RCBS Shell Holder For Hornady Dies

[TropicalVibe]

Just received my Hornady New Dimension Dies, as Midway replaced my RCBS SB dies. I am reloading on my Rock Chucker, and have the RCBS shell holder. Will there be any problems with using the Hornady dies?

Thanks in advance!

Regards,
TV

[SDguy]

Give it a shot, You should be good to go. This peeks my curiosity.

How are most guys setting your head space. Nearly all of my reloading has been for a bolt action rifle thus far. Generally I shoot for .002 clearance when I am reloading for a specific rifle I encountered a interesting delima with a few Remington 17 fireballs.

I had been reloading for a few factory 17 fireballs for a number of years. One of these rifles was a SPS Varmint and the other was a SS limited edition and both were headspace way on the long side. Suspect if I were to check these rifles with a head space gauge both would be long out of spec at least by .005". Well Recently a came across a CZ 527 17 Rem that had been that had been re-chambered by Bob Green to 17 FB.
Try as I might I could not get any of my Redding 17 FB dies to bump the shoulder back on brass fired in the other rifles enough, to allow the brass to chamber in the Bob Green CZ 527. GRR
Well I tried a wide aray of 223 shell holders from redding, Lee & RCBS. I was nearly ready to send the rifle back to Bob to have her chambered a little deeper. Just did not want to believe Bob would chamber a rifle out of spec. So I decided to try one more option ordering another die set to give a try. Decided on a Hornady set this time around. Plesant suprise to find this took care of my issue. Think there was only .003" difference between my redding dies and the Hornady.

Crazy thing was there was .016 Head space diff between the Factory Rem and the Semi custom CZ chambers. ------ GRR

[LRRPF52]

I prefer to match the dies and shell holders to the same company, but even then you can run into cases where you don't have enough depth to push the shoulder back.

A good rule of thumb is to take a fired case from your chamber, measure shoulder location, and set back .002" -.005" from there in the AR15. Failure to set back far enough is the #1 reloading issue we see with the 6.5 Grendel. As long as your dies are set up and you ensure consistent set back with your stroke on the press, you'll be fine.

I started out bottoming out my sizing die on the shell holder, but noticed that my brass was getting worked too hard, so I decided to back off a bit. Bracket it in and see what will chamber in your rifle. We're basically walking a line between sufficient set back and minimum brass sizing.

Another helpful tip is to only use spray-on case lube, like Hornady's One-Shot. That will limit the amount of set back to what you want, whereas imperial wax can add a lot of case displacement due to its thickness.

The detailed reloading procedures in Volume II of the 6.5 Grendel handbooks covers this extensively. http://ar15buildbox.mybnbwebsite.com...-HandBooks.htm

[NugginFutz]

Just received my Hornady New Dimension Dies, as Midway replaced my RCBS SB dies. I am reloading on my Rock Chucker, and have the RCBS shell holder. Will there be any problems with using the Hornady dies?

Thanks in advance!

Regards,
TV

I use an RCBS #32 with my Hornady dies. I found that if I set up the die as the instructions directed, I mushroomed the shoulders. I needed to back the sizer off about 1 turn to get the proper setback. If you're ok with searching for the correct setup a bit, you should be gtg. I am pretty sure that if I'd gone with the Hornady shell holder as LRRPF52 recommends, I'd have been able to set up as per instructions.

[TropicalVibe]

All,

Thank you for the input and home-grown knowledge! I have a case gauge on order, as this should tell me a lot about the re-sizing, shoulder bump, and head-space. In the meantime, I loaded a few dummy rounds on some PPU brass that I had once fired. After re-sizing, and trimming the cases, the measurements with my calipers seemed dead on. I cycled these cartridges through my rifle without any failures to fully chamber or eject.

The RCBS shell holder looks like it will work just fine.

Regards,
TV