Tidbits About Bullet Seating - Mandrels, Neck Lube, etc.
- By Rocketmandb
- Reloading Depot
- 24 Replies
I'm working on testing methods and products and gathering data on bullet seating. I'll be posting some comprehensive data once I get to an appropriate point of collection, but I just got some interesting information that I though was worth sharing.
I bought an AMP Press a number of months ago and have been testing different neck lubes, different processes, annealing vs. not, etc. Tomorrow I'm heading out to BLM land to do some ~2k yard ELR with my 300, and some closer in stuff with my 6 BRA, which means tonight I'm doing a bunch of loading. For my 300, I tried two slightly different processes:
Process 1:
- Anneal
- Size
- Lube necks with moly (topic for another post, but I've found moly to be the best neck lube on annealed brass)
- Mandrel
- Trim
- Primer, charge, seat
Process 2:
- Anneal
- Size
- Lube necks with moly
- Mandrel
- Trim
- Lube a second time
- Primer, charge, seat
Below are the graphs from the AMP Press showing the difference. I did 16 on process 1 and 46 on process 2.
Process 1: Single neck lube before trim, primer, charge, etc.
Process 2: Neck lube before trim, then second neck lube before primer, charge, etc.
Notes:
- On process 1, some of the plots spike at the end because I needed to re-zero the press height
- You can see that the extra lube step on process 2 pretty dramatically brought in spread. It's about a 30lb spread on process 1 vs. a 16lb spread on process 2.
- I'll post the muzzle velocity results after I get back tomorrow.
- I'm expecting somewhat of an SD improvement from the set of process 1 vs process 2, as I've already documented a correlation between seating force SDs and muzzle velocity SDs in my Mandrel Musings thread.
- For my 6 BRA, the two different plots I've got show a stark difference - includes annealing vs. not for one firing. But there is also one other factor that plays a significant role that was unexpected. More on that later.
I bought an AMP Press a number of months ago and have been testing different neck lubes, different processes, annealing vs. not, etc. Tomorrow I'm heading out to BLM land to do some ~2k yard ELR with my 300, and some closer in stuff with my 6 BRA, which means tonight I'm doing a bunch of loading. For my 300, I tried two slightly different processes:
Process 1:
- Anneal
- Size
- Lube necks with moly (topic for another post, but I've found moly to be the best neck lube on annealed brass)
- Mandrel
- Trim
- Primer, charge, seat
Process 2:
- Anneal
- Size
- Lube necks with moly
- Mandrel
- Trim
- Lube a second time
- Primer, charge, seat
Below are the graphs from the AMP Press showing the difference. I did 16 on process 1 and 46 on process 2.
Process 1: Single neck lube before trim, primer, charge, etc.
Process 2: Neck lube before trim, then second neck lube before primer, charge, etc.
Notes:
- On process 1, some of the plots spike at the end because I needed to re-zero the press height
- You can see that the extra lube step on process 2 pretty dramatically brought in spread. It's about a 30lb spread on process 1 vs. a 16lb spread on process 2.
- I'll post the muzzle velocity results after I get back tomorrow.
- I'm expecting somewhat of an SD improvement from the set of process 1 vs process 2, as I've already documented a correlation between seating force SDs and muzzle velocity SDs in my Mandrel Musings thread.
- For my 6 BRA, the two different plots I've got show a stark difference - includes annealing vs. not for one firing. But there is also one other factor that plays a significant role that was unexpected. More on that later.
