I've just found I have an issue with a set of Redding dies. It kept making crooked ammo, so I took the depriming rod out and then measured some cases - looks like pulling the case back over the sizer button was really screwing up the straightness of the cases. I'll have to figure out if I can leave the sizer button out (I can deprime in other ways) and still seat the bullets, of try to straighten the deprime rod.
Get one of the tapered expander balls Redding offers for their dies, and expand the necks by
pushing them over the ball in a separate step.
Or get a Lyman M-die or other separate mandrel type neck expander die.
Math - it already has a tapered expander ball, but the shaft seems to be slightly bent, thus making the case crooked. When I removed the expander ball, the cases come out nice and straight
Get a new rod assembly...or get a carbide expander assembly. The floating carbide expander WON'T fix anything really out of whack though!
Redding sells die parts, as do others, and Midway handles most of them.
Forster (sizing) dies that size down a thicker neck of some brass a bit can be corrected with different diameter expanders. It also does the opposite with "thinner" brass. They work, yet keep the necks in round, without resorting to several trips through the die.
Another thing that should be mentioned is how well the seating die stems mate up with the bullet ogive and at what point/bearing surface they contact. That can also create a runout issue, even with the alignment systems of great seating dies.
One last thing: find a system. Mathman and others here use certain "known" quantities. They use the same or similar make and quality of brass, bullets and dies so that using the runout gauge every time they reload is pretty much omitted.
But they didn't get there without a gauge of some sort and when problems show up at the range, the gauge is often drug out to sort things.
I rarely use a runout gauge anymore unless using WW or RP cases when sorting.
