All I could afford a few weeks ago was a two die set of Lee Precision (what an oxmoron that is) .300 AAC Blackout dies.  All that I read about them said that all you needed was the two die set and you were good to go.

It has been a long, VERY steep, PAINFUL, and VERY FRUSTRATING learning curve with them.

I am dyslexic which doesn't help anything so I called Lee to get help.  The tech there explained how to set up the forming die which was to close the press, screw the forming die down till it touches the shell plate, open the press, then screw the forming die down from 1/4 to 1/2 a turn so that when the press closes ALL of the press's slack is taken up.  

That fixed the forming problems that I was experienceing.

I then proceeded to reload about ten rounds.  Said rounds were Hornady 110 grain EXP FMJ but not boat tail.  I had a heck of a time getting the bullets to go into the shell's neck without destroying the case's neck.  Called Lee and was told to buy one of their universal expander dies (which member's here also recommended).  So I ordered it from Midway USA and got the Lee Universal Expander die and it definatley eliminated the bullet to case problem.

So I load about 20 bullets try to fire them.  Half of them load perfectly fine but the other half won't let the bolt go to bolt lock even after beating on the forward assist!  WTF now!  I had to fight them out of the rifle by putting magazine block into my vice, the rifle onto the magazine block, unlatching the charging handle, and then using a soft faced hammer to knock the charging handle back enough to unlock the bolt!  Scary shit to say the least!

So I says to myself, "Now WTF can be wrong!".  I happend to buy six 20 round boxes of Remmington .300 AAC Blackout rounds and used them to compare to my reloaded rounds (of which one full box fired FLAWLESSLY which told me the problem wasn't the rifle but WAS the reloaded rounds!)..  What I finally found was that the crimp on my reloaded rounds wasn't "deep" enough to allow the rounds to feed all the way into the chamber.  Another call to Lee who said that I need to buy their 300 Blackout crimping die!  I got off the phone with them and SCREAMED AT THE TOP OF MY LUNGS, "WHY THE F DIDN'T YOU TELL ME THAT WHEN I TALKED TO YOU THE LAST TIME ON THE PHONE!".  Ordered the Lee Crimp die from Midway USA and got it on Saturday in the mail but didn't have time to fool with it till Sunday.

Sunday is usually my DOR = I do NO projects, work, NOTHING but sit in front of the TV and watch either NASCAR, or the history channel, or the military channel.  

Once the NASCAR race was done, I got restless and decided to try the crimp die and see IF it made a difference.  Bottom line, it made a WORLD of difference!  Now ALL reloaded rounds feed into the chamber, the bolt slams home & locks up, and the reloaded bullets go BANG!, the spent round is ejected, a new round is fed in, I pull the trigger, and BANG! the cycle keeps going till I'm out of rounds.

So the final cost of the "inexpensive" Lee (not so) Precisioin dies were almost $100 and two weeks of fussing with them.  For another $40 I could have bought the Redding National Match 3-Die Set 300 AAC Blackout Product #: 459622 Redding #: 39327 from Midway USA and been done with it.

Bottom line, you get what you pay for.  I'll live with the Lee Precisiion? dies I have for now but next month I will most likely be buying that Redding set.

I hate to burst your bubble, but I use the Lee 2 die set and have ZERO issues.

Sorry, but everything you described is pilot error and could be fixed with a run the any good loading manual.  The problems you are having with Lee dies will continue to plaque you with all other brands as well.  Your tools will work fine, you just need to sit back, take a deep breath and figure out how to use them.  You know the old saying,  A poor Carpenter Blames  his Tools.

Or the crimp removed the bell/flare applied with the expander die?

I think this will solve your issues

Thats what I'm thinking as well. He might be better off to skip the flare die and just go with boat tail bullets.

Or put the proper chamfer inside the case mouth?

I guess this thread didn't go as planned...

I had planned on getting one of the case gauges.

As for not deburring the cases, I deburred all of them.  Even the once fired Remmington .300 AAC Blackout factory cases gave me the same problem with loading the Hornady 110 grain non-boat tail rounds into them so I called Lee and they advised getting the expander die.  I set the expander die so that it barely opened the mouth of the case so that the bullets BARELY sat inside the mouth of the cases.  

I didn't like the amount of crimp the Lee die put onto the cases and the bolt still wouldn't go to home when I sent it to battery.  That's when I called Lee again and they advised me to buy their .300 Blackout crimp die which when I got it set, the bolt carrier now goes to battery and I can hand eject the rounds.

