AMP Bullet Seating Press (simple neck tension test) 

Thanks for your time John. When I first saw this press I was also caught in the typical "marketing hype", until I just sat back and thought about it a bit. All this press currently does is a) pull the handle for you, and b) potentially make you think there are rounds that you shouldn't shoot because it's graph line does not match the others or some previous line that you somehow considered to be a "good line". This is an instrument, and to be more specific, it is a measuring instrument, but until there is a known correlation between the readings and what you will see on paper, AND, for me at least, most importantly, clear backwards tracing indications of why lines are different, and WHAT the root cause of it is, I would find no value in a machine that is just constantly telling me I potentially did a poor job during the last few hours reloading 50 rounds... This is one of those machines that will hopefully find it's way into the right person's home who have the time and knowledge to use it to definitively map the outputs to inputs and verify what the measurable input steps are in the reloading process that will produce the desired results consistently. In my mind, this is not a tool that should be on every bench out there, since it cannot fix any of your problems, it can just potentially tell you that you just wasted alot of time.

John, Thank you for putting the work and time into this tedious process. We appreciate it!

Great start to a very interesting subject. Thanks for making it easy to compare results and putting it all in one video. Now the fun begins.

Thanks for sharing your results, I appreciate you including the on target data.

When you shoot these, you need to get someone you trust to hand you the cartridges one by one, recording the order in which they are fired but not informing you and marking the impact points, MV etc., as you go. In that way, you will be blinded (inasmuch as is possible) to the seating-curve results when you do the actual shooting.

Thank you so much for sharing this with us. You are great John !!

Just what I needed unable to do much for few days , i just had my gall out yesterday tv just doesn't cut it , thank you so much.

I'm looking very forward to this John... Thank you so much for this info. Very interesting.

That looks like so much fun. I love technical stuff and tweaking. Unfortunately I cannot justify all the fancy equipment expense because I don't shoot competition. I just need an accurate load for my hunting rifle and maybe some target shooting with my friends. Nonetheless, I enjoy videos like this because I can still learn what may or may not be important to my own reloading efforts. Thanks!

It looks like higher neck tension is shooting better sometimes slightly more powder and less neck tension you can achieve the same thing if you're worried about distorting your projectile if you're not distorting your projectile with the higher neck tension just run higher neck tension like the video good job

Thank you for the experiment John, very interesting

First AMP "unboxing"/"first look" video that wasn't completely worthless. Thanks for sharing John; I can't wait to see more testing with the unit.

Interesting piece of equipment and test. Probably need to repeat exactly the same test "X" times to see if the results are consistent. Funny that the virgin brass with just the bushing generated one of the best results. Are we all wasting our time? :)

Thank you John.

Well done and thank you for an informative and well presented video - cheers! However I can only conclude that the whole idea of monitoring insertion force is not necessarily related to grouping performance. Your data suggests widely differing pressures can have little affect on groups. Maybe a few thousand samples will reveal some interesting correlations. I think anyone rushing to buy a press may end up with a very expensive dusty shelf filler. I've played with force monitoring using an arbour press and load cell, the charted data I made actually correlated with the 'feel' of the press - I now batch by feel and have some data but it's too little to draw any conclusion (other than those chaps at AMP won't get my dosh anytime soon). As an aside I note that virgin brass with no mandrel was the best group but not the best ES (IMO SD is irrelevant on a sample of five)

Hello @John - focus change - use it in combination with your glow device. You glow with "AZTEC program XXX +6". Use it without +6 means "normalm code" and with -6 for example and check the pressure difference and on the target. Do it with the reload data you normally use so that you can compare.

Hi John. Thanks for doing this. I found it very interesting.

Good video and information . Thanks for sharing sharing It will be interesting to see how much it might help with your rounds

Very nice video, I like your test methodology. One thing that I'd say to keep an eye out for, and you're probably aware of this already, is that the intervals on the y-axis across the different groups of graphs are not all the same. This can be a bit deceiving at times because some of the results might look relatively tight and overlap well, but then once you see the y-axis intervals and the ES between graphs it might not turn out to be great. Alternatively, some of the groups of graphs that don't appear to overlap as nicely might not actually be all that bad when you consider the y-axis interval and what the actual ES of the graphs is.

I've always got better groups with virgin brass. I wish I knew why. I enjoyed the vid, it gives me something to think about. Thank you.

I haven’t read all 125 comments but… around the 12 minute mark on your once fired 283 expander rounds, you can see all of them have an issue with the seating die body is being pushed down with the press. I didn’t notice this with the virgin brass.

Great video. Thank you. It's a lot of work, but IMO the only way to tell if this makes a difference is to print the graph and label each line (shot on the target and muzzle velocity). If it shows that one of the odd ball graph lines has a M.V. in the middle of the ES and the shot falls in the group, then sell the press on ebay. I've shot several groups in the 0's (.03, .07, etc with a 6BR) at 100 yards using a Wilson chamber die and K&M press just going by feel. I know some benchrest shooters that can do that regularly. Not to rain on your parade, but I just think it's time consuming. Nothing beats trigger time.

Great vid John. At 17mins 40 seconds through the vid, you state that the virgin brass with .284 expander is virtually zero neck tension. You're obviously not looking at the column of numbers to the left of the graph. As I understand it, the vertical numbers represent the Lb force & those cases were seating at about 120 to 130 Lbs. In my opinion, that is very heavy neck tension. Now, I'm not at all saying you're doing anything wrong, this is all pretty much uncharted territory we're getting into, just giving you something to consider for future testing. My annealed cases seat at about 30 Lbs with -0.003"

ALWAYS like your videos. Have you figured out how the make AUTO RUN work? I have not got it to work on mine. Thanks

John, I'm getting this press to help me work on ways to tighten my ES/SD's....I believe you can adjust the seating depths on your rounds and really tighten up the groups that shot slightly worse than the others...but had better overall ES/SD numbers. The bad thing about shooting 100yd groups is....speed doesn't really matter and doesn't separate enough at 100yds to show on paper how bad of a load it really is. Once you take these loads out to 1k....you will see the benefits of using this tool to find ways to really shrink that SD/ES range. Great videos as always. Have a great one.

Really nice video thought it was great with the target result along with the graphs. Which target cam do you use? Great Video

Great video John, thank you! Lots of tests can certainly be run. Quick question, what is your “no expander” initial neck ID? You’d mentioned that was the biggest neck tension variable.

Great video, can’t wait to see many more!

Great video as always....Are the lines on the graph numbered? It would be very helpful if they are. I noticed all the lines are blue except for the last one.

Thanks for the videos !

Nice work 💪

Seems to me that you need a press that pulls the bullet and graphs the force. I think the fallacy is, the force to seat a bullet has little to do with how it is released.

My question would be, where is the tuned speed node on that rifle? The press will show us how to prep for consistency, then we adjust load for the tune?

Annealed or not? Not sure if I missed that. Looks interesting.

one of my biggest concerns about that press is that all that data it seems to give you would be wasted on me like a lot of this is seeming to be . But it does look really nice thanks again for another great video .

Great video John! I see in the upper right are the individual tracks. Did you for example match up the individual shot with its trace? Could that give you insight to say a trace or two that are out of line with the other traces? In doing that shot to trace it may give you an indication of shots that are off from other shots in a group. I will say I am jealous of your SD and ED numbers across all of these loads!

Great job look forward to the next video

I've seen a lot of posts on amp press on RU-vid and Instagram and am excited to see what the results will be like on the target. Worst case scenario: the worst cases do not bring the worst results. ;-)

Food for thought. How does a compressed load effect the results? Which has nothing to do with the neck.

Hi John, very interesting video, did you record the bullet numbers to correlate each shot with its curve? That can be helpful to identify if similar curves are related to poi.

Hi John, i have a question about thelast group: the virgin no expander, did you measure the interior neck diameter ? thanks in advance

smoothness of your mandrels or expanders and diameters of bullets.. any difference will cause pressure difference

There must be something between the virgin and fired brass. Perhaps the base diameter or some other dimension. I noticed you were having a lot of cases stick in the die after seating. Did you measure the runout of the unloaded and loaded brass?

Were any of them annealed? I think in the past you didn’t use the exact code the AMP annealer gave you. I wonder if that would make a big difference?

So I've been thinking about possible tests worth running on this press. I'm very curious to see what a change in dwell time durring sizing/expanding has on necks (how much or how little do you need) and also once necks are sized what is the effect of letting it rest a day?

How long of a dwell time are you using for the neck sizing and the expander pin? I know you turn your necks, tests I have done on unturned brass shows that I get significant spring back on anything less than 12 seconds dwell time. Now I use a progressive so I am FL bump in one position, neck bushing in another and gauge pin (expand) in a third, so total of three cases being sized on each cycle. I use 15 seconds and I measure less than 0.0005" variation between 95 cases. Way out of my reach, but that is an amazing tool that I would love to run tests on. Thanks for sharing this, looking forward to some additional testing with it.

Are you moving the inside of the necks with anything that should make it more consistent also or maybe you found different good luck

that was awsome thanks for video john

Visually, the tightest groups seem to have this in common: the max resistance on Y axis crests 120. And the best group crests 150. Does combustion repeatability require a minimum resistance to to produce the most consistent shot-to-shot pressure pulse?

Awesome vid thanks for sharing!

Results will be interesting, thanks. Seems like a great test.

John, while you might not be a scientist, you are a super smart guy. I found this very interesting and can't wait to see if or what new correlations this kind of measurement points to. Did you measure seating depth after using the AMP press. I have found that while the chamber dies do a reasonably good job of seating bullets to a similar base to ogive it is not always within an acceptable range. I am not nit picking your testing and am fascinated to see what comes next. Also, was your hypothesis that rounds seated with more consistent graphs would shoot more consistently and or tighter groups?

Nice test configuration! Cant wait to see the video of your shooting datum.

All in all you're prep was amazingly consistent with pretty much a correlation on paper it seemed. Other than those couple crazy odd ones which were 11 and 12 and they landed right in the rest of the group and really well in the vertical of the group which oddly to me says the graph isn't telling us anything. That would just leave me scratching my head, was that coincidence or are we to the point of splitting hairs so fine it doesn't matter?

Cleaner necks in the Virgin brass maby. Did you brush the necks on the once fired? Great vid, wish i could afford the AMP stuff.

I don’t know! Hopefully will be able to figure it out? Does it show the amount of pressure it takes to seat each projectile?

Interesting that the virgin brass had the best results. Where do you go from here?

Was that Lapua brass? If yes, your test confirms why it pays to buy good brass. The virgin brass is made by brass prep EXPERTS. The question seems to be: how can we, as reloaders, restore fired brass to virgin shape and metallurgy…

The last two groups were virgin brass. They were the best groups. Once fired brass is supposed to be the best method. With that being said, I would look at the chamber pressure differences between once fired and virgin brass. Possibly look at case fill percentages between the two also.

Did you anneal your fired brass prior to running the neck mandrel or shoulder bumping the cases?

Forgive me if I missed it, but was the once fired brass annealed? Thanks enjoying your videos.

John - next batch is ready in September - you have till then to either save me or cost me $1400. No pressure. Lol. I have a sneaking suspicion that you would have to measure force to remove the bullet as well because it might take a little more force in but that process might then normalize the brass to the same consistency as the others. I also think you might get some info on how brass is aging with more and more firings.

I was wondering if you brushed the ID of the neck? Appears dirty vs clean neck makes a difference...

What size bushing, neck turned or not? Was once fired annealed?

In the once fired .284 the 3 that are close together and the 2 lowers match the other 2

Interesting. A pattern guy I did see some correlation between the graph and groups but obviously inconclusive. What neck lube did you use?

Sorry but this is a measure of seating force, not neck tension. You are making an inference about neck tension which may or may not be true. Try this polish the inside of one case neck and another case without being polished. Use a neck bushing die to neck size each case. The case with the polished neck will seat with less force however both have the same radial neck tension as the same diameter neck bushing was used. You could argue that neck tension has two components - radial tension and seating force.

I didn’t catch, did the once fired get annealed?

Did you anneal before loading the once fired brass?

Where did you get that black reloading tray

Here it will be interesting to replicate the virgin brass, with the annealing of sheaths at more or less temperature ...

I think at a certain point there is just to much information going in and gets lost 😞 in the madness lol 😂 it’s a nice bit of kit made by great blokes. Hope they sell heaps of them. I’m not at that stage of loading yet ;-)

My question has nothing to do with the press. Is your intro music from "Mirror in the Bathroom?"

Please try a once fired/annealed with Redding Imperial molly lube (graphite)..

I wish you could resize brass with this

Dude, great video and you grabbed lots of data. This gadget is new and lots of unknowns. And screw the internet. There's always going to be nay sayers.

Very interesting. Great tool for checking consistency. But another layer of self pity for when your score is rubbish.

Bravo!!1

Parabolic

You van se om the graf how IT Will spread hight wise. Realy intresting. Tru sitting and take only one value Reading.

Cool data. Way too $ for me, but nice to see this

First

Algorithm bump

marketing marketing marketing new toy all hype nice machine works well but completely unnecessary information john you have a good channel dont become a Gavin tube infomercial

Lol only shot virgin brass. Save your money lol