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Messages - varmintpopper

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121
Dropping a metal rod down the tube onto primers could set them off, I'm thinking the plastic/Fibours material could also be there as a cousion to help prevent this from happening.

Good Shooting

Lindy

122
Stars Want to Sell/Want to Buy / Re: Star Parts on eBay
« on: November 12, 2015, 12:11:47 am »
That was Funny,,,,,,,, Now both of You,, Go to Your Rooms   LOL


Good Shooting

Lindy

123
Star History / Where star left off and Dillin begins
« on: August 26, 2015, 10:26:52 pm »
This may be a little long but interesting
About Us

The Highly Irregular and Somewhat Improbable

History of Dillon Precision Products

By Mike Dillon

I got into the reloading equipment business purely by accident. It started when a friend of mine died in an airplane crash – MY airplane. A few other friends of his and I spent four or five months closing up his machine shop business and selling off all the tools for his widow. When we were finished, she said, “I guess I owe you an airplane.” I answered, “No you don’t. I didn’t lend it to you. I lent it to your husband. That was between him and me. But I WOULD like his Thompson submachine gun.” The Tommy gun came with a star loading tool, so I became a progressive reloader.
Shortly thereafter, I bought an M-16, and wanted to load .223 ammo progressively, but Star said it wasn’t possible to do it with their tool. They said, “If you want to try it, we’ll sell you a .380 shellplate and you can try to make it work.” So I went to a machinist and cut down an RCBS die, ground the hardcoat off of the outside and had him thread it to the weird thread size that Star dies used and I made the damn thing work. I changed the link-arms to give it a little more stroke and came up with a kit so my friends could convert their machines.
My friend Peter Kokalis was ridiculing me and sarcastically suggested marketing my kit as the “Superstar Conversion,” which I did. Maybe 100 or so kits were sold, but soon people started asking me for a conversion to load .30-06 rifle ammunition on the Star machine. That’s when I decided to make my own reloader. The RL-1000 was the first full-fledged Dillon Precision product. Manufacture started out in my garage, then we moved into a small shop. We started the company on a $30,000 loan against our house.
Our first hobby-level progressive loader – The RL-300 – was a major learning experience. We built maybe 900 or 1000 of them, and lost about $100 on each one. This led to the RL-450, a less expensive machine to produce, and one that got the attention of the “big guys” in the reloading industry. By 1984, both Hornady and RCBS either had introduced or were preparing to introduce their own progressive reloaders, and they were much stronger than us in the distributor market. I wasn’t going to fight their fight. All good fighter pilots know that you don’t fight the other guy’s fight. Instead, I went into direct marketing. This was a go-for-broke thing. I spent every dollar I could raise on advertising. We had to sell 500 machines that month to pay for all the advertising we had purchased – we sold 5000.
Our rapid growth in the reloading industry coincided with the growth spurt in action pistol shooting. This sport required the expenditure of mass quantities of ammunition, and we offered the equipment to allow shooters to affordably do so. I shot with Robbie Leatham when he was a kid and by the mid-80s I saw the chance to sponsor two shooters who were going to get us some publicity without spending lots of money that we didn’t have. Dillon Precision became Rob’s and Brian Enos’ first corporate sponsor – we gave them the components to load their ammunition and helped them with match fees and other expenses. For a while, we also had a contingency sponsorship program for shooting events. We gave a thousand dollars to any major match winner who used ammunition loaded on Dillon presses. In time, virtually everybody who won a match did it using Dillon-loaded ammunition.
Our products have thrived for several reasons. First, I run the company based on my philosophy. You treat other people the way you want to be treated. I don’t want people calling me up saying, “You miserable S.O.B., you sold me this machine and now you won’t help me.” I don’t want anyone mad at me. This is reflected in our warranty. No warranty cards, registration or serial numbers are necessary. Whether you are the first owner, or the seventeenth, all our hobby-level reloading machines have a lifetime warranty. If you break, damage or wear out anything on them, it will be fixed or replaced – whatever is necessary to restore the machine to normal operating condition. If a minor part is all that is needed, contact us and we will ship the part. (International customers pay  the return shipping costs) If something major is damaged or broken,contact us and  we issue the customer a return merchandise authorization-RMA- to return the item to us for repair. The customer pays the shipping; we fix or replace as is warranted. Only our commercial machine, the Super 1050, has a one-year warranty, as do all electrical/electronic products and textiles. Our customers understand that they have a best friend at our factory. We are only a phone call, FAX or E-mail away. In return we receive an incredible amount of customer loyalty.
