An interesting project.

Muir

Well-Known Member
A friend of mine came by yesterday with the seater to his Lee die set. He wanted me to turn the top of the stem flat so that he could use his dial vernier as a depth gauge when seating bullets. I did this for him as it was a quick job on my bench lathe. We got playing around and found that the stem seated the bullet .050" for every complete turn it made. Knowing that, I took the seater stem back to the lathe, turned a "V" bit sideways in the tool holder, and cut 10 equally spaced lines in the seater using my dividing head on the headstock and operating the carriage of the lathe like shaper, cutting the lines through the knurling. This way, he can have .005" increments of depth adjustment and get a pretty good idea of his depth without the micrometer. A black mark on the die body acted as a datum point.

I turned out pretty well and I'm sorry I didn't get a photograph of the finished product but... you get the picture. I may do it for some of my dies sets. In any event, the .050" depth per turn is worth knowing.~Muir

PS: Jesus. I just noticed that my next post will be #8000. And I promised JAYB I wouldn't stay too long, too...
 
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I measured a seated round and then added a full turn to get a revolution depth
my seaters now have a single mark on the collar and a reference point above on the collar
 
Excellent job Muir - The 50 thou per turn only works on those seating dies with a 20 TPI thread. Here's a few others and it's easy to calculate how many thou per turn each will give.

Seating Stem Adjustment
(Manufacturer - tpi)
*Forster/Bonanza - 32
**Forster/Bonanza - 28
C-H/4-D - 20
Dillon - 20
Hollywood - 18
Hornady - 18
Jones - 20
Lyman - 20
RCBS - 28
Redding - 20
Wilson - 20

And here's something I grabbed off another forum some time ago.
 

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Excellent job Muir - The 50 thou per turn only works on those seating dies with a 20 TPI thread. Here's a few others and it's easy to calculate how many thou per turn each will give.

Seating Stem Adjustment
(Manufacturer - tpi)
*Forster/Bonanza - 32
**Forster/Bonanza - 28
C-H/4-D - 20
Dillon - 20
Hollywood - 18
Hornady - 18
Jones - 20
Lyman - 20
RCBS - 28
Redding - 20
Wilson - 20

And here's something I grabbed off another forum some time ago.



Very handy :)
 
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