45 acp problems

[dragonfire]

Well i cast my bullets ,sized to 452 ,loaded and went to the range today ,almost every round failed to let the gun return to battery, i checked my overall length and i'm good there ,so i came home and slugged my barrel,and i'm getting a 4515,any one got any ideas,i new to loading cast for the 45 acp ,thanks

[Orygun]

Crimp?
Do they seat in the barrel flush with the barrel hood?
Spring?

[dragonfire]

the gun function is good to go , i used the lee crimp on it ,if i seat it to 1.22 on the bullet i get it to fit almost flush

[Shottist]

I had the same prroblem with an AMT Hardballer. It shot factory ammo great but would not fully seat lead bullet reloads. I got a 45 ACP gauge from Dillon, and the reloads would not fully go into it. I "solved" the problem by running the rounds into a taper crimp die until they gauged "good". No more problems.

[dragonfire]

i tried a remington ,cci and speer ,still the same ,almost feels like the head of the bullet is catching in the chamber

[pa_guns]

Hi

What kind of bullet are you using?

Loading just about anything other than a 230 grain round nose requires some playing with the OAL.

After crimp the outer diameter of the loads should be below 0.470" at the mouth of the brass. Anything over 0.472 is going to cause trouble in most pistols. Some pistols only work if you get down to 0.468". Checking this is relatively straightforward. If you pull the barrel out of the pistol, the loaded rounds should drop easily into the chamber.

So much fun ...

Bob

[dragonfire]

i have the lee 228 grain bullet

[Ben]

Have you taken the barrel out of the pistol and used it as a gauge. The rounds should free fall down into the chamber by gravity and be level with the hood on the barrel or maybe .001 below. Pa guns mentioned this, but you didn't say whether or not you'd tried this important test for proper functioning.

If your reloaded rounds won't meet this test, you've either got the bullet seated out too far hitting the lands early or you've got some thick walled brass combined possibly with some bullets that are miking .452. Maybe a .451 bullet and some different brass may offer hope of smooth functioning.

Do you have a 45 ACP taper crimp die ?

Sounds like you need one.

Ben

[pa_guns]

i have the lee 228 grain bullet

Hi

Assuming it's the Lee 228 grain RN, that's about as standard as you can get for 45 acp.

An OAL around 1.260 should be about right. Taper crimp at 0.469 at the case mouth. They should feed like a champ.

Bob

[xr650]

How far out of battery is it? Is there only a crack or 3/4" gap?

I am working on problems w/ 230 gr. Lee tumble lube at the moment.

[Cayoot]

I had a similar problem with a 1911. I wanted to try a Factory Crimp Die, but didn't have access to borrowing one.

So what I tried instead was to load some .45 ACP ammo as normal, then I pulled the decapping pin out of my sizing/decapping die. I then ran my loaded cartridges in my sizing die (sans the decapping pin).

Volia! Now they feed just fine!

I never did get the FCD for the .45 ACP, this is because I had a universal decapping die.

I set up a turrent press so that I run my .45 acp in the following order:

1. Universal Decapping
2. Size
3. Bell/powder charge
4. Seat/Crimp
5. Turn turrent back to size die for final sizing.

All my .45s run great with this system, and it didn't cost me anything extra!

[pa_guns]

Hi

The 45 acp head spaces on the mouth of the cartridge. Doing the crimp exactly correct is very important. Spending $10 on a taper crimp die is money well spent. Modern 45 acp die sets pretty much all include a taper crimp die.

Bob

[Lloyd Smale]

ive owned a few tight chambered guns. Springfield is notorious for doing it. You can experiment by seating your bullets deaper until they work. A couple of my springfields needed swc bullets seated right at the edge of the driving band. Or send your gun in and have them open up the chamber a tad. Another thing to keep in mind is your springs. I change mine out ever 1000-1500 rounds if your springs are getting week it will efect your guns return to battery. One other thing that is sometimes overlooked with a semi auto is that you have to take care to make sure when your seating your bullets that you make sure your starting them in straight. Its real easy to get lacks when your loading on a progressive press.

