Home made die, an unusable success
Hey guys got back to the friends shop yesterday and sat down in front of the lathe for the second time. I salvaged a piece of scrap 1" steel rod to practice with and after a quick lesson on cutting threads on a piece of alunimum he turned me loose.
I spent an hour or so drawining up plans in autocad for a .458 swage die. Basicly copied the CH design in function. Everything looked correct so away I went.
I found a rotery file that matched the diminsions of a 458 bullet profile and was actually .460 so a quick touch brought it down to about .456 or so. After boreing out the hole and boring the profile with the rotary file everthing looked good. Dimentions was just under size allowing for a final polish to size of .458. Well I got a little happy with the polish and managed to overshoot to .464.
Lessons learned. I did make a pretty nice bullet with it and was very impressed with the overall outcome of the die. I will perfect it soon as a little closer attention to final dia should solve my problems. Maybe I will fix this die up for .500 bullets. Anybody making .500 bullets in a 7/8th dia die?
Well I must say it was alot of fun and how amazing it is to be able to make your own tools and bullets. I have said before that I thought a degree of magic was involved with making dies and bullets. Now I am fealing a bit like a magician:mrgreen:. Still don't have it all figured out and making riffle bullets is my main goal here. Don't have the know how yet to put some dies together. I'm keeping at it though.
Good shooting,
BT
P.S. Pic is of my die with ch .429 die in background and oversized 240 grain .458 bullet.