If I’m being honest, I’ve always had a mixed impression of Frankford Arsenal. Sometimes their gear feels gimmicky or cheap compared to brands like Dillon Precision or Redding, so they haven’t been my first stop when I need a reloading tool. That said, I spent some time at their booth during the 2022 SHOT Show. I checked out their presses, priming tools, and powder handling equipment. Some of the pieces still felt less than premium, but I was surprised by how much genuine innovation they were putting into new products. To be fair, I don’t think Frankford Arsenal is trying to compete in the premium tool category.
One product that grabbed my attention was their Universal Precision Trimmer. It looks a lot like the Little Crow Gunworks World’s Finest Trimmer, but the way it sets up is totally different. A single seventy dollar trimmer that claims to handle everything from 17 Remington to 460 Weatherby Magnum is hard to ignore. No extra pilots to buy. No inserts to lose. No fiddling around with tiny cutter adjustments to get the perfect trim and OD/ID Deburr.
First Impression
The kit comes neatly packed in a plastic box. You get six aluminum collars and three plastic collets. The instructions make sense. Unlike the World’s Finest Trimmer or the Giraud Tri-Way, this isn’t built with a fixed, chamber-shaped insert. Instead, the inside diameter of the aluminum collar indexes off the shoulder of the case and becomes your datum. The neck sticks into the cutting chamber and the cutter takes it down.
The plastic collets act as guides. As you tighten the retaining ring, the fingers close around the case body. You control how tight or loose it feels. Adjusting the cutter is straightforward. The body threads up and down on the cutter housing in a similar way to the Tri-Way. The best feature is the set of witness marks that let you dial in your trim length with real precision. I appreciate that because I’m tired of the guess-and-check approach used on most trimmers in this style.
Everything can be adjusted by hand. No Allen keys or special tools. As long as things stay put, that’s a positive. The cutter looks like it could have been pulled off any RCBS, Redding, or Forster trimmer. Four cutting edges and a central hole, but no pilot screw.
Setup and First Cuts
For this test I’m trimming 303 British. It’s the perfect cartridge for this trimmer. I don’t load enough to justify a dedicated trimmer, but trimming by hand is not my idea of a good time. The 303 Brit is a bottleneck case that headspaces off the rim, and the shoulder is not as defined as at 30-06 case but it is larger then a 300 Blackout. The brass I have is old, mixed headstamp, and has seen plenty of use.
Setup was simple. It was obvious which aluminum collar matched the shoulder and which plastic collet worked best. I kept everything loose for the initial pass. I adjusted the guide collet until the case fed smoothly with a reasonable amount of resistance. Then I set the cutter body so it barely kissed the mouth of the case. I measured that case, checked the trim-to length, used the witness marks to dial it in, locked the cutter body, and fired up the drill press. I set the VFD to 800 RPM.
The first case overshot the target. I measured the error, backed the body off by that amount, locked it down, and ran the next case. That one hit the target perfectly. The next matched it. So far, so good. One thing I actually liked is that the body of the trimmer stops spinning when the case is inserted. Chips don’t get flung across the room and you can clearly see the cutter working.
Then I checked the cut for squareness. I rotated the case 90 degrees and measured again. The length shifted by two thousandths. That’s not good. Holding the case and calipers up to the light confirmed it. I could see a faint sliver of daylight, which means the case mouth wasn’t square.
This is where things started going sideways. An out-of-square case mouth irritates me more than it probably should. I tried tweaking the alignment collar, rotating the case during the cut, and checking the cutter tightness. Then it hit me. I wasn’t sure these cases had all been sized properly before trimming. Since this trimmer indexes off the shoulder, inconsistent shoulder bump will absolutely cause trim length variation, and that can create a crooked cut.
So I reset. I ran every case through a sizing die, tossed them into the tumbler, and annealed them afterward. It’s overkill, but it’s my routine and it keeps everything uniform. It took a couple of days to get the brass processed the way I wanted. That gave me time to think about how the cutter works and what might cause an out-of-square cut.
Before trimming again, I tore the trimmer down, cleaned it, and reassembled it carefully, making sure every part was seated correctly. None of that made any difference. The first few cuts were just as crooked as before.
At this point I tried looking at the problem from the designer’s perspective. I assumed three things:
- The team that built this tool are reloaders.
- They would be bothered by crooked case mouths.
- They care enough about their product that they wouldn’t intentionally release something that would fail when used as intended.
