SSN Vet
Member
Lee case trimmer gage pins for straight walled pistol brass..... why did I buy these again?
But a stuck case remover is one of those tools you have on hand and hope to never use. I reloaded for over 25 years before I stuck a case on a Sunday afternoon. All reloading stopped and I spent the next three hours building a stuck case remover. Fortunately, I have a lathe to whittle out metal parts.
Yup another stuck case tool sits unused
If you can build a case puller in 3 hours, you're way ahead of the curve, compared to spending possibly days trying to find something you bought 25 years ago and have never needed to use, before.
No way I could manage that. I can barely keep the stuff I commonly use organized; there's a lot of it. The rest gets shuffled around in various storage boxes until I finally start randomly throwing stuff that "doesn't make the cut" away. I'd just as well have the ability to make a tool than to store it, if I expected to need it once every quarter century!When it comes to tools, I am pretty organized. Plus, I have duplicated sets of common tools stored in multiple locations. Saves me from a "Ponce de Leon" type search.
It was over 40 years before I bought a kinetic, for $17. Taking into account the brass and bullets I have saved with it, it will be about 200 more years before it pays for itself.
I guess you haven't seen this yet?I have found the most redundant and unneeded tool on my reloading bench is the ubiquitous powder tricker. Here's why:
They're not tall enough and don't have enough horizontal reach to trickle powder onto the pan of my scale. If the thing can't drop powder where I need it, what's it for?
They're unstable; you need one hand to steady them while the other is turning the spindle.
I use my scale to do two things: calibrate my powder drop for bigger batches (>30 or so), and weigh charges one by one for small lots (<20 or so). I almost never run 100s at a time on my SS press. For those small lots I use Lee dippers to measure powder into the pan, and I've learned that it's pretty easy to tap a couple of flakes/balls/sticks of powder into the pan while I watch the readout change. I can even use the dipper to remove flakes/balls/sticks two or three at a time, resulting in very accurate weights.
So the trickler serves no purpose and sits in a drawer. What supposedly essential piece of gear do you guys never use?