Another reason Dillon reloading equipment does so well is because we are in constant contact with our customer base. We are constantly hearing from our customers. No one else in this industry gets the degree of field feedback that we do, because of our direct sales and our warranty. Several product improvements and new product ideas have come from our customers. Additionally, virtually all of our employees are shooters and reloaders. We literally have hundreds of years of widely varying reloading experience available in-house. We are never stagnant. We’re always testing design changes, constantly seeking improvements. The speed of change in the firearms industry will not allow you to rest on your laurels.
In order to serve our international customers, we’ve made several appropriate design changes. Most of our equipment requiring power is now available in 220 volt, 50hz. The casefeeder for the RL550B/XL 650/Super 1050, both the CV-500 and the CV-2001 vibratory case cleaners and the electric primer tube fillers are available in 220-volt European versions. In conjunction with a major European arms manufacturer we have added many primarily European calibers to the list of caliber conversion kits available for the RL 550B and the XL 650.
Besides playing with firearms and reloading equipment, one of the other loves of my life is flying. I always had that young boy’s fascination for airplanes, but didn’t think I could fly because I had a kidney removed when I was a child. Finally, at the age of 23, I found out that the FAA doesn’t discriminate against you for lacking a kidney. When I was in college I decided I needed to learn how to operate some piece of machinery, and get paid a lot of money for doing so. I went to school in Texas, and every day I passed the airport, seeing airplanes take off and land. So I decided to learn how to fly. I washed airplanes during the day and learned to fly them at night. I soon got my commercial license and my instructor’s license. I taught flying for about a year, then lied my way into a cropdusting job in Arizona because nobody would hire me unless I had experience.
I have always had an interest in warbirds, both fixed and rotary wing. My first warbird was a P-40 I bought as scrap from another cropduster. It had a bad engine, so he was selling it as scrap. I paid eight hundred dollars for it. It took a long time to restore, and I almost sold it several times just to get out from under it. When I was finally finished, I flew it cross-country. I thought the main satisfaction would be from the act of restoration, but I discovered that the airplane was a real thrill to fly.
My latest restoration project is a Huey UH-1H helicopter. It was built in 1967, and may have seen use in Southeast Asia. I bought it after it was retired from a National Guard unit. It had one-half hour of flying time left on it. We pushed it into the hanger and proceeded to remove everything. We rewired, rebuilt, repainted or replaced EVERYTHING on that helicopter. After it was finished, a good friend of mine, ’Slick’ Aguirre, taught me how to fly it. ‘Slick’ flew Hueys in Vietnam, where the birds were nicknamed “slicks.” After Vietnam, Slick used his G.I. Bill benefits to go to college, then joined the Air Force and learned to fly jet fighters for a living. Anyway, with Slick’s help, I qualified to fly the Huey in about one week.
At Dillon Precision, our future plans are to build upon the foundation of innovation and improvement in our product line.
We have implemented several design improvements to current machines, all of which may be retrofitted to previous versions. The Square Deal B now has machined brass link arm bearings. This gives tighter tolerances and greater rigidity than the molded Delrin bearings used previously. Another change is the innovative “lock-link” bellcrank for the powder measures on all machines. This design requires no return springs on the powder bars, and prevents the powder bar from returning until the platform is lowered to the at-rest position. This virtually eliminates ANY chance of an accidental double charge on the auto indexing machines. This design update will fit most older powder measures
In a longer view, Dillon is working on several other projects. Most we will keep under our hat, but one interesting project is that we are now manufacturing an improved 7.62 NATO mini-gun. This is available to US State Department approved governments only, but it’s interesting that a company that traditionally provides progressive loading equipment is now involved with improving progressive UN-loading equipment.