[dragonfire]

the pistol is pretty much new ,i use the lee taper crimp on the ammo ,sometimes it will close just enough you can push the action closed and a couple other times its a pretty good sized gap ,it will close if i seat the bullet to 122 but to me that is to far to seat in the 45 ,the bullets come out of the mold right a 452 ,is it possible that i need to size the bullets to 451?

[pa_guns]

the pistol is pretty much new ,i use the lee taper crimp on the ammo ,sometimes it will close just enough you can push the action closed and a couple other times its a pretty good sized gap ,it will close if i seat the bullet to 122 but to me that is to far to seat in the 45 ,the bullets come out of the mold right a 452 ,is it possible that i need to size the bullets to 451?

Hi

In a world of infinite variety, anything is possible. With lead bollits, pretty much everybody runs .452 diameter in 45 acp.

Check and see if they drop into the chamber. That will quickly answer the .451 / .452 question.

Bob

[dragonfire]

Yep they drop right in , so if i set the bullet to 122 or 123 and they fit ,is it safe to shoot with it seated that deep?

[pa_guns]

Yep they drop right in , so if i set the bullet to 122 or 123 and they fit ,is it safe to shoot with it seated that deep?

Hi

Safe to shoot with reduced loads. At 1.220 or 1.230 OAL you probably will have significant feed problems on a properly set up pistol. Short bullets = steep angles = jam.

Bob

[dragonfire]

Well if i seat it to 122 it drops in right , i plan to run it at 122 with 4.0 of bullseye ,thats all i need for a plinking round ,thanks for the input fella's

[pa_guns]

Well if i seat it to 122 it drops in right , i plan to run it at 122 with 4.0 of bullseye ,thats all i need for a plinking round ,thanks for the input fella's

Hi

I keep assuming that your 122 is 1.220". Is that correct?

If you seat them to 1.260 they also should drop right in. If the don't then something else is wrong.

Bob

[dragonfire]

Bob , your correct ,if i seat it to 1.26 it will not go all the way into the chamber

[robertbank]

I agree with pa guns. You should not have to seat the bullet that deep. Go with 1.250 and let us know if they drop in or not. Make sure your crimp is .469 - .471 no more no less. They should feed like warm butter. Sounds to me like it is either a case of to long OAL or over belled cases not being crimped. I don't believe the brass thickness would be an issue. If the above specs don't work then I would take the gun to a 'smith as there is something way out of line with the chamber cut.

Take Care

Bob

[pa_guns]

Bob , your correct ,if i seat it to 1.26 it will not go all the way into the chamber

Hi

Ahh, that's a problem.

Have you scrubbed out the chamber real well? A brass brush may be required.

What is the diameter of the bullets at the case mouth. You need a number that's good to about a thousandth of an inch. These days a $12 Chinese micrometer is a good way to get that kind of accuracy.

Bob

[MtGun44]

Failure to taper crimp is THE most common cause of this problem.

Save time, buy a taper crimp die and set it up to push half the thickness
of the case mouth brass into the bullet (you will need a magnifier to
see this).

Also make sure the chamber is clean, hard residue can cause this too.

Taper crimp ! This is critical for reliable 45ACP ammo.

Also, set you LOA to match a factory ball round. which the military sets to
1.266 - 1.2675. This is for basic feeding reliability.

Bill

[dragonfire]

I have the lee factory crimp die, is there a differance from the lee taper crimp die and the die i have?

[pa_guns]

I have the lee factory crimp die, is there a differance from the lee taper crimp die and the die i have?

Hi

The Lee die should do a taper crimp if you set it up correctly.

Setup is tricky, a crimp of .472 is way to big and a crimp of .468 is dangerously small. The die needs to be carefully set up to function properly.

Bob

[35remington]

Please read this post, because I shoot the Lee 228-1R that you use.

1.250-1.270" is not the correct length for the 228 Lee Bullet. 1.220" is.

The Lee RN has a short, non standard ogive. That's why the "1R" instead of the "2R."