In the mean time I decided to try one more thing.  Since I have three AR15s and therefore three bolt carrier assemblies, I tried all three of my bolt carries in the rifle.  One is a crome one from Sarco, one is a standard finish one from Sarco, and the third is the one that came in my Smith & Wesson M&P AR15.  Of them all, the Smith & Wesson one goes to battery the easiest and comes out of battery when hand ejecting a round the easiest.  The other two take a lot more effort to get them to go to battery and to hand eject a round.

What that tells me is that the hammered stainless steel RedXArms .300 AAC Blackout barrel's breech is VERY tight and may have been part of the problem all along with getting the bolt carrier to go to battery.  Every firearm has a personality and every firearm either likes or dislikes certain things.  EX:  I have a Para Ord P14 45 ACP pistol that has a factory barrel in it.  A good friend of mine has a Argintine (sp?) 1911 pistol that needed a new barrel so he had a Richard Heinie competion 45 ACP barrel installed in it by a VERY good gunsmith.  My buddy tried shooting some reloaded (by someone other than me with Lee dies) 45 ACP rounds through it and it would NOT go to battery.  I ran those same rounds through my Para NO PROBLEM.  I took all of the reloads that he had left home, ran them through my Redding Competion carbide dies and VOILA, they ran perfectly through my buddies Richard Heinie barreled 1911.  My point is:  all weapons have personalities.  My Para's personality when it comes to ammo is that it will accept anything.  His 1911's personality is that it will accept ONLY rounds that are EXACTLY right or it won't accept them.

 

After I talked to the tech at Lee and he explained (verbaly) how to set the sizing die, I had no problem with re-sizing the brass to the correct specifications.  He told me that there is a critical dimension from the area where the case transitions from the area of the case to the body of the case (the taper) is .003".  Understand that written directions are VERY difficult for me as I am dyslexic.  When he gave me the (verbal) directions on how to set them and why it is done (to take ANY slack out of the reloader's mechanism), it made perfect sense as to why my re-sized rounds weren't working.

I have a RCBS Trim Pro-2 Manual Case Trimmer Kit which I use to trim all of my reformend resized .300 AAC Blackout cases to 1.368".  I used my Brown & Sharpe vernier calipers to measure each and every case to verify that they are indeed 1.368".  I then deburr them with the RCBS deburr tool that came with my Rockchucker reloading kit.

As I stated, each case was trimmed to 1.368".  I even went so far as to take a black Sharpie and paint the whole case and bullet of a few rounds that would and wouldn't allow the bolt carrier to go to battery, (atttempt) to load them into the rifle, extract them, and found NO scoring or marks on them at all.  VERY puzzleing as I though I'd see something.

I'll admit that reloading tapered rifle shells is one heck of a lot different than reloading straight cases (like 9 mm, 40 S&W, 38 Special, .357 mag, 45 LC, and 45 ACP).  I had NO problem with my RCBS .223 Rem rounds that I reloaded which I've reloaded about 1000+ rounds of .223 Rem which all loaded, fired, and ejected with no problems and I didn't have to crimp them either.  I have two .223 Rem uppers.  One  is a S&W M&P AR15 in .223 Rem, the other is one I built that has a Model 1 Sales 20" bull barrel on it and like I said, I've run all of my reloaded .223 Rem rounds through them with NO problems AND I've let friends shoot my reloaded .223 Rem rounds and they didn't have any problems with them.

THEE only set of Lee dies I have are these .300 AAC Blackout dies.  I think the resizing die works great.  I am unimpressed with the bullet seating die because of the aluminum bullet seating die plunger has no mechanical lock nut on it as do all my Redding and RCBS dies.  I read reviews on these Lee Dies and it runs 50/50 = half the people who used them loved them and half of them strongly disliked them (and sent them back for a refund).

I'm going to keep mine for now but eventually buy a set of Redding dies when I can afford them..

Key words:  basic reloading procedure.

Yes, each author of reloading books have general guidelines on how to reload ammunition.  I have the Speer reloading manual that came with my RCBS Rockchuker manual and a Sierra reloading manual and I use both of them as reference material.

Before investing anything in "building" .300 AAC Blackout rounds from my unusable (for) .223 Rem cases, I bought the book "The Handloader's Manual of Cartridge Conversions" by John J. Donnelly & Judy Donnelly.  I read that book to get knowledge of what I needed to know about resizing the .223 Rem cases into .300 AAC Blackout cases.

