I’ve started running my virgin brass through my expander ball/bushing die for my 6GT before loading, and then when sweating bullets about one in every 10 rounds i suddenly feel a lot less resistance in the seating die and the bullet seats like 4-5 thousandths more than the rest. Is this just the inconsistency of the hornady brass or am I somehow doing something wrong? i feel like I don’t have that issue when I don’t do anything to the brass besides chamfer/deburr
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Bushing die on virgin brass
- Thread starter Kspence49
- Start date
You'll probably want to keep your expander ball in their until you replace it with a mandrel die and mandrel. The difference you are feeling now is probably due to un-lubed case necks, new bare brass is sticky. After you have fired them they will have carbon in there that acts as a lubricant as you seat the bullet. Unless you clean it out. Several ways to lube the neck if you want to get into that.
Oh interesting, so the bullets that feel less resistance might have gotten some lube or something in the neck? That would make sense to me. Once I get my case prep station here I’ll be brushing the necks but until then I might grab a copper brush out of my cleaning kit and run it through my brass. Is it worth running the new brass through the expander ball without the bushing in there?
I use a mandrel, so I remove the expander ball from my sizing dies. If you’re not using a mandrel you still need to size the neck dia somehow. Relying solely on the bushing in your sizing die to set neck tension assumes that the neck thickness is the same across all your brass.
The 1 in 10 with light seating pressure, set those aside. Then measure things. Could be the necks are too soft. Could be the necks are a lot thinner. Create a separate lot of these cases.
Here is another "it depends" situation.
At some point in your journey into precision loading/shooting, you have to decide how fine a point to put on brass prep and seating force. That is a mouthful since there are expansive implications from saying this with all the additional instruments, tooling, and processes it requires if you say it.
Some day you will want to play the neck tension game and see how much neck tension variation matters to you. This is where things like annealing, using force measurement to seat, and even neck turning potentially come into play.
You may find all you need to try is to ignore this because it doesn't affect you. (This is difficult with a standard seater in a standard press, and easy with an arbor seater in an arbor or using an AMP Press.)
Another possibility is you work the virgin brass more to get them all to normalize to the same neck tension. Or, you may postpone till after the first firing cycle and see if that makes them all the same.
Lots of permutations on the options and outcomes. Some brands of brass are less likely to cause these questions and they spoil folks who will never know what it took to turn surplus sow's ears into silk purses.
Instruments, tooling, and controls cost money, lots of it. Sometimes, just buying better brass to start with can bypass all that fuss. You will just have to decide how far down the rabbit hole you go. Another way to go is to get with friends who already have things like inline seater dies and an AMP press. Have them help you measure the seating forces and run your testing to see if it even matters to you, then decide how to go forward.
