I purchased one in the early part of the year as I was just having a lot of trouble with the RCBS and the Hornady machines. I’ve been pleased with it for the most part. It did well with h4350, n560, and Retumbo.
For the past few months I’ve been working on a 7prc load with h1000.
Seems like it’s absolutely night and day with this one.
The other day I woke up and saw that I had 15 pieces of primed brass ready to go. I have finally feel like I’ve gotten load development done for this gun. So I turned it on, let it warm up for 30 minutes, then give it another 30 minutes of just sitting around doing nothing. Calibrated it, filled the hopper, checked my settings, loaded those 15 rounds perfectly with absolutely zero issues, or overthrows.
Thought I’d like to have a few more as I need to verify zero with this gun. But that meant running a mandrel through some more brass and getting it primed. So I dumped the powder back into the canister and left the trickler on just sitting there. Went and mandrilled and primed 50 pieces of brass and came back to it. Refilled the hopper and verify the settings again.
I don’t know what was going on with these 50 pieces. My success rate went from 100% to less than 50%. I had overthrows up to two grains higher than The setting, never seen that before. I had one spell where it did six over throws in a row.
Today had similar With another 15 pieces of brass.
I can tell when it’s going to happen. As you watch the scale recording closer and closer to the target, you would expect it to slow down but instead it speeds up. In fact several times it absolutely laid the hammer down on the throttle and went way over.
Weird. I have two and haven’t had this issue. I do think they can keep making improvements on the software side. I feel like I need two of these expensive machines to be fast enough, but I also think it’s the best thing out there for my needs.
I like my Franklin, but if a butterfly flies by it will tweak out and under or over dispense. Or is the dog walks by the bench… Just my $0.2c and experience. I precisely level and block all wind and vibrations.
A few weeks ago I would have said absolutely yes. Right now I would have to say conditionally yes. Mine’s really behaved well except for h1000 which seems to give it a lot of fits.
Other forums online state that the larger powders just don’t do as well with it.
A lot of people recommended keeping the hopper completely full as with a lower level of powder in the hopper the pressures putting the powder into the tubes changes and that leads to inconsistencies. I tried that and got from about a 40% success rate to a little over 60% success.
My firmware was 3.02. Current is 3.07. So I did update that. Of note when you do that you lose all your powder profiles and you have to recalibrate. Better but still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of success rate.
I’ve done some more reading and watching on YouTube and there’s some people out there going into the deep settings. I’m not about ready to do that until I have a better understanding of what these settings actually are. Looks like I’ve got some late night reading now with the owner’s manual.