07.22
I have just started loading my own range bullets. I shoot so much these days that I was pretty much forced to, to bring the cost down. You can buy .45 ACP cartridges for about $0.20/ea. or you can load them yourself for $0.10/ea. or less. That’s a no-brainer in my book. Any time you can cut the price of a hobby in half it’s showtime.
I had read on the internet about this little gizmo called the Auto Prime by Lee Precision. You basically just put all your primers in the tray of this thing and it has a pin that comes up and rams a primer into a cartridge with each pull of the handle. That means that you can sit their in front of the TV with a bucket of clean/decapped brass and prime all your cases. I used it for the first time tonight and it does just as advertised.
I’ve included some pics of it below. If you reload your own bullets you should grab one of these. They cost about $10 from Midway. It takes a little more time than doing it all on a progressive press but it’s much more reliable. There are no primer misfeeds to deal with. It also gets you out of the reloading dungeon for a while so you can watch TV with your wife while priming.
Auto Prime
The whole thing is small enough to fit in your hand. It’s about as tall as a sharpie. Hold it at about a 45° angle pointing away from yourself. Remember that primers explode if mishandled. Don’t look into the shell when you are priming!
Shellplate and Tray
You have to buy the appropriate shellplate to fit in the mouth of the tool based on what caliber you will be reloading. I load .45 ACP so I got the Lee #2 shellplate.
Handle
The handle pushes a lever that forces the ram up through the shellplate. I had to grind the ram pin down a little bit because it was too tall to allow the primers to feed. Once I made that adjustment it worked like a charm.
