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So yeah.  Had hornady for many years.  Ive been looking at switching over to dillon 750.  Multiple videos show about 1k rds per hour output. I can do with no major glitches about 500 an hour with the lnl hornady.  Do i do it. Make the switch. Is it that more reliable? With less issues?

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I've not used the Hornady LnL, or the Dillon 750, but I'm a huge fan of my Dillon 550's.   Rock solid, and a great warranty.   The 750 should really scream in terms of rounds per hour, but caliber conversion kits do get more expensive as you go up in the Dillon line.  That's a consideration if you load lots of calibers.

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Anyone who owns a Hornady is going to tell you to stick with it.  

Anyone who owns a Dillon is going to say to make the switch!

My limited understanding of the differences is that the Dillon out of the box requires less tweaking to get it to run smootly.

if you've already tweaked the Hornady then I would say stick with it.  Full disclosure, I have a Hornady (shocker).  

it would be interesting if you were to make the switch to hear what you think.

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1 hour ago, Golf battery said:

So yeah.  Had hornady for many years.  Ive been looking at switching over to dillon 750.  Multiple videos show about 1k rds per minute output. I can do with no major glitches about 500 an hour with the lnl hornady.  Do i do it. Make the switch. Is it that more reliable? With less issues?

What options do they have on the Dillon that make it faster?  Do you have the case feeder on your LNL?  Bullet feeder?

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I have the case feeder.  Its a huge benefit.  The dillon also has the case feeder and bullet feeder.   It just seems like i cant go more than 100 rounds or so without having to re adjust something or fix something.   Do the dillons have this issue also

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I have a 650 and am very happy with it. I’ll do 300 rds in an hour and am happy with that. That includes prep, case gauging, clean up, start to finish. Can I go faster? ….maybe but not a priority. Does the machine need tweaking once in a while, yes, it’s a machine with lots of moving parts. But from speaking with others who have the LnL the Dillion seems to not have as many issues. 1k an hour seems crazy to me.

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8 hours ago, JC_68Westy said:

I have both brands and will go with Dillon every time.

Can I ask why? I am not using either ( I use Lee but I only do maybe 50 an hour and that is sufficient for me currently) but I have thought about moving to Dillon a few times as well. 
Thanks

-Jim

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7 hours ago, JimB1 said:

Can I ask why? I am not using either ( I use Lee but I only do maybe 50 an hour and that is sufficient for me currently) but I have thought about moving to Dillon a few times as well. 
Thanks

-Jim

I don't really ever have to tweak either of my Dillon's once they are dialed in. The Hornady LNL seems to always need some tweaking, especially the indexing. The Dillon's also have much better priming systems. The LNL priming system is a PITA.

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1 hour ago, Golf battery said:

What do you find the major differences are.  Are they both progressive presses?

They are progressive, see my other response. The priming system and indexing are the two areas where I like the Dillon presses better. The biggest advantage the Hornady has is cost of accessories like caliber change plates and consumable parts.

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1 hour ago, Krdshrk said:

What issues?  Jamming on the feeder?  There's mods you can do...

Jamming.  Hoping out of the v.  I bought that black plastic holder to help stop cases from falling out.  Jamming on the case feeder plates. Dropping more than one case at a time.  Im just getting tired of always having to readjust things.  

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1 hour ago, Golf battery said:

Jamming.  Hoping out of the v.  I bought that black plastic holder to help stop cases from falling out.  Jamming on the case feeder plates. Dropping more than one case at a time.  Im just getting tired of always having to readjust things.  

 Simple mods:

 

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On 3/25/2022 at 7:22 PM, Golf battery said:

So yeah.  Had hornady for many years.  Ive been looking at switching over to dillon 750.  Multiple videos show about 1k rds per hour output. I can do with no major glitches about 500 an hour with the lnl hornady.  Do i do it. Make the switch. Is it that more reliable? With less issues?

TLDR advice to Golf Battery. Realistically, just video yourself loading some rounds on the Hornady and time your bursts of smooth reloading to get your seconds per round. Get an average, and do the math. Short of automating a 1050, you probably won't go faster than that on any press, and most of these overblown claims are not what people are actually doing in an hour, but their max cyclic rate extrapolated. 

