I like to deprime before I tumble. Well .. I should say I like to tumble deprimed brass but my wife has been doing the depriming. We had been using the Lee Universal deprimer and it worked fine but last week my wife bought the Frankford Arsenal deprimer and we used it for the first time last night and I wanted to give some thoughts for anyone considering it.
With the Lee Universal deprimer you have to use the press and my wife didnt want to sit in another room. I don't have a separate area for reloading just one crafting room so I have to get out the press and set it up in order for her to deprime.
The Frankford Arsenal you can use while sitting and watching TV, its reasonably small in size and I am here to tell you .. it works GREAT!
Here are some things that may not be apparent. Like most things made today I thought the unit would be all or mostly plastic. Not so .. the body is cast aluminum .. I was shocked to find it metal. It has some heft and feels like a real tool.The barrel that holds the pin is metal, the collar is metal and the construction of the entire unit including the spring its fastners is first rate. In the land of tools its actually a really well made nice tool.
The only plastic bits I can see are the collets and the primer catch bottle.
It comes with three collets. They are the only thing that feels a little less than robust but they dont actually do much. Each collet covers a range of brass diameters. The middle was great for the 38 and .40 and would have worked for .45. There is a smaller one and a MUCH larger one. So large in fact .. I have trouble believing you can manually pop a primer from any brass with that big a diameter but .... what the hell do I know.
After you have installed the collet of your choosing all you do is insert a piece of brass and rotate the collar so the opening allows your brass of choice to slip in. The collet doesn't really hold anything .. it just changes the aperture size.
And away you go. Easy peezy. When she went on to .40 .. turn the barrel collar counter clock wise to let the collet open, put in the brass and turn the collar back down until the brass goes in easily and GO. Takes less than 5 seconds to change from one caliber to the next.
In the time it took to watch one outer limits she must have gone through 300 pieces of brass .. all while lounged back in the couch watching tv. She quickly developed a little system and was flying machine like through with little effort and I didnt have to take out the press and bolt it to the table in a room that has no AC or TV.
Would be great for apartment dwellers. Anyway .. Nice little tool for $50 from Amazon.
Just checked and I paid $43.61 plus tax
