So when I roll some of my reloaded 6.5x57 ammo on a smooth surface, I notice that the bullet does not spin perfectly about its axis. Presumably this can cause accuracy problems. Is neck turning the solution? If not, what?

TIA

A little witch craft.............

Run a search here on run-out, and you`ll find books worth of ways to help avoid it.

There are people here that think a wobbly bullet will cause terrible accuracy....and there are people here that think it might make a minor difference. It's usually caused by an expander spindle that's off center and pulls the case neck to one side or another as the case is withdrawn from the die. If you can work with someone with a concentricity gauge or buy one I will copy below a post that seems to work for most people....here goes

My $.02 worth---ALL dies with expander balls need tuning. Think about it....people chase concentricity issues of .003"......a piece of typing paper is .003" thick--what are the odds that the expander is not PERFECTLY centered in a die and can pull the neck off center that little bit??? Pretty good I'd say. Pull the expander stem out of the die (and now is a good time to clean the inside of the die). Run about 5 brass into the die and see if they come out concentric. If they do (and usually they will) you now have to try and get that stem centered on re-assembly. A great way that helps is to put a piece of very concentric brass up into the die to hold the stem in place as you tighten it down. Sometimes this takes 2 people unless you have 3 or 4 hands. AFter reassembly try sizing some brass and check runnout. If not good then do very small turns of the expander stem--probably 1/32 of a turn at a time. Resize some brass and repeat the small turns. At some point I can almost guarantee that you will get GREAT RUNNOUT CONSISTANTLY. (Somehow, someway the expander spindle will hit almost perfect centering in the die body) I have many dies that consistantly make less than .002" runnout after sizing with most of the brass at .001" and less. I own, hornady, redding, forester, rcbs, and lee dies. ALL OF THEM HAVE BEEN TUNED and most make fantastic ammo and all make good ammo!! I have never ever got a set of dies from any factory that made as good of ammo as those that I have done this simple work with.

I fought with this expander ball problem some years ago. I finally gave up and started swapping out my dies. I've only found two that are acceptable and hold runout to a minimum. The Redding NS bushing dies are good, but the best of all seems to be Wilson NS knock out die sets. These don't use an expander ball or even a standard press for that matter. You can do the job with the dies and a little rawhide mallet. Just one mans opinion. Best wishes.

Cal - Montreal

I gave up fighting with centering the expander spindle and ball assembly on conventional dies that have a threaded spindle, like rcbs, redding, lyman etc., I don't tighten the lock nuts that hold the spindle and leave them loose, expander ball finds it's own center and cannot pull the case neck out of alignment when the case is withdrawn from the die, runout problems disappear. I've resized thousands of cases this way and haven't bent any spindles or decapping pins. I put an index mark on the spindle above the locking nuts, and keep an eye on that and make sure it dosen't rotate up or down deep enough to bottom out on the web of the case and bend it. Easiest way to true a die is to let it true itself.

I got one of those RCBS case gauging units, and it did help me improve the accuracy of my loads.

I now remove the expander ball from all dies. I then expand the case necks using a Lyman M die (if loading jacketed, I back the expander plug out so that the "step" does not expand the case mouth).

This has loaded very concentric (and accurate) ammo for me in 4 different calibres.

I happened to have the Lyman M die because I also load cast bullets, so I tried it and it really improved things!

John

So for dies like the LEE Delux three piece dies on the full sizer die you can run a few cases and check them and then raise or lower the expander as needed to come to the proper place. But a consistancy gauge is a must to determine this I guess?

Oscar Makonka
How would you use this method on a lee die? The expander would either fall out or go way to high to do any good.

Oscar how would you use this method on a lee die? The expander would either fall out or push up and do nothing to the case neck.

Blob, nope, can't do it with Lee's or Hornadys as they don't have a threaded spindle.

[quote]A great way that helps is to put a piece of very concentric brass up into the die to hold the stem in place as you tighten it down. Sometimes this takes 2 people unless you have 3 or 4 hands.

Guys--the bottom line is try and hold the spindle in the middle as you tighten it down. You may have to take a couple tries at it....yes you will need a gauge to get it near perfect. Hornady dies have been a "diamond in the rough" for me...after some tuning some of the best runnout you will get out of any loaded ammo. Let me know if I haven't made this clear. kraky

There are many ways of trying to overcome runout introduced by the expander. Some good ones have been described above. Others include:

- use of a Lee Collet die for neck sizing - produces very straight ammo.
- both Hornady and Forster will hone (the neck portion of) one their FL dies to the dimension you specify. That way, you can get rid of the expander all together. This die modification costs in the order of $10 per die plus return postage.

- mike

Another thing which I think helps (but not sure) is when seating the bullet, just seat it halfway, then rotate it 180 degrees to finish seating.

I do a variation of Oscar's. Using an RCBS die, I FL size it, but without the expander spindle in place. Then in a second step, I engage the expander spindle no more than two threads so it's wobbly, then drive the expander down into the case neck. It works well - for me, better than the floating, o-ringed spindle from Forster with its partial neck and shoulder support. Cheaper, too.

The most useful practice I've found for reducing run-out is to sort the brass by neck thickness variation. (Neck turning doesn't help, since a neck thickness variance is extremely likely to be present in the rest of the case as well.) I sort my cases to those under 0.0015 variance, measured at multiple points around the circumference of the neck, and those over that size. I'll hunt with variance up to 0.0025, and destroy cases above that. At least I used to - bulk brass quality has become very much worse in the last couple of years.

Didn't know about honing to my desired diameter - thanks mho.

Jaywalker

Lee collet neck dies and Redding competition seaters solved the problem for me.

I have a lee collet die coming so maybe it will work well for me.