Realistically, the question is what is needing TLC on the hornady, and with team blue would you be doing 500 rph without any drama? 

On 3/27/2022 at 11:57 AM, JC_68Westy said:

I don't really ever have to tweak either of my Dillon's once they are dialed in. The Hornady LNL seems to always need some tweaking, especially the indexing. The Dillon's also have much better priming systems. The LNL priming system is a PITA.

I have a couple of LNL-AP presses and friends with SDBs, 500s, and 650s. 

So first, I have to say that I generally agree that the LNL takes more TLC to keep running based on anecdotal evidence. But from my experience, the indexing isn't the part that needs much TLC. One of my presses has about 125k rounds on it, and I have had to adjust indexing on it all of three times. Once was preemptory after tearing my setup down and packing it for moving and not even based on actual bad behavior. There's probably something you can do about that. 

Second, which dillon do you have? Because the only thing I hear people bitch about regularly is the primer system on the 650. That is one of the big changes to the 750. It moves to a more LNL like sled setup, but with the dillon adjustable primer seating stem/ram. (their approach to the seating stem is a win, the 650s primer merry-go-round is not, I don't know anyone who has a 750, but it looks like it should be a nice priming system). 

 

1 hour ago, Golf battery said:

Jamming.  Hoping out of the v.  I bought that black plastic holder to help stop cases from falling out.  Jamming on the case feeder plates. Dropping more than one case at a time.  Im just getting tired of always having to readjust things.  

 The Dillon case feeder hopper is definitely better than the Hornady. The dillon's clear plastic faceplate that catches the falling shell is a better, less cheap design. That and the fact that you can adjust the speed makes it suck much less. It can still have a case hang up like the LNL, but not nearly as often. if you don't make modifications to the hornady setup, you also get pieces of brass occasionally raining on your head, which I don't recall being an issue for dillon. It's easily stopped with non permanent mods, but there's not really a fix for the collator binding on a case (this is what variable speed would help with), or cases binding in the faceplate/funnel thing in a way that doesn't trip the switch (this is what a better designed faceplate helps with). 

I've generally got mine beaten into submission and just have to reach up and free the occasional binding case in the collator and have to adjust the tension on the pivot screw for the case dropping bit. As far as I am concerned, their instructions are questionable and their suggestions about which pieces to combine for a given caliber are very wrong. 

The main thing that was super, super screwed up is how the pivoting case drop is mounted to the arm that holds the case feeder. If you have an old one it is just sort of wedged on a nut. I fixed mine wit a piece of angle iron and a bit of shimming. Hornady now has changed things up to have a bracket to hold it in place. It's a stupid design. Dillon owners don't have to do this shit.  Stupid original design is on top, my fix is in the middle, Hornady's is on the bottom. 

 

stupid_mount.thumb.png.4053e53620834275bcc19cc2384fc693.png

Take the rate's quoted by people on the internet with a grain of salt the size of Montana. Lots of schmucks saying stuff to look impressive and are outright lying or have a bunch of caveats they aren't adding to their explanation. Even with the bragging and the OCD people with a system, and the people with zero quality control, you see a lot of people in the 400-500 range for the 550, and 400-600 range for the 657/750. 

On 3/25/2022 at 7:22 PM, Golf battery said:

So yeah.  Had hornady for many years.  Ive been looking at switching over to dillon 750.  Multiple videos show about 1k rds per hour output. I can do with no major glitches about 500 an hour with the lnl hornady.  Do i do it. Make the switch. Is it that more reliable? With less issues?

The dude telling me he loads 1200rph on a SDB but then says they don't load more than 200 rounds at a time is not a useful data point. 

