There's a great trope of English life; the story goes that two guys in a shed, have a lightbulb appears over their heads as the bleedin’ obvious reveals itself, they go on to invent some world-beating innovation and then rise to greatness. Like most founding myths, it's usually somewhere between revisionist half-truth and outright bullshit. So its come as something of a surprise that for once I'll be able to park the cynicism and tell you a tale where the trope came true. Half true, it was one guy
Anyone who has ever slaved away into the night; tapping at a trickler, trying to get a set of beam scales to balance so they can get on to charge No.2 of 250, has wondered if perhaps there could be a timely middle ground between the inaccurate dispense-by-volume and the tedious dispense-by-weight.
There are lots of offerings; scales and dispensers, dispensers with built in scales, at all kinds of money from a round of drinks, to well over a grand. Some are very accurate, some are very quick, at the spendy end some are both. When you come to think about it all of them top-out at one kernel accuracy.
Way back in the early 80’s Working from home, in his shed or spare room, Allen Edwards was looking for a solution to the problem of accurately dispensing small pistol loads. When he hit upon the bleedin' obvious.
If all the kernels are the same size all you need to do is dispense them one at a time, and a trickler already does that very well. What a trickler doesn't do is monitor itself. But it could do
Target Master : an all together better trickler.
As it rises to zero The beam of your existing scales breaks a beam of light, the photoelectric cell stops receiving a signal, and turns off the motor driving the trickler.
That's all it does. Brilliantly.
Dump a scoop of powder onto the pan, press go, and the Target Master whirrs away until the beam settles on the mark. To increase the speed, use a bigger scoop. To increase the accuracy, set the trickler to drop the last few kernels a little slower and set a camera in front of your scale to remove the potential for parallax error
It's very easy to plan out a workflow where you're adding a scoop and pressing go, then turning to seat your next bullet and work the press, as you put the finished round into the box, the Target Master has already come to a stop and you're ready to start again. Simples.
“I designed the first Targetmaster in the early 1980's particularly for light charges of fast pistol powders. I found that no measure was accurate enough for the 1.2-1.5 gn charges required for the .32 S&W Long target pistols of the time.” AEYou can find TargetMaster here if you're not in the UK or you want the extra bits: camera, remote start, and stand, which i would recommend, you can email Allan HERE His name above the door he will sort your order personally
More soon
Your pal
SBW
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Nice
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