Homemade Bullet Feeder

This is a Homemade Bullet Feeder that I designed back in 2009 for a Dillon XL650 to feed Hollow Base Wadcutter Bullets. Back then there were not many commercial bullet feeders available that were affordable and none designed to feed Hollow Based Wad Cutters. (I still don’t think there are to this day) Feeding HBWC bullets presents a challenge over the typical round nose bullet because both ends are flat and one end is hollow so sorting them required some new thinking.

This system all started with the bullet collator.

The collator body was made from a simple metal bucket mounted to a arm made from electrical conduit.

To sort the HBWC bullets I came up with a simple plate that had little wire fingers attached to it.

Here is a close up of the Fingers.  The way they work is if the hollow base is facing the correct direction the finger will inset into the base and allow the bullet to fully drop into the base plate.  If the bullet is not facing the correct way it would fall out and return to the bottom of the bucket.

The sorter disk is turned by means of a 6 RPM motor attached to the base of the bucket and it drops the bullets into a clear acrylic tube in the base.

Here is a video of the Collator in action. (video may be LOUD!)

The bullets are feed into the tube upside down so the next apparatus in my system is a bullet flipper.

The Flipper was machined from mostly PVC pipe and fittings.

The bullet disc was machined from a piece of cutting board and the clear Plexiglas hold the bullets in while leting me see whats going on with the flipper.

The cut away section allows the bullet time to fall completely into the disc after it comes out of the feed tube from the collator.

The disc is run by a 5 RPM geared motor and a relay.

The motor is controlled by a relay and a photo resistor setup.

There is a Led on one side of the tube and the photo resistor on the other side that basically creates a switch. When there are enough bullets stacking up in the bottom tube the top bullet blocks the light passing through the tube and this turns off the relay/motor.

This is a quick diagram of the switch setup.

Here is a video of the Bullet Flipper in action.

The final part of my system is the Bullet Die.

The bullet die was machined from aluminum bar stock and it uses an external arm activated by the moving shell plate to drop the bullets onto the shell.

The arm activates a bullet stopper. This one is adjustable and used for the HBWC bullets.

This is an animation showing how it works.

The feeder die can also work with other bullet types too such as these round nose.

Different bullet stoppers are used for different bullet types.

This video shows the bullet die in action.

Overall the system worked a lot better than I ever would have imagined. I haven’t used it in a few years because I don’t shoot a lot of HBWC anymore but it was a fun project to design.

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