I was going to add to my reloading 556 thread but since (so far) it has not been junked up, I’ll keep in clean and add this.
I ordered some additional tool heads and stands and a vibratory cleaner and separator from Dillon this weekend and was eyeballing the new RL1100 press.
Because they only ship to CC address it goes to my PO Box, but because it was a large/bulky order they emailed and wanted to send it to my physical address, which I gladly gave them.
It was the shipping manager that contacted me so we had a nice chat when I called. We were talking about why there is such a shortage of the reloading dies and how that is the bottleneck in their business.
Apparently there was a family owned business that made the carbide dies for them and the dad died and the son retired and while the company is still in business and doing the work for Dillon on their dies, none of the people remaining at the company have been able to properly grind the dies which has resulted in 80% rejection rates on the dies they’ve been getting.
Dillon is looking into buying the the machine to make the dies in house but its a 6 month order for the machine, $1.3M and it will still take them 4-6 months of set up and training to get the process right. Apparently carbide finish grinding is a meticulous process.
Machines and things that don’t include dies are shipping much faster. Dies are shown as at least a 60 week delivery at the moment. The 300 blk dies I ordered last august still have not shipped, but I was able to find them on eBay new several months ago, although I overpaid for them
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