What I DON'T have is anyone local to turn to for their hands on knowledge of resizing cases EXPEICALLY the .300 AAC Blackout which is a real problem for me as I am DYSLEXIC.  If any of you are dyslexic or know someone who is dyslexic, you'd understand that we (dyslexics) do not do well with written instructions alone.  I know that I need hands on experience and guidance from knowledgeable people to succeed at anything.

I was VERY good at fixing high performance jet aircraft in the U. S. Navy because in Aviation Electriciansmate A school, we had four hours of classroom instruction on a subject (like landing gear systems) along with four hours of actually working on that system.  I was good enough at it that I made AE2 (E5) in a little over two years and had I not had a (now ex) wife who hated the Navy, I would have put in my 20 and retired (at the minimum) a E8 chief (or higher).

So cut me a little slack if I didn’t at first succeed the first time out reloading .300 AAC Blackout rounds.

Why come to a written forum?

This

Wow as usual a tough crowd here.  I purchased my Lee dies as well to load up for my 300 BLK.  Although not near as experienced in the reloading experts here (20 to 30k total) I had issues as well with the dies.  I setup exactly as the directions specified, and had issue with round chambering occasionally, maybe 2 out of 50 rounds.  I did however have the crimp die.  I thought the crimp die might have been the issue, as my last 100 rounds fed fine with no crimp.  Or maybe the inconsistent sizing die.  

Load is LC brass, 1680, rem 7.5 primer and hornady 225 grain hpbt.  I like the Lee crimp die for pistol rounds, but the sizing and seating dies I am not impressed with.  Down the road I will be buying new sizing and seating dies for the 300 BLK.

A few thoughts and comments.

OK, your loaded rounds do not all chamber, why?

1) Sizing die not set up correctly.  The fix is to screw the die into the press a little at a time until ALL of your sized cases ( no bullet or powder) chamber and extract with ease.  Not just some of them, all of them.

2) OAL to long, bullet making contact with the rifling.  The fix is to seat the bullet deeper until they chamber.

3) Case mouth flare applied by the Lee Expander die making contact with the chamber walls.  The fix is to remove the flare with a taper crimp or a Lee Factory Crimp Die.  Better still,  forget the Expander die and eliminate this one all together. The fix is to properly "Chamfer" in inside of the case mouth

Deburring will NOT help a flat based bullet better enter the neck.  Deburring is done on the outside of the neck after trimming and has nothing to do with your problem.  Your problem is on the inside of the neck.  You need to "Chamfer" the inside of the neck so it will accept all bullets both flat and boat-tail.  Expander dies are not needed for bottle necked rifle rounds.

 You do have the expander button/ball installed on your Full Length die, Yes?  Failure to install the button will result in undersized necks that may not accept a flat based bullet.

4) Seating die not set up correctly and buckling the case.  The fix is to set up die die so there is no contact with the built in taper crimp.

 1) Take a properly sized and trimmed case and place it in the shell holder.

 2) Back the seating die way way out of the press.

 3) Raise the ram.

 4) Screw the seating die into the press until you feel it make contact with the case mouth.  

 5) Lower the ram

 6) Back the seating die OUT of the press at least one FULL turn.

 7) Lock it down with the Mickey Mouse rubber "O" ring locking nut.

 8) Adjust OAL with  seating stem.

 9)  If a crimp is desired, purchase a Lee Factory Crimp die and leave the seating die set up to seat only.

 If it were I that contacted Lee and was told to purchase an "Expander" die I would have been a little pissed.  I would have asked the fool if an Expander die is needed to complete the loading process with Lee dies, then why do you no include them in the Lee die sets.  I would have accused him of trying to sell me something that is not needed to fix the problem, which is exactly what he did.

I think the OP has been handled a bit roughly, but the answers he got are spot on.  I also have Lee dies for 300BLK and had a few problems, but worked through them in an evening.  I am happy that Lee has the inexpensive green cased dies, as I have started to back up my other dies with a set of these for the calibers I generally load.  Nice to have a spare in case the reloading Gods decide to throw a monkey wrench in ones efforts.  To OP reloading is difficult, I suspect especially if one has problems reading, perhaps you can find someone to show you around a loading bench in person?

If your dyslexia is that difficult to overcome, you may wish to give up reloading altogether. Someday you might load 7.2 grains instead of 2.7 into a pistol round, and that won't go well.

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Maybe, but he didn't really come here for help.  He came here to tell the world how HS Lee Precision is and how their products and their tech support  are no good.  The replies to his original post were merely pointing out that Pilot error is most likely the problem and not his tools.  IMO, if he would have come here with real and honest questions instead of a Bashing Lee thread he would have had a more positive  experience.