Good Shooting

Lindy

124
Star Reloaders / Re: bullet feeder
« on: June 01, 2015, 11:39:47 pm »
I also would like to know if the lee bullet feeder could be addapted to the Star ??

Good Shooting

Lindy

125
Star Reloaders / Re: bought a star
« on: May 05, 2015, 04:28:23 pm »
Jerry
To change from small pistol primer to large pistol primer You need to change the following parts: #22 primer slide, #24 primer punch, # 25
primer punch spring, # 26 Primer punch bushing, # 34 primer magazine tube.

Good Shooting

Lindy

126
Stars Want to Sell/Want to Buy / Re: hulme case feeders (clones)
« on: April 28, 2015, 03:51:42 pm »
Jerry
Yes, I know well how the clones that I make work, they work very well, But I would like to hear from the people who bought the 10 clones that I sold on this forum, and how the clones are holding up for them. If I recall correctly You bought one of my clones.

Good shooting

Lindy

127
Stars Want to Sell/Want to Buy / Re: hulme case feeders (clones)
« on: April 27, 2015, 11:03:20 pm »
How about the Folks who have bought a clone stepping up and let Us know how these worked for You.
I would be interested to find out the Wear facter, Reliability, Comparison to the Hulme, Etc.

Good Shooting

Lindy

128
Star Reloaders / Re: Powder tube thread pitch
« on: April 13, 2015, 10:57:56 pm »



American Dryseal Pipe Threads (NPTF and NPSM)

American Dryseal Pipe Threads (NPTF and NPSM)

This commonly used connection incorporates two methods of sealing. The male NPTF (Dryseal) tapered thread will mate with the NPTF tapered female, which is usually a port, and seal when the special threads are crushed together. Male PTF (Short Dryseal) are identical to male NPTF threads except that the thread lengths have been shortened by one full thread from the small end of the taper. Additional sealing aids such as pipe dope and Teflon tape are often used with theses threads. If the male has a 30° seat it will mate with the 30° cone seat in the NPSM straight thread swivel female, usually found on adapters, and is mechanically held together by the threads. NPTF and NPSM are not interchangeable with the British pipe threads.

Click here for a guide on how to properly measure threads.

Click here for a printable, actual size pipe fitting profiles. You will need to have Adobe Reader to view and print the file.


American Dryseal Pipe Threads (NPTF and NPSM)
Dash
Size   Inch
Size   Thread   Male
Thread
O.D.
mm   Male
Thread
O.D.
inches   Female
Thread
I.D.
mm   Female
Thread
I.D.
inches
2   1/8   1/8 - 27   10.3   .41   9.4   .37
4   1/4   1/4 - 18   13.7   .54   12.4   .49
6   3/8   3/8 - 18   17.3   .68   15.7   .62
8   1/2   1/2 - 14   21.3   .84   19.3   .76
12   3/4   3/4 - 14   26.9   1.06   24.9   .98
16   1   1 – 11-1/2   33.3   1.31   31.5   1.24
20   1-1/4   1-1/4 – 11-1/2   42.2   1.66   40.1   1.58
24   1-1/2   1-1/2 – 11-1/2   48.3   1.90   46.2   1.82
32   2   2 – 11-1/2   60.4   2.38   57.9   2.29



129
Star Reloaders / Re: Case Ejector Simplified
« on: February 26, 2015, 07:47:07 pm »
Jerry
I use a taper crimp die on three of My Five Stars with no problems at all.

130
Star Reloaders / Re: Case Ejector Simplified
« on: February 25, 2015, 11:30:41 pm »
I modified all my stars to eject the finished round using this simple and trouble free method about 5 years ago.

131
Stars Want to Sell/Want to Buy / Re: hulme case feeders (clones)
« on: January 23, 2015, 04:17:33 pm »
I currently run 4 Star Machines that have Cloned case feeders and have experianced zero issues with them.
They are made from Delrin which is the workhorse of plastics and will last under heavy use for many many Years.
And, The cost is considerably less than a Hulme feeder, If You can find one.

Just My Two.

Good Shooting

Lindy

132
Star Reloaders / Re: Star small parts bag.
« on: January 11, 2015, 09:33:09 pm »
Nice find! I've recieved Parts from them in bags like that Years ago, sometimes in the late 50s I believe. Wish I had kept them.
 It has a zip code in the address and I don't think zip codes came along until the Year 1963.
Enjoy

Good Shooting

Lindy

 

133
Star Reloaders / Re: New to Star Reloading
« on: December 31, 2014, 03:36:13 pm »
Frochevy
Welcome to the Star Forum. I'm sure that You will find all the answers to any questions You may have about Your Star Machine here on this forum as
all the experts are Here. Take a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx7kDdReQ_E  It is a vidio of a Star in operation. and may help you.
Google Star reloaders and look for "Star Machine Works" and You can download the instruction manual and a parts list for the Star.
Again, Welcome

Good Shooting

Lindy

134
Star Reloaders / Re: RCBS Star Dies
« on: December 16, 2014, 12:20:56 am »
I have never heard of RCBS dies that were manufatured to fit the Star, But I have turned down and treaded  .40 S&W RCBS dies to fit the Star.
This wasn't hard to do, But there was not much metal left on the portion of the die that has to fit into the shell plate. They did work/function well.

Good Shooting

Lindy

135
Stars Want to Sell/Want to Buy / Re: collator
« on: November 19, 2014, 10:32:09 pm »
I home made a case collator and it works likea champ

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