For dillon gear, the name is dillon's take on hourly throughput with a case feeder, and the reality is that most people don't get to that, especially if your metric is "I want to go make 500 rounds right now,  how many minutes until I have 500 rounds boxed up". On the LNL-AP I can do just about 3 seconds a round with .40 or .45... right up until I have to grab another handful of bullets, and my QC is minimal. In my world, me claiming I can do 1200 rounds per hour because of that is total bullshit, for others it isn't cause math or something. People I know well and deal with in real life have rates around 400 rph with the 550, 600 rph with the 650, and 700 and change with the 1050. For straight walled pistol using a case feeder on the 650 and 1050. For me I can do about a round every 5 seconds with visual inspection.  That'd be a cyclic rate of 750 per hour, but reality is I seldom load more than 300 at a go.  My SOP when doing that is to tighten the pivot bolt on my case feeder, check the bolt on the shell plate isn't loosening, load up the primer tubes using my vibra prime, load 100, gauge them all with my armanov 100 round gauge, mark them and box them, then repeat that for the next 200 and go do something else. This takes about 35 minutes and the only work not included in that is cleaning the brass. 

So my fairly objective (IMO) take on red vs blue here. 

-blue wins on QC. IMO hornady's biggest problem is that if they get a bum part, they will ship that bum part until it is gone. Dillon fixes something so it is fixed the first time. Dillon also has less bum parts creep into the pipeline. 

-blue wins on CS. Hornady's CS isn't bad, but Hornady is a bigger company doing more things, and you will occasionally wind up arguing about warranty with someone who needs more training or something. 

-blue wins the locator pins vs the hornady spring retainer. The pins are a better design and is smoother. The spring can be made much, much more reliable. I've tried to explain how, but it really needs a video. If your spring comes undone and would like me to make a video on how to make it never do that, let me know. I've got 10 years of use on my current spring. 

-blue wins with 6 positions vs 5. This matters a lot more of you want a bullet feeder. This can matter a lot to top speed. 

- red wins the powder drop. It's always been a better poder drop in general, but for a time dillon was cheaper to get extras. Now a spare powder measure for team blue is $120, and you can catch a sale for the hornady for ~$65-70 and can get one for $95 without any work. This gets an asterisk because the dillon powder through expanders are 100%. The hornady one in .40 had issues. In theory they redesigned it, but I haven't met that one and can't vouch for it.  

-red wins price generally. Right now kind of sucks and it looks like about a $100 difference. This happens regularly, and at those times I'd do team blue. 

-blue still wins in aftermarket support, but the gap has narrowed a lot in the last 10 years. 

-cleanliness is a draw. The new primer system on the 750 may move this to a blue win, but with the hornady, out of the box, you can wind up slinging a wee bit of powder sometimes. With the 650, you have to clean the primer merry go round regularly. 

-both need roller handles added to the initial purchase price if you are going to do any kind of volume in a sitting. 

 

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12 minutes ago, Golf battery said:

funny thing is he says the case feeder works flawlessly.  Just flawless. Watch the last case he loads.  Not so flawless.  That case popped out. 

That is not about the case feeder as far as I can tell. That's about the brass vs the shell plate. Polishing the opening of the shell plate reduces it greatly, but some brass still doesn't want to go all the way in easily. The really bad one probably shouldn't be reloaded because the case head expanded more than most. Some of the others I'm still trying to figure out. I have an idea as to what is going on, but I have to test it. I've got mine to the point it doesn't happen too much and I catch it before it becomes a problem. No idea if the dillon people have similar issues. 

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Yeah.  See.  Im a person of small patience.  On certain things.  Any time i have a malfunction with the lnl press.  If its a known quick fix.  Fine. But if i have to redesign the whole press for them.   Well.  Thats bs.  Thats why ive inquired about the dillon.   Your responses were great.   Thank you for taking the time to respond so thoroughly.  

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If you have an lnl, there is a shim mod for the base that greatly helps indexing. The shell plates are also not 100% symmetrical or uniform. After I added a small shim, which is actually an ar15 barrel shim, I got the shell plate to run really smooth, then realized it liked to get stuck at certain spots.. so I started marking the underside of the shell plates and started to file and polish them... 

 

Dillon or Hornaday, they both require a decent amount of work to get running really nice.  A few mods really make a difference. 

For reference, I never have indexing issues. I will load a couple hundred... walk away for a month, and load another couple hundred without doing so much as loading in powder. 

I do plan a big blue machine one day simply for automation. 

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