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If it suits you fine but my point still stands, and if you want to get the best accuracy then you need to deal with your issues rather than bandaging the symptom.

I use a lot of live quarry ammunition too, from rats to red deer and nary a load needs neck turning, extra cost or crimping, in fact a crimp die would be a extra cost. You seem to be making a meal of your handloading, but if you are happy with that level so be it.

dromia wrote:If it suits you fine but my point still stands, and if you want to get the best accuracy then you need to deal with your issues rather than bandaging the symptom.

I use a lot of live quarry ammunition too, from rats to red deer and nary a load needs neck turning, extra cost or crimping, in fact a crimp die would be a extra cost. You seem to be making a meal of your handloading, but if you are happy with that level so be it.

What issues are you talking about & what symptom?

It takes five seconds to run a loaded round into a FCD & the cost is minimal.

I don't 'make a meal' out of reloading, though I've certainly done plenty - more than 50,000 rounds of rifle & pistol in the last decade alone.
Not all are run through the FCD because it's not needed for certain applications.
Back to back testing shows a small but significant improvement & any nay-saying doesn't change that.

I don't doubt your small improvement but you still don't know the cause of the problem that the crimp die is marginally fixing, band aid reloading.

That seems a good enough reloading standard for you so carry on.

The Lee crimp die can be very usueful in certain situations.

The first and most straightforward scenario is when ammunition needs to be crimped and you want to do it without wasting cases setting up a seat/crimp die. In my case this means on hard kicking magazine hunting rifles. In these circumstances the worry is not so much accuracy loss from OAL change but the potential for misfeeding in an pinch, expecially on the sort of hunt where you are topping up your magazine wherever possible. A further advantage of the Lee crimp die over the seating/crimping die is that you don't have to be as precise with case trimming, handy for when the cases are all under max length but vary a bit.

The second instance where they are very useful is where you don't have much parallel shank on a particular bullet ( so simply seating deeper doesn't give you more grip on the bullet) and you are using magnum primers, particularly with ball powder. An example of this might my 125 grain Sierra SP loads in my 308. Using the book max charge of Hogdon BL-C(2) with the bullet seated to maximum shank in the neck gave best accuracy together with velocity but large ES and a persistent flyer. Irregular ignition was suspected using CCI BR primers and a magnum primer tried with no real improvement. A light crimp on the case mouth with the magnum primer dropped the ES to around 25 fps and eliminated the flyer. Testing with the original CCI BR primers and crimp resulted in the large ES and the flyer again and so the crimp made the difference in this case.

Now, was this because the load was fundamentally defective?

In my submission not.

BL-C (2) powder was expressely designed for the 308, perfectly valid powder choice.

Sierra 125 grain SP bullets were expressly designed for the 308, perfectly valid bullet choice.

CCI BR primers were expressly designed for this class of usage, again a perfectly valid choice.


However, until the internal ballistic problem was solved by the Lee crimp die, the load wasn't up to my standard.

A very useful tool, providing one understands it's uses.