Dillon RL450 woahs.

[grfox92]

My uncle gave me an RL450 a few years ago. I've taken an interest in starting to reload and have slowly been accumilatimg everything needed to get started.

After months of pawn shops, deals online and locally I have everything I need.

I go ahead and attempt to slip an RCBS shell holder in the shell plate and that when I learned that dillon doesn't use a shell holder and the has a different plate for every size conventional shell holder.

Those plates are $50 a piece and I believe I need 4 different plates to reload what I currently want to reload for.

The dillon is progressive and there is alot going on there, and having never reloaded anything ever, it's pretty tough to start from scratch trying to assemble this thing with no prior experience.

I've been told I should start with a single stage. Dillon makes a great press and has a good following, but I'm not a 9mm mag dump guy or go to the range with an AR and shoot 10 30rnd magazines on a Saturday.

I want to reload rounds for my Hunting rifles and make bear loads for my 10mm.

Should I sell the dillon and buy a single stage? Or is there a good reason to stick with the dillon and drop $200 on shell plates?

Thanks for any advice.

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[seand]

That’s a sweet press. Interesting though, the frame looks different then my 450.

I don’t think you would get much for as as the cost to upgrade the parts that everyone thinks they need nearly equals a new 550c anyways. But you don’t really need to upgrade, it will still be way faster than a single stage even with manual primer feed and manual powder drop.

Personally I’d rather keep the 450 and pick up a cheap single stage if you need it. But really you can do it all on the 450. You can operate it just like a single stage if you like, just by not indexing the shell plate.

The more you shoot the more you load. Loading a few hundred rounds in a single session on a single stage sucks. 500+ rounds for a varmint hunt- you will really wish you kept the progressive.

You can still get the manuals from Dillon. They also have a compatibity chart for for the conversion kits for the shellplate, powder funnel and buttons. Lots of cross compatibility so you might not need as many as you would think.

https://dilloncdn.com/magento/charts/rl450-rl550-conversion-chart.pdf

 

[98XJRC]

My first and only press is a Dillon 550B. I bought it for reloading 9mm and 300 Blackout for my AR. While it’s classified as a progressive it’s not a true progressive in that the cases don’t advance automatically. This is extremely helpful for load development. I’ve had great results with it, but I also haven’t loaded precision rounds.

My recommendation for loading precision if you’re extremely picky would be to remove the auto powder filler and install a funnel in its place to drop your powder down through after using a trickler. Again only you can determine if taking that extra step would be worth it. Using the 450 when properly setup would allow for extremely quick loading and allow you to complete 4 steps at once.