does anyone use these?? they claim to do away with case trimming, I am trying to get away from an expander ball yanking its way through the neck of the case, IMO this is where the most damage and issues to your brass is being caused. how is runout with the X die??

I fed my old M-1 a pile of ammunition made with RCBS's X die, and in the end it saved nothing, except perhaps, one trimming. Runout IMO was no different than that induced by the standard die. It will save a trim or two, but not much else...

If the expander ball is pulling hard then you are getting too much sizing. The Redding bushing dies will allow you to control this quite a bit.

My advice is to save your money and stick with old reliable -- or else upgrade to a bushing-type setup. I've now had 2 sets of the X dies and saw little merit in the system.

CC, I've used the X-dies and they've done about what the literature says for me. After 3 or maybe 4 sizngs, I haven't had to trim the brass at all for in excess of 13 reloads in one batch (I'm on the 17th reloading of these cases) They do have an expander in them, but I tune my dies' expanders to minimize runout, and these dies make VERY concentric ammo for me. They weren't that much money, and they work great for me.

Having said that, I have some neck bushing dies, and they produce great, concentric ammo also, but just firing it a bit, I have to trim every now and then.

Good shooting--Don

If you want to see how X-dies work, try running .270 brass thru a 30-06 X-die and see what the die does to the extra .046" of case!