eliminating any confusion.
I have long
used powder measures, tricklers, and scales, but the combination fielded by RCBS
provides the accuracy of a scale without the tedium. Notice I didn’t say speed,
because while the unit is much faster than the using a measure and trickling on
a standard style scale, is not as fast as a measure. Essentially, the dispenser
dumps a coarse amount of powder into the scale, then trickles in at a slow speed
until the scale is brought to the desired weight – without any other
intervention or activity required from the user. You use a numeric keypad to
punch in the desired powder charge into the dispenser. The dispenser then
receives data from the scale to distribute powder into the scale pan. A huge
charge (75 grains) takes about 50 seconds; smaller charges take less.
But make no
mistake - this is not as fast as a powder measure. You can speed things up by
using a mechanical (human powered) powder measure and setting up the electronic
dispenser to act as powder trickler. However, I don’t see time as a critical
factor. One minute per load (including dumping the charge pan into a prepared
case) is not that much time. And there is nothing from preventing you from
performing other activities while the electronic powder metering is going on.
For example, if you are charging cases for a .220 Swift, then you can resize
.223 Remington cases, prep them, or perform other tasks such as listening to a
football game on TV. Like any other scale, vibration or other movement can
interfere with its operation. Therefore, it is probably a good idea to set the
scale and dispenser on a separate table. I cannot envision using the dispenser
and scale on ball powders, but then, I cannot imagine using anything but this
setup in the future when I do use extruded powders. Loading 50 cases with
extruded powder is no longer something to dread.
