Loading cheap hulls

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Jessegreenwood

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Is there a trick, or any tips to reloading cheap hula like Winchester universal, without crushing them?
I am using waa114 wads. The whole hull keeps crushing/folding in on the sides.
Also, good dummy medium to practice with, before loading powder and shot? Thinking sugar or rice?
Just untill I can get a good repeatable crimp. I have a lot of wads.
Thanks
 
Those hulls, and cartridges in general, have to be the most poorly manufactured shells on the market. I suggest you move to a better hull if you wish to avoid major problems down the road - such as hull separations. To address your specific problem, it sounds like the lip of the wad shot cup is catching at the hull mouth. Perhaps the crimp creases are not being opened enough during the sizing process.
 
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Winchester Universal are the worst designed hulls I have ever reloaded. My biggest issue is variable thickness/stiffness on the mouth of the hull, making uniform crimps difficult. The thin walls are challenging too. Sounds like you are having trouble with fit of the components inside the hull. The thin walls of those hulls will crush if too much pressure is applied on the final crimp station when the load is too high in the hull.
Some things I do to help are: make sure you have enough compression of the wad when seating it. 40 lbs or so should be correct. Unlike the old Winchester compression formed hulls, or Remington unibody hulls, you can't get away with compressing the wad in the final crimp station. The hull will not have enough wall strength for that. Check the level of pellets in the hull before moving the shell to the pre crimp station. Pellet charge should be nearly at the level where it would be when the shell is all closed up. Put enough pre-crimp on the hull to get nice clean well defined folds ( difficult with those cheap Winchester hulls) Make sure your final crimp station is set so that the crimp is recessed only about 1/10" or even a tiny bit less.
I no longer bother with Winchester universal hulls. Even the cheapest Cheddite / European hulls as used in Challenger and Score shells are better. And real target hulls like Remington STS and Federal Gold Medal make all the problems go away.
 
Win AA 114 wads are a 11/4 ounce shot capacity wad .are you loading target loads or hunting loads ? Are you loading from a book or some other source . my first though is your stack height is to high for the hull .
 
I reload cheap wins once with a Lee 1 oz slug.

Your stack height is critical for a good crimp.

Learning I cut up a good one and use the components to reload. You can even.press out the primers and reuse
 
rembolt said:
Win AA 114 wads are a 11/4 ounce shot capacity wad .are you loading target loads or hunting loads ? Are you loading from a book or some other source . my first though is your stack height is to high for the hull .
Click to expand...

Good Point - Alternatively, perhaps the OP is loading with a lesser quantity of shot and leaving a free space in the hull. To complicate matters, the design of the 114 wad changed over the years. I cant seem to find any load data for the Universal hull, I wonder why? Perhaps the OP is "boldly going where no reloader has gone before":)
 
I've loaded these on my MEC 9000- similar to AA's for me. Agreed they are challenging- need lots of supervision. I rarely reload these as 1) I have a metric $h!t ton of AA's and 2) I normally shoot where I can keep my hulls. Life is too short- load AA's if you want to load Winchester hulls.

So all of this is no help to OP. A question- do you load other shells that work fine? Is this a new machine? If sidewalls are collapsing- what stage is this happening- on crimp? On pre-crimp? May need to back some stages off and roll through a tuning process.
 
Simply the op has not given enough info for us to give any useable help . there are a number of things componets used and adjustment of the loader its self . as for data for the winchester polyformed plastic shell . which the universal shell is .the rcbs handbook list a few loads with a win aa12 wad .
 
I'm with rembolt. Not enough information to offer any solid advice. But, the problem described appears to be too high a load column...which can cause hulls to collapse in exactly that way, when crimped. By the way, these cheap Winchester hulls reload just fine, when set up properly.

To make up dummy practice rounds, I like to use walnut shell media, for the "powder" charge. Then, wad and shot as needed, for the preferred finished load. Works well.

Also, your Mec is easily adjustable in the pre-crimp and crimp stages...where a lot of this type of problem arises.... to fine tune the loading process and produce good shells. Mec even offers a series of you tube videos, that explain the process. Hope this helps.
 
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