What is next? I have two tools coming from China, the first one will be used as a simple round nose bullet form. I will take wooden block castings from that tooling and try to understand pure round nose loading issues better before going to the next step.
Round nose tool cast forms can get turned into round flat meplat slugs on my lathe for testing, with various sized
cut to true meplats so as to see the best size to avoid loading issues and loading damage.
This avoids the sin of "going too far" on the can't go back tooling changes, a sin I have committed twice now.
These simple round nose forms can also be machined into hollow points so I can understand the loading characteristics of those hollow point forms.
A simple view of things long term says I could make up a whole bunch of simple powder coated round nose forms into loaded rounds, then build a simple aluminum round tool to slip over the assembled bullet and quickly drill machine the PC'd bullet make the final hollow point bullet form, or else maybe use the old RCBS lubricizer to top punch size a shallow hollow point into a bunch of the PC'd bullets before loading them.
Accuracy destroying balance errors may well enter into these somewhat crude hollow point methods. not good
I suspect any form of post PC machining could hurt accuracy, so some "totally captive" die steel based nose forming machining that takes place at the actual final sizing operation might be better for keeping as much "on center and perfectly balanced" accuracy as possible. As would starting out with the simplest, best most "accuracy stable" cast bullet form that is found out of all the testing.
In the function of the LEE push through die there is a limited length tight zone that does all the sizing, so if I made up a pusher spud that goes into the ram that just happened to push the bullet into the sizing die and leave it on purpose in that tight zone (to park the unmachined undamaged PC'd bullet right at that perfect constriction zone) then I could then come in from the top with an aluminum bushed drill driven conical tool that could cut some very on-center very consistent depth hollow point forms into that captive, on-center bullet. Then I would swap out the short spud that is on the press ram and then finish the sizing stroke and ejecting the bullet by pushing it only from the bottom.
Machining tool would look a lot like this (less the shouldered aluminum rod it is inserted into, of course).
Run out in this cutter would simply make a balanced, on-center very slightly larger diameter hollow point cavity.
Not many hunting bullets are actually needed, so some mild gyrations to make them are OK by me.