So I went back to the manual and review it again. There is a line telling you to rotate the case 180 degrees to get a square cut. I decided to take that seriously. Because the body of the trimmer can rotate independently of the cutter, you can hold the body of the trimmer still while rotating the case. If you want to get more aggressive, you can rotate the body one way and the case the other, especially at the end of the cut, while keeping steady upward pressure so the case stays tight against the aluminum collar.
This worked better than expected. I inspected each case and slowly dialed in the technique. If you push the case straight up into the cutter, the way you would with the World’s Finest Trimmer or the Tri-Way, the Frankford trimmer will consistently cut the mouth out of square. Sometimes it’s slight, sometimes it’s obvious. If you twist the case and the trimmer body in opposite directions at the end of the cut while keeping upward pressure, the mouth comes out square.
The downside is that your fingers pay the price. Pushing the case upward while twisting it, multiplied by about 250 cases, almost gave me a blister. Can you get a square cut? Yes. Is it comfortable or easy? Not really. There is room for improvement.
There’s a lot of looseness in the assembly. The plastic collet doesn’t provide much lateral support if the case isn’t perfectly straight. There’s also some end play in the bearing and cutter stack. Twisting the case seems to overcome this by helping the case settle into a consistent position inside the trimmer body. Rotating the parts against each other forces that seating to happen faster and more reliably.
The Results
This batch of 303 British was about 250 cases, which I consider a fair test. It gave me enough time to get familiar with the trimmer and develop a rhythm. Unfortunately, even after figuring out that rotating the case and trimmer body was the key to getting a square cut, I never fully trusted the process. I checked every case that came off the trimmer, which slowed me down quite a bit.
Before checking length I did a quick ID and OD deburr to avoid false readings. This also gave me a way to see if a cut needed correction. If the case was slightly long, I could put it back in the trimmer, give it another twist, and the shiny areas on the mouth would show where material was still being removed.
After finishing, I mixed the brass in a bucket and pulled a sample of twenty-five cases to measure. For general purpose brass I hold a tolerance of plus or minus four thou. My target was 2.212 inches.
Overall, my results were not as consistent as I would have liked. Based on the measurements, about nine percent of the cases were either above my max limit of 2.216 or below the min limit of 2.208. My Lee Enfield No. 4 Mk2 probably won’t care, but plenty of handloaders wouldn’t be thrilled with that spread.
There are some variables at play here. This was mixed headstamp brass. Even after full-length sizing, you can still get variation in shoulder angle or shoulder diameter depending on how the brass springs back. Since this trimmer indexes off the shoulder via the aluminum collar, that will affect trim length. So take these numbers with a grain of salt.
Most handloaders trimming cases in bulk, are likely trimming mixed head stamped brass. Sometimes we hunker down and buy up a bunch of single lot premium brass for those very special occasions when we want to smack a gnat at 400 yards. Personally, I have found that it is more the exception then the rule.
As a future follow-up, I’ll run a single-lot batch and see if the consistency improves. I don’t believe the mixed brass contributed to the out-of-square mouths, but it is plausible that it did contribute to length variation.
I ran my tests using a drill press, which is what I believe is the best way to use these types of trimmers with. However there is a lot of people who are going to use them on a hand held drill. Based on the outcomes I have seen on a drill press, I do not have high hopes that it’s going to be any easier to get a square case mouth on a drill. You’ll also end up with brass shavings everywhere. I have this on the short list of tests to run, and I’ll update this review with the results.
The Bottom Line
Is it worth the seventy dollars I paid for it?
I’m going to say yes, with caveats. Normally this style of trimmer is cartridge specific, so if you load wildcats or load several different cartridges, a universal trimmer makes sense. You just have to understand the limitations. It’s more finicky than a purpose-built trimmer, it requires more finesse, and you can’t expect to shove a case straight into it and get a perfect trim.
That said, it saves a lot of bench time compared to a hand-cranked lathe-style trimmer. It’s consistent enough that, if you really care about squeezing every bit of precision out of your loads, you can let this trimmer handle the bulk removal and then finish-square or fine-trim on an L. E. Wilson or any other hand lathe you prefer.
If you are interested in trying the Frankford Arsenal Universal Precision Case Trimmer it can be purchased from any number of retailers that sell reloading tools. I have provided a few of our affiliate links below.
Let me know if your experience with this tool has been any better or worse, or what tricks you have found get around the issue with crooked case mouths.
Thanks,
Jay
If your interested in seeing other reviews, here’s the Giraud Tri-Way Trimmer review we covered previously.
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