Anyone experiment much with sizing copper jacket bulelts? Wondering how it affects accuracy.
My father has a K98 with a .329" bore, and he's been sizing .338" bullets. I was thinking of getting him some 300g .333" Woodleighs to try, but not if they're likely to go sideways.

CH4D make swage tool IF your punch fit perfect the bullet shape that can be accpetable for hunting accuracy , to make the operation easy make several steps to avoid big ships and bullet distorsion

better is to start with low cost bullet as Sierra or Hornady ( I prefer Hornady ) and don t forget the lube and to clean your dies often to remove copper trace

good shooting

DAN TEC

Bwana-be
I may be burned at the stake, after hours on the rack for saying this .......
Why not cast bullets?
A cast bullet for your dad's rifle will fit perfect, perform the job and cost less.
Jim

Nothing against cast, in fact, he does lots of that himself, and if all goes well with this rifle (hes having it chambered to 8x57 Imp) he'll likely buy a mold for it. But they don't do the same sort of job as a jacketed RNSP.
He has a Lee sizer, I believe, so it's not going to custom fit the bullet.
Guess the only way to know is to find out....

Who says he's got to size them? Certainly .003" over groove diameter has long been accepted as OK for cast bullet shooting, and I don't think another mil or two will really matter, as long as the bullets don't expand the case neck enough to interfere with chambering. That can be your limiting factor with bullet diameter. But that rifling leade makes a mighty good sizing die.

"NotRicochet" wouldn't a .003 oversize bullet increase the breech pressure. I would hate to have a gun blow up in my face. Lead cast bullets are good for fun but I have never gotten any real speed out of them to much barrel leading.
Swede44mag

Cast bullets are much softer than copper jackets (even the hardest cast alloys), and they have lube grooves that provide a ready place for the metal to go that's displaced as the bullet's forced into the rifling. And they're lubricated. Even with considerable oversizing of the bullet, they don't take an inordinate amount of force to start into the rifling. If you consider the force that's applied (through a leverage system) to force bullets into a sizing die in a lubri-sizer, it's pretty small compared to what's available from the burning powder. I don't think a few thousandths oversize is going to run the pressure way up. And it's been commonly done for a long, long time.

[ 11-12-2003, 03:32: Message edited by: NotRicochet ]

Oops! Went to edit my post to fix a typo and posted a reply with a quote instead. Can't delete it, so I edited it out.


[ 11-12-2003, 03:34: Message edited by: NotRicochet ]

you can use too special groove bullet with the first driving band out of the case to ride the groove that safe and avoid any over size loaded neck

good shooting

DAN TEC

I'd go up not down.

Check with both of the Corbins to see about having a bump up die made to swage readily available .323s to .329. No loose cores from jacket springback.

Bwana, this subject is something that's intrigued me for a while now and the next time I get some disposable income, I'll try it out. I think the "tools" you'll need are simple and cheap.

Contact Lee or check their website ( http://leeprecision.com/catalog/browse.cgi?1069370783.5735=lubesize.html ). They make a "bullet sizer" kit that is generally designed for sizing cast bullets, but does work with jacketed bullets, too. The principle is simple: the bullet rests on a flat baseon the ram, pointing tip up. You simply raise the ram up and the bullet is "squashed" up through the die and is collected out the top.

I've tried running .312 Hornady jacketed bullets through a .309 Lee sizer, and it works great. The effort required is about the same as resizing a case.

The thing that makes this prospect interesting is that Lee will make you a sizer kit in any size you want for $25 U.S. Say you want to have a jacketed bullet that measures .313 for an old Lee-Enfield (my plan for the future). Why not get a custom sizer kit in .320, .317 and .313? You can then take 8mm (.323 bullets) and size them down in increments and end up where you want. The total outlay for the proposed tools would only be $75.

I'd very much like to hear stories from people who've tried these inexpensive Lee sizer kits for sizing down jacketed bullets.

"P-17" Sounds like a reasonable way to resize jacketed bullets but don't you stand a chance of getting them off center with the point? A possible concentricity problem dealing with jacket bullets and not using real swage dies? Just my 2cents worth.

Swede44mag

Swede, the Lee pushthoughs have the nose go in first and they do a real good job of self aligning. The real problem is that the core stays permanently smaller and the jacket has some springback to it. Even doing it in stages, you'd wind up with the cores loose enough to affect accuracy with as much reduction as is talked about here.

I can only think of a couple of examples where you have available bullets just enough over the desired size to make sizing down a good idea. You might want to take .224s down a bit for use in some of the older tight Hornets and you might want to take .321s for the .32 Win down to .318 for J bore 8mm. If the .321s are now hard to get, you might take some .323s down. Those are the only cases I can think of that I would try.

That may well be the case, or it may not. It's certainly worth a try, though, in my opinion.

What about using bonded core bullets? Would that alleviate the spring-back problem?