Review of .22 LR to .224 swaged bullets with die set from BT Sniper
I just received the first .224 die set from BT Sniper! What a work of art. Beautiful workmanship, and quality machining! Well thought out design for everything.
I will take pictures later, but I was so excited that I just had to come up from the shop, and do this write up!!
My target was 55 grain bullets which would be appropriate for shooting in my AR15's. I wanted hollow points, or something close to that. Brian hit it perfectly on the weight, and shape. The resulting bullets are extremely accurate weight wise, have a wonderful profile, and are very concentric to the axis line.
I bought a wire extrusion die from Lafaun, and use 187 grain cast Lee TL style boolits as the raw material for that. I found that if I coated the castings with Xlox thinned out with mineral spirits, it helped the wire flow through the die easily. And, this leaves a slight residual coating of lube on the wire, which eases the later core swage (makes the cores accurate weight) operation. The wire extrudes at .187" diameter, which is perfect for these cores.
I made my own wire chopper, based on the idea of a paper cutter. Two pieces of angle iron, with a pivot, clamped to my bench top. I feed the wire through two holes, to a stop, which gives me a 47.9 grain pre-form.
I run the pre-form into a Lafaun core swage die. Brian is allowing me to use the one he got from Lafaun until he makes me one of his own. I'm getting 46 grain swaged cores.
I'm de-rimming brass on a BT Sniper de-rimming die set. I found that the Federal brass is thicker, and so I am weeding those out, along with any brass that has a deep cut from the gun's firing pin. I am bringing home .22 LR brass from my club, and it's a variety of manufacturers, shot from a variety of guns. The ones that had nicked edges from the firing pins were the ones that seemed to split, crack, and punch through while de-rimming.
After de-rimming, I am annealing by placing the de-rimmed brass pieces on top of 10d (ten penny) plain (not galvanized.... the zinc would be poisonous) finish nails. I have a row of thirty nails. I can go down the row with a hand held propane torch pretty fast, stopping at each one until it glows. I tried MAPP gas, but found that it was too hot, melting the brass sides. Propane is perfect for my needs, and the priocess moves along quickly. I dump the brass from the board onto a metal tray for cooling.
The next operation is to seat the cores in the annealed brass. A touch of swage lube makes that job amazingly easy. Once I have the cores seated, I set up the point form die.
The point form die will handle any weight of bullet. Anything less than 55 grains will require trimming the brass. Anything over that weight will have an exposed lead tip, but it's all possible in this die.
The actual pressure to form the point can be achieved by pushing on the press arm with two fingers (my thumb and index finger). I have the die set so that at the full mechanical stop of the press the bullet is perfectly formed. The resulting bullets are slightly hollow pointed, and the base bottom is flat, with slight curvature on the edges. The form is very precise, and repeatable. The bullets eject with the automatic ejector with almost no force whatsoever. With some practice, I am sure I could easily exceed BT Snipers production rate in his video.
I have some sample parts cleaning as I type this. I will post images soon, and even show you some of the sample parts that Brian sent along with the die set.
Needless to say, I am very impressed and very happy!
This is a die set that is above Corbin's quality. I've never seen a Blackmon die set in person, so I can't compare this set to that. But I have seen a Corbin set in person, and this is nicer.
Pictures will follow.
P.S. I will have samples available for people to take a look at as soon as I get enough cores made, etc.... So far, it was small qtys of everything.
Review of .22 LR to .224 swaged bullets with die set from BT Sniper
Haven't built/bought a canulere tool yet. Only had three get pushed in so far, and I prob have 1500 shot through my AR. I think I'm loading them a touch to short on oal tho, I'm going to play around and see if I can get that performing better.
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