Home made dies

Beautiful. I am a hack with a dremel and a drill, trying to make dies for reloading 22lr. It is interesting how much the stuff I (try to) make resembles the real thing. Only mine looks like some hack made it with a dremel and a drill. I have a probably stupid question. I have been using grade 8 bolts to make dies. They don't last very long. I use HSS for the punches. I have just assumed that professionals cannot make dies out of HSS either because you have to grind off the material instead of drilling it. Is that so? Or can you guys actually use HSS to make the dies? If so what do you use to bore it and ream it?

Typically dies are made of steels with a higher carbon content like 4140 or 4130. I like to use D2, but steels like O2 or A2 could also be used. These are tool steels not HSS. With out looking at the data sheets, I believe these steels have a higher carbon content then a typical grade 8 bolt. You would machine these (or dremel these) in the annealed state then harden and polish prior to use.

bevelling the base

Howdy
I'm making some basic 9mm tc swage dies with some success
The major hurdle seems to be getting a bevel on the base,how do you do it?
MARK

Hi there!
Many thanx and respect to brave men, who doesn't afraid to try, make mistakes and tell us, army of newbies about that!
Gathering all the info about creation of dies i-ve found this! http://www.sebagosales.com/swagedbullets/
Reading Rifle_Mag_Number_6_swaging_article found all the sizes i was searching. Enjoy, who didn't see this before

B and A did write a book about machine shop technologies They had many photos and designs showing the set uup and development of many tool and a section on the bullet dies
I wish I could have found that book in my friend estate, IT was great reading.
The dies were created at RIT { Rochester Tech Rochester NY The Makers were Ray Beihler and Walt Astles.
Ted was working some where along those Line , Only his dies were press dedicated Upside down Or in the ram
The standard quality dies of today usually are with the die in the top of the press and a simple ejection system mounted to the ram

Anybody care to update this thread with some more lapping and polishing tips. I am having trouble getting the points polished out.

Just some general drill stuff. In a past job we drilled quite a few holes fairly deep....example 1/8" hole 8" deep.

The key things I found were......
Use good drills, Titex or Gughring...either brand new or with machine ground points.
Have the drill aligned with the drilling axis, in a mill a drill that was not aligned the tip would run out..in a lathe I would indicate the drill with an indicator mounted on the work.
Bore a starting hole that the drill will BARELY slide into....sharp single point boring hole is best, on a mill we circle milled the hole.
In a cnc I would feed .0005" per revolution and run 70 SFM....I would peck after every .05" and I would make the return stroke stop .01" away from cutting...all of that can be translated to manual machining. Those numbers were mostly for H13 steel but will work for any tool steel.

The one time I saw a guy walk two drilled holes nearly an inch in 8" he said the drill tip was wobbling badly. That job there had a 1/2" spring pocket about 3" deep, then the 1/8" hole went from bottom of the 1/2" drilled hole clear out of the part. He also did not reach down into the finished 1/2" hole and carefully spot drill....and he had no dwell cycle on his half inch drill cycle...so the web thickness on his 1/2" drill probably gave him a bad area for the 1/8" drill to start.

Where you cannot bore a hole to start I have found it is very important to make sure your spot drill is let run so that all tool pressure is gone, if we were grinding we would call it "sparking out"..in a lathe I would run the spot drill up, lock the tailstock quill and let it dwell a bit. A 120 degree spotting drill would be best too, if you use a center drill use only the 118 tip......the actual center angle on a center drill EATS drill tips in materials like A2....the drill will be very vocal with it's displeasure :-).

These spotting drills are a good investment..they do not have any body relief.....in the trade center drills are used a lot but these are better. If you do some simple math you can make a decent corner break on a drilled hole by adjusting the depth of the spot drill too.

http://www.guhring.com/BrowseProduct...NC-Spot-Drills

From my work in that tool and die shop I was exposed to a lot of ID grinding in all kinds of steels and carbide. These kind of shapes and parts they would rough machine in a lathe leaving .01" on the inner dia and a few .001 on depth, atmosphere heat treat, ID grind leaving a few .0001" on ID side, then polish with 2-3 grades of diamond paste applied with a wooden dowel.

