Boy do I feel stupid - Dillion XL650

S

Skyhawk

Regular
Rating - 100%
19   0   0
Location
Ottawa
I was gearing up to make a batch of match ammo this morning and decided to take apart and clean my press. So I roughly removed the shell plate from under the ejector wire, and I hear something drop from behind the bench onto the floor. It was obviously the indexing ball, because I noticed it was missing once I had the shell plate off. There's a lot of junk under my bench, so instead of looking for it, I just replaced it with a spare ball I had handy. I'd look for the darn thing later.

It was so dirty under there, it was embarrassing. Amazing the darn thing still worked so well. Anyway, I'm putting it together, have everything clean and in place, and I'm trying to start the shell plate bolt in the middle hole. No way will it start threading. I tried cleaning the hole with Q-Tips, took it apart about 20 times, and the darn thing still wouldn't start into the threads in there. I even removed the shell plate bolt retaining screw after loosening it too far because I figured it must be poking into the hole, preventing the bolt from seating all the way down to the threads.

So two hours pass...

Finally it occurs to me like a flash of lightening, "what if it wasn't the ball that rolled down behind my bench, and the ball actually rolled into the bolt hole while I was removing the shell plate?" So I grab a powerful magnet and place it against the shell plate bolt hex key while putting the other end of the key into the hole. I lift it out, and YESSSSSS the darn ball was magnetically stuck to the end of the hex key! After all that painful fiddling...

It could have been worse. I could have called Dillon with my problem! :HR:
 
Dillon are genius at diagnosing problems over the phone, I suspect they have seen this and worse many times and would have figured it out immediately.

Good for you for figuring it out for yourself.

My own favourite move is repeatedly losing one or the other of the locator buttons. They never stay lost but the last one I found was in a case that it was trying to deprime – something didn't feel right and voila, there was the missing button. I have no idea how it got there, especially since the case in question was fed from the case feeder which is way above the shellplate or anything where the locator button might reasonably be place.
 
I'm not 100% sure what fell down there because I found 13 stray 9mm cases and 5 bullets that somehow disappeared into the small length of space left open behind my bench. I also found a black sock. *kidding about the sock*

But I figure I must have knocked some stray bullet or case that was behind something that was behind something that my elbow could have jarred while removing the shell plate...
 
Snapshot said:
My own favourite move is repeatedly losing one or the other of the locator buttons. They never stay lost but the last one I found was in a case that it was trying to deprime – something didn't feel right and voila, there was the missing button. I have no idea how it got there, especially since the case in question was fed from the case feeder which is way above the shellplate or anything where the locator button might reasonably be place.
Click to expand...


You know where the #1 place I look for missing locator pins?


The shop vac......:redface:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom