Thursday, December 6, 2007

A Bench Built for Reloading, Not Work


I Have been reloading at home for many many years. Unfortunately when I moved away for school I also moved away from my fathers workbenches, walls of tools, drill press & lathe, many presses, dies, books and so on, so fourth and such like. I started to ache for my reloading tools not long after I moved down to Columbus. I have my own single stage 50BMG press and Rockchucker, as well as dies for all my pistol calibers and some rifle. Lots of brass and the other accessories that go with the above. It was during a conversation with my welder friend that the idea of a custom bench could be built and outperform anything that I would pull out of the dumpster while on a diving expedition as far as using a regular desk to reload on and in lieu of this computer desk upon which I type on now. I measured the only wall space I had left and came up with some figures and sent them to Anthony. He bent angle from 4" flat stock and in a short 3 hours had a frame done up. On a trip to Menards we decided we were just going to use deck wood but while passing a "pre cut discount" bin that had tongue and groove wood flooring we figured it would be cheaper and finish A LOT better than deck wood. It took some time to get it all laid out and drilled. Not long after I brought it down (this was while I was home for thanksgiving break) and tore it apart and gave the top two surfaces about 4 coats of polyurethane and the frame a good coat of Semi gloss flat black rust-o-leum. With Anthony's guarantee of 600# on the frame I was not afraid to load it up for the needed weight. As this is a bench that can be moved by 2 people & a nice 20" x 36" footprint it needs weight while FL sizing 45-70 and .44 magnum brass that have been run hot. For what it is it has a generous amount of storage and work space. And will service me for many years to come however I hope that when I get my own place a much more impressive set up will take its place.

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