The gun won't chamber the longer length cartridge because the bullet is hitting the rifling and preventing complete chambering. If your gun will run at 1.220" use it. I cannot get a 228-1R to chamber at any longer length either.

The resulting round is non standard, in that it is not a factory ball duplication round. It is quite a bit shorter. Likely it is less reliable than Lee's 230-2R, which is a factory ball duplication bullet.

If your gun does not feed the 228 reliably, buy the Lee 230 2R or the Lyman 452374, which are a much more faithful reproduction of factory ball rounds.

It ain't the gun you're using, it's your bullet.

[bobk]

Some .45s do not headspace on the case mouth, particularly old military guns. Some of those chambers were so long, the extractor limited the case movement. Even with a decent chamber, you soon develop a headspace problem, because the cases get shorter, the more you reload them (ever trim a .45?). Thirty years ago, I shot a bazillion Speer 200gr. SWCs, usually over 6.5 of Unique. Eventually I went to using the OAL to provide a reliable headspace. I would remove the slide, barrel, etc. Then I set the bullets long, inserted them into the chamber, and attempted to bring the slide into battery. I continued to seat them deeper until the slide would close. I used feeler gauges to measure a go-no go. .005 was a go, .009 was a no go. This gave me uniform headspace with varied lots of cases.
I never did much with this with j-bullets. I usually carried factory loads, and shot cast or swaged bullets. One cautionary note: If you have to seat the bullets deeply to get them to function, you are also raising pressures. That, combined with Bullseye, could be a disaster. I never use a powder that would allow me to double charge a case without having a mess all over the bench. This can result in cussing, but you never end up with any "dynamite" loads.
Bob K

[pa_guns]

Please read this post, because I shoot the Lee 228-1R that you use.

1.250-1.270" is not the correct length for the 228 Lee Bullet. 1.220" is.

The Lee RN has a short, non standard ogive. That's why the "1R" instead of the "2R."

The gun won't chamber the longer length cartridge because the bullet is hitting the rifling and preventing complete chambering. If your gun will run at 1.220" use it. I cannot get a 228-1R to chamber at any longer length either.

The resulting round is non standard, in that it is not a factory ball duplication round. It is quite a bit shorter. Likely it is less reliable than Lee's 230-2R, which is a factory ball duplication bullet.

If your gun does not feed the 228 reliably, buy the Lee 230 2R or the Lyman 452374, which are a much more faithful reproduction of factory ball rounds.

It ain't the gun you're using, it's your bullet.

Hi

That's crazy stuff. I'd dump the 228 and get a 230 in a hurry ....

Bob

[35remington]

"That's crazy stuff. I'd dump the 228 and get a 230 in a hurry ...."

Me too.

That's why I have a 228-1R AND a 230-2R.

[35remington]

"Even with a decent chamber, you soon develop a headspace problem, because the cases get shorter, the more you reload them (ever trim a .45?)"

Bob, not quite true. The 45 ACP was designed and toleranced to headspace off the case mouth. The case would have to be very, very short to headspace off the extractor. The firing pin of the 1911 protrudes far enough in front of the breech that it will fire short rounds, and headspacing is still off the case mouth unless, as you mention, you set it up to headspace off the bullet. In many cases you or I set the pistol up to headspace off the bullet, but this does not mean that the cartridge will headspace on the extractor if this is not done and the case is short. In actuality, it is still headspacing on the case mouth.

Only if it is very, very short - considerably shorter than any likely to be encountered length of even a frequently handloaded case - will it headspace on the extractor.

Headspacing off the extractor is undesirable, leading to misfires and poor accuracy. Ol' Mose wasn't dumb. He toleranced the pistol so that would not happen.

Handloader magazine pretty much killed the "headspacing off the extractor" myth. Even for somewhat short often fired cases. Information on request.

