RCBS 1500 Question

Shadowstalker · Feb 14, 2011

After searching this forum and others I'm pretty close to buying a 1500 Combo; but after talking to a guy out at the range that has one I wanted to find out if other guys have had the same experience that he has.
He told me that it is not very well suited for loads under 25g (which is most of my reloading) because it spins up to 25g so quickly. My load is 24.5g of 748, and he was saying from his experience as it starts "thinking" about 24.5g, it will have already spit out 25+g. He did talk about possibly "tricking" the machine by setting up so that it is slightly out of level front to back, so that it goes to the trickle mode sooner. Anybody else experience this?
The calibers I load the most are:
.223 (2000+/yr)
.40 S&W (2000+/yr)
7mm Rem Mag (150+/yr)
.338 Win Mag (250+/yr)
My reason to purchase one is for the accuracy and saving the time of manually tricking in every charge.

levi333 · Feb 15, 2011

I've never had a problem loading for .223. Loads in the 24.5-25 range.

.40 is going to be quite slow though, i wouldn't recommend it due to how much time it's going to take.

Shadowstalker · Feb 15, 2011

Thanks Levi333

AMProducts · Feb 22, 2011

I have the older model than this one, so not sure how well my experience translates, but I've had good luck with mine. Typically what I do is drop a charge with my powder measure, and then let the auto-trickler finish it off doing the last 1-2 grains. If you are trickling from the start it takes 30 seconds to 1 minute to fill the pan.

Shadowstalker · Mar 1, 2011

Got it on Thursday and became a beliver after an hour or so. I loaded up about 300 rounds of 1 load and had no overthrows, and all the loads that I measured against a trusted RCBS were within 1/10 of a grain. I than did two different workups consisting of 90 rounds for 2 different bullets and powders and remeasured everyone against the scale, and only had 8 that weren't perfect. It seems to "learn" the rate of powder trickle and anticipate the trickle. The McDonalds straw trick worked great. My only complaint was the speed: the worst was about 42s and the best was 30s; but tonight I'm going to "reprogram" the speed with the instructions RCBS sent me to speed up the process a little.