Have you ever seen one of these?
Well this is the only one I’ve ever seen. No pics on the web that I can locate. I’m assuming from the artwork, styling, and price on the box that this is a late 40’s or early 50’s unit from when Redding first started up.
It was given to me years ago and is brand new in the box with all of its paperwork. The handle has never even been mounted and there’s still a little overspray of the “attractive wrinkle finish”, as the brochure calls it, in the die threads. When it was passed onto me it came with the comment that nobody else would want it because it uses some old bastard shell holders. It has one of said shell holders, cut for the standard.473 rimless size used by the 30/06, 308, etc.
I ran across it in my shop the other day, forgotten on a shelf for 6-7 years since the last move and it got me to thinking. You know what else uses a bastard shell holder? A cartridge I love but is a little bit of a pain to load because it won’t fit my hand priming tools, the 45 Auto Rim. So what better way to make a bastard unwanted press usable than to spend a bunch of time machining a shell holder for a bastard cartridge.
I started by turning and threading a chunk of dowel pin from the scrap bin at work to the outside dimensions of the Redding shell holder.
When that was done I flipped it around in the chuck and used a 7/16” endmill in the tail stock chuck to plunge cut the recess to within.010” of finished depth. Then used a little hooked tool to make a finishing cut across the bottom of the recess and open the ID up to .475”. I took an old Woodruff key seat cutter and ground it down to the proper .085” width and removed all but two of the teeth while grinding relief all the way around where the old teeth used to be. It was then chucked in the tool post and used as a form turning boring bar to cut the proper sized rim recess.
It then went into the vise on my milling machine where I used a 1/2” endmill to remove about 1/3 of the top. I followed up by putting the modified key seat cutter in the mill and cutting the radius out of the rim recess on the open side to allow the shell to slide into the holder. In hindsight this process is likely done with a specially ground endmill that cuts the whole thing at once but I’m not a production shop so I make do however I can.
In the end it’s still a funky little press that uses unavailable bastard shell holders. And I spent to most people more time than it’s worth to make it usable. But with the priming setup it has being usable for the Auto Rim I plan to put it on it’s own corner of the bench and use it as a one trick pony for the times I need to run off a box of 45s for my 625.