[bobk]

35remington,
I was going on things that I had read in the past, so it was time to do an actual check. Short answer: my gun would headspace on the extractor. I measured some Federal cases that had been fired, but not a lot. They went .884 - .887. I found an old cci blazer case, which obviously had only been fired once. It went .991. I then measured the chamber depth. The first measurement was from barrel hood to chamber mouth, and it went .902, Then I put the barrel in the slide, and here's where I got sloppy. My feeler gauges are out in my truck somewhere, and it's 10 degrees out there! So, I took an Amerigas fill notice and doubled it. It was a half decent gauge, slipped in with just a little drag. It microed .016. Boltface to chamber is .918, in this gun, which is a commercial Colt which hasn't been fired any great amount. This works out to .027 headspace. If I put the case in the chamber, close it, and lightly pry on the case head with a knife blade, the air gap between the forward part of the rim and the extractor disappears. I used a light shining from the top of the slide, viewing from the bottom, to observe this.
Maybe a Gold Cup would be different. Just had a thought; it may be that the headspace never comes into play, or not much. The round feeds, and you end up with the case head against the slide boltface. The firing pin strikes the primer, and fires the round before it moves the case much, due to the inertia of the loaded round.
We could start a thread on .45 chambers, but the thing I wanted to emphasize the most was the danger of deep seating. This is something I'm being real careful about with the short-necked .400 Corbon barrel.

Bob K

[bobk]

Correction: the blazer case was .891, not .991. Sorry!

Bob K

[35remington]

Bob, something about the setup is drastically wrong, and I can't completely diagnose it over the internet.

The 1911, in its tolerances, was designed NOT to headspace off the extractor with all but deliberately very short cases and accidentally very long chambers. Your chamber appears to be in spec, but something may be wrong somewhere else. The total headspace measurement to breech appears to be undesirably long. Any headspace that allows a .45 ACP case to headspace on the extractor on cases of this length is undesirable and needs correction. Your handloads may work fine since they are headspacing on the bullet, but factory ball may not be able to headspace in that way.

The "headspace on the extractor" bit is very infrequent, more so than many would have you believe. A gun writer that maintained that the .45 ACP somewhat frequently headspaced off the extractor had to recant in public after being corrected in print.

Get that gun looked at. If your rounds headspace on the extractor for whatever reason you have problems that need correcting.

Headspacing on the extractor is so very undesirable that steps must be taken to correct it. Check your extractor for underlength as well.

[pa_guns]

Hi

A "full length" 45 acp case should be .898" long. A "go" gage is also .898" long for the obvious reason. A 45 acp no-go gage is .914" long. A 45 acp field gage is .920".

Firing pin protrusion on a 1911 is nominally 0.060~0.070", but it can be quite a bit longer than that without causing problems. Up around 0.120 you will be piercing primers.

The unknown in the equation is just how deep a dent you need to make in a primer before it goes boom. If you guess that it's 0.020" then:

Properly headspaced pistol is at 0.913" long. Max length brass is 0.898, dent is 0.045". Gun goes boom. Same pistol should do just fine down to 0.873" long brass.

Brand new pistol, minimum chamber, maximum length brass, dent is 0.060 deep. With brass at 0.858" the gun still should go boom.

Depending on what you have for headspace, firing pins, and brass, the pistol probably will do just fine with no extractor at all down to below 0.870".

The extractor on a 45 is very easy to pull at the range. It's an easy experiment to run, and it will give you real data. Give it a try!

Bob

[35remington]

pa, thanks for the numbers. Food for thought.

[bobk]

35remington,
I checked another .45. This one is a Commander (the aluminum frame), circa mid '70s. The chamber depth from the barrel hood is .898, and the folded bill was tight in the barrel hood to slide boltface dimension, so the overall headspace would be .006-.007 less. Interestingly, the barrel out of the other .45, a Combat Commander, had slightly less clearance from the hood to the boltface, and would probably have very close to the same headspace as the issue barrel. The Blazer case, chambered as before with the issue barrel, could not be pried so that the rim contacted the extractor. It appears that the stack up of production tolerances allows some guns to headspace on the extractor.

