Bigcountry gives some outstandng advice, its stuff that reloaders learn from reloading for several years and find the best way to do things.


As far as press threads go, They are purposely made a bit loose by design. It wouldn't do any good to have threads that tightly fit your dies where you would have to chase the threads with a big tap occasionally to remove powder residue or oxidation in order to screw in a die, or worse yet, having to take a pipewrench to a die because its galled or bound up to the press. If you square your dies up with pressure from the ram before tightening the locknut, the loose threading is not an issue.

Having little or no play in the ram is a good thing, but when you think about it, your shellholder is going to have a littleplay in it as it mounts on the ram and as to how it holds the brass, if everything is squared up before you start, everything should selfalign as you run the brass up the die. One could go insane if they start considering how much the brass springs back after being resized dependant on the hardness and thickness of the brass and how many times its been reloaded. Its best not to worry too much about it, we are reloading cartridges, not trying to put together a manned mission to Mars.