Ya that lee 230gr bullet is a piece of dog ****. But it is an excellent platform to experiment with. You kept the nose long and unsupported with your swage die. That's good for slow bullets like a subsonic 300bo load. Add some speed and accuracy goes south real quick. Your 230gr 30cal bullet is a lot like that 22cal bullet I swaged. 1400fps & under it shoot lights out. Heat it up and forget it.
I played with that same lee 230gr bullet myself. But I went a different route.
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Crude drawing but you can see that I wa actually swaging the lee 230gr bullet and a 212gr .301" paper patch bullet. The other thing I did was make a short strong nose and tapered the bullets nose to fit the leade/throat of the chamber.
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In the post above is a picture of a swaged 30cal bullet. This was the jacketed test bed of that bullet that easily shot moa/10-shot groups @ 100yds.
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The real issue with lead bullets and hv is the stresses put on the bullet. Things like nose slump, rotational torque from the front of the bullet twisting in the lands while the back of the bullet is still being pushed forward and is in the case/ball throat. That's why I went with a tapered nose on the swaged bullet to mirror the fit of the leade/throat of the bbl. A as cast 311413 bullet that was chambered vs the same bullet that was swaged and chambered. Huge difference in the lengths of the land marks in the 2 bullets. A tight fit and true alignment ='s less stress on the lead/swaged bullet.
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Enter the bump die. I actually made 3 different bump dies and have a egan bump die. The bump dies conform the bullet to the leade/throat of the bbl. The compression of the bullet in the bump die also removes any voids in the bullet. Bump dies can also withstand the pressures of the hard alloys needed for hv bullets in the high powered rifles.
Ok great, got a good nose/bbl fit, got rid of any voids in the bullet. Chose a bullet design that has a strong short nose. Then tested alloys to find how hard of an alloy is needed to withstand high pressure hv loads in a 308w. Once I found a strong enough alloy I had problems with the base of the bullet and had flash from the al gc's. It took huge amounts of force to swage the hard alloy that was need to withstand the pressures/forces/torques that were applied to the lead/swaged bullets when loaded with high pressure hv loads. So I changed my gc maker to make a gc with a round edge.
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SWaging such a hard alloy was out so I went with bump dies and cast bullets. Put the rounded edged gc's on them and ran them in a bump die to form the nose on them. Then I put them in a herter's 9-ton press that uses top punches and a ejector rod that has a raised edge that mirrors the shape of the rounded gc's. The end result is a bullet that has had the nose bumped to fit the leade/throat of the bbl. Has the voids compressed out of the bullets. Has the bullets bodies trued to the nose of the bullet and the bases are trued/even and not deformed.
I started with a 300/308 1 in 12 twist 26" bbl varmint contour 4-groove bbl
Changed to a 1 in 10 twist 22" bull bbl 300/308 4-groove bbl
Then changed to a 1 in 11 twist 26'' varmint contour with a long throat cut in it for the 175gr smk bullets 301/308 4-groove bbl
A a bunch of testing with the other bbl's I changed bbl's again, this time a 30" varnmint contour match .340 chamber 1 in 14 twist 300/308 6-groove bbl. This is what the throat looks like in the custom 30" bbl.
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Anyway, swaging bullets is easy and doable for the 30cal's. Getting them to to go fast is another story. Just started playing with the hard alloyed bumped bullets last winter and plan of giving them 1 heck of a workout this winter.
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While that doesn't look like much there is 2 sighters on the bottom right target and 2 10-shot 100yd groups on the top 2 targets. Those bullseye's a 2.125", I chose to test in the 34gr to 35gr load range of h335 simply because I was getting 3"+ with the same bullet/load/rifle combo (see picture in post #56). Started adjusting the powder throw down and it landed on 34.7gr so that's what I tested.
I'm not knocking what anyone is doing & there's tons of testing to be done in this area. I've tested with cheap ebco bbl's to custom $450 shilen bbl's. Cheap lee molds to eagan nose pour molds along with making/testing different shaped gc's. Made bump dies for the lyman 450, rcbs rock chucker & herter's 9-ton press. Also made swaging dies for the herter's & rcbs presses. Can't even begin to tell you how many different alloys I tried/tested and ended up using a 4 to 1 ratio of 4 parts range scrap (8bhn/9bhn) to 1 part mono-type. The end result is a 16bhn/17bhn alloy. After all this I'm just now to the point where I can actually do some real testing (this will be year #3).
My goal is to cut groups in 1/2 when I do a head to head traditional cast vs bumped/swaged cast with hv loads that are 2500fps+. Right now I have 2600fps+ loads that are doing 10-shot 1 3/4" groups @ 100yds with traditional cast bullets.