Now, as PA-GUNS said, this probably never happens. I'm curious about gun function with no extractor, but it's 0 degrees here! I see by your profile that you're from Nebraska, so you can appreciate that I ain't gonna scratch that itch today. What I think actually happens is that the firing pin fires the cartridge before it actually moves the cartridge much, and the case head plants itself on the boltface, and stays there via residual pressure, then inertia, until it contacts the ejector. The extractor may be acting more as a pivot point for the process, rather than actually dragging the case out of the chamber. If the firing pin were driving the cartridge into the chamber, we might get the appearance of flattened primers. Goes like this: firing pin drives case mouth into chamber, fires cartridge. Then, the primer backs out under pressure and expands slightly, and next the case recoils back into the boltface, reseating the primer, but with the primer filling out the primer pocket to the absolute edges. I never saw that, regardless of how stupid my loads got.

I don't think the first gun I measured is doing anything wrong. .45 brass seems soft, and that's why it gets shorter. When the brass has a lot of reloads on it, the casehead gradually sets back until I begin to get extractor nicks on the front of the case extractor groove. Then they go in the recycle coffee can. But this is all a moot point. Set the OAL to limit headspace, and taper crimp, roll crimp, hell maybe no crimp if you have large bullets, and it will work fine. Just don't seat too deeply.

Bob K

[pa_guns]

Hi

The 45 acp has a pretty well documented process when it fires:

The firing pin forces the cartridge forward in the chamber until it stops. By design this is when the case mouth hits the front of the chamber.

The rest of the firing pin motion dents the primer, making it go boom.

Pressure expands the walls of the cartridge "nailing" in in place forward in the chamber.

The same pressure drives the primer out of the case head for an instant in some cases.

The pressure then builds and stretches the case so that the case head goes flush against the breech face on the slide. At this point the case is as long as the maximum headspace dimension.

Pressure drops pretty fast as the bullet moves down the barrel. As it does so the brass springs back. The spring property is why you use brass in the first place.

The net result of all this, amazingly enough, is that you move brass out of the walls of the case and into the web. Strange but true ...

Bob

[BD]

Does the barrel in question have any throat? The chamber dimensions of most modern 1911's are usually very precise. On the other hand the throating, which is done by hand and "feel", can vary all over the place. I've seen a number of 1911s which came from the factory with no throat at all. The square ends of the lands started abruptly at the end of the chamber. In effect this means that the chamber mouth acting on the lip of the front drive band, or the bullet ogive hitting the ends of the lands, limits the seating depth which will chamber on any bullet other than a standard military ball nose profile.

You can check this by pulling the barrel and looking at the chamber. If it's been throated the ends of the lands at the chamber will chamfer smoothly out to groove diameter. If not, you'll be looking at the blunt ends of the lands.

If you're loading .452 boolits in a .451 groove diameter barrel with no throat, no amount of crimp will get the front drive band to smoothly enter the leade of the barrel until you've gone so far as to actually swage that drive band down. This situation will also commonly lead to minor leading in the first inch of the barrel as the lead which gets scraped off the oversize boolits is vaporised and then smeared into the bore by subsequent rounds.

Hope this helps.

BD

[JMax]

When building match pistols I always used a match finishing reamer to cut a lead in the rifling for shooting SWC and WC bullets. Perhaps a quick clean up with a finishing reamer is all that is required. The same thing was needed when shooting 255 gr SWC for bowling pin loads and when an H&G 292 230 TC bullet was used. There is a proper OL for the 45 ACP and one should stick to it. When I set my first Dillon RL300 up in 79 the procedure was to "Zero" the seating die using a 230 gr hard ball round and load every bullet from there. Reliable feeding and with the finishing reamer reliable operation.

[35remington]

Whatever you've got, whether long chamber or short, it's possible to ensure that the round does not headspace on the extractor in most instances. If function is otherwise reliable, then the extractor headspacing issue can be avoided with a shouldered lead bullet. These are pretty common.

FMJ might be another story. If accuracy is sub par with ball you might look at extractor headspacing as being a possible culprit.

I ain't shootin' outdoors here right now either save for some coyote hunting with my .257. It's gonna stay cold for awhile, so I see to my casting and loading to make sure I've got a bunch ready when it warms up.