The "speed chucks" or polishing lathes used for polishing spun very fast...everybody did some polishing but a few folks did nothing BUT that, and they got very good at it. The polishing lathe was usually two speed, and setup so you faced the part while sitting down. Another key thing was wiping the ID before starting any polishing, shop dust will scratch the finish, and also key was wiping between grits...and keeping dowels separated for each grit of diamond. Also each part took some skill, sometimes you wanted to create a radius where there was a sharp corner, or you wanted to maintain the sharp corner, so your approach to each situation was different. I can see on a bullet die if one were not careful polishing where the ogive joins the body one could actually make that spot BIGGER than the body of the bullet :-)..not good.

The ID grinding totally eliminated the lapping, and allowed very close tolerance ID to be established after heat treat, or on carbide. Some tiny holes around .05" we still had to lap because they were too small to polish properly, we actually did ID grind them though.

These are the types of wheels we used....but for a job like this wheels would be cnc turned much like the reamers that were shown earlier, and we would plate CBN (Cubic Boron Nitride) onto them in house, they would be made smaller than the bore.

http://3.imimg.com/data3/BG/YJ/MY-12...ls-250x250.jpg

Then a fairly simple cnc id grinder would be used, it would run the tool in, feed out to diameter, walk down the bullet point a bit, or then stroke out of the cavity...you set your stroke out to not bell mouth the hole (too far out) or to leave a taper (not far enough out). That machine was a fairly crude cnc conversion that had backlash in the ballscrews...but that feed out to dia and stroke out of the cavity process would be repeated about 4 times total...whole cycle took maybe 2 minutes.

Lots of this does not apply to home shop stuff, probably none of us me included have an ID grinder :-).

Hi, I am from India, where we dont get anything for reloading, so we have to do lot of Jugad work. I am a sports shooter and require ammunition .32 SWL Wadcutter and .32 acp for practice. I need help from esteemed members for making a swaging die for 32 Wadcutter in .312 diameter and a point forming die for making 32 acp jacketed bullet head from 8 mm OD soft copper pipe.
Please provide me with design details for both which I can give to some machinist to make dies for me.
Help will be highly appreciated.
Best regards.
Dr. Kitekar

Sent from my SM-N960F using Tapatalk

How did you make the cutter exactly? Do you have a tool grinder?
Thanks man.
MA

So I currently making some dies, and using silver steel as it is easy to machine, easy to heat treat and quench to R60, and polishes really well. As it's a first time I also have some 5160, 1045 and D2 to play with.

I'm having trouble boring the hole straight with no toolmarks with a purpose made reamer. Do you guys use a straight flute reamer for the initial hole, then just a cherry cutter for the ogive section, then polish?

I'm using a wooden dowel to lap and polish which isn't working awesome, just wondering if there are any other tricks here?
Can someone post a picture of their reamer?

Would love to see an entire video of this being done on youtube.
Cheers team.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ameenkitekar

Hi, I am from India, where we dont get anything for reloading, so we have to do lot of Jugad work. I am a sports shooter and require ammunition .32 SWL Wadcutter and .32 acp for practice. I need help from esteemed members for making a swaging die for 32 Wadcutter in .312 diameter and a point forming die for making 32 acp jacketed bullet head from 8 mm OD soft copper pipe.
Please provide me with design details for both which I can give to some machinist to make dies for me.
Help will be highly appreciated.
Best regards.
Dr. Kitekar

Sent from my SM-N960F using Tapatalk

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I made a set of 32 dies for my Herters 9 ton press. They are 3 piece and easy if you have a lathe because a 5/16 reamer is readily available!
I made the nose punch radius with a 1/4” ball end mill.