Grade bolts for making straight through dies.

[just bill]

All I'm looking for is a bolt close to 4140 pre hard to practice making straight through dies. Grade 5 or grade 8 or even hardware store HR or CR steel rod. Tractor Supply has a lot of 1" bolts to convert to dies. My 70 year old Logan needs an awakening. Having to wait a year for dies I may use only once, why not try to make dies?????

[Darth-Vaj]

It’s a lot of process, time, trial and error etc... but given that you don’t have much else to do. Why not? And sounds like fun to make dies. It’s too bad I know next to nothing about machinery! Much less changing car oil...

[Nobade]

I have tried that, and don't recommend it. Bolts machine very poorly, and getting a good surface finish is quite difficult. Buying a stick of D2 die steel if you need to have heat treated dies is money ahead and will save you a lot of headaches. Or O1 for most uses that don't require quite the dimensional precision.

[rbuck351]

Not sure what kind of die you are wanting to make but I have made push through dies for boolit lube/sizers and for swaging down brass cases for reforming them from all thread which is not all that hard.
I drill them under size and then ream and polish to finish.

[Plastikosmd]

Do you ream to final size or polish to final with trial and error pushing though?

[quail4jake]

I made a Star die from CRS and, of course did not harden it. I usually get Magma to make whatever die I need and it's well worth it however I needed a die to size & lube cal. .69 expanding balls which was initially .689 in this instance. The folks at Magma declined the job (wisely so) since the die would be too thin and likely not successful. Well...I really wanted to lube / size these 14 ga boolits so I made one on my little South Bend by making a blank and boring and polishing and boring and polishing...you get the idea. In the end I wound up boring to .695 to size the balls to just squeeze in the bore and taking .020 off the outside diameter to allow lube to flow around the die, so now the walls are now < .018 thick and perforated with holes. The die is soft CRS so one drop on the floor and game over. I think if this were hardening steel it would likely distort in the hardening process which I think may be why the Magma folks didn't want to fool with it. Anyway it works, made from CRS. I've tried bolts...very poor machining. What was the question?

[Plastikosmd]

Ha!

Good enough for me!

[rbuck351]

I ream close and then polish to final size. I use a dial caliper to check inside dia and push a boolit through and mic it. It gives me a close idea of the reading from my caliper so I can get close to final size without having to do a lot of push through trials.

[littlejack]

just bill
In the past, I have made push through dies out of 7/8 NF grade 8 bolts. Not being a machinist, and self taught on a 10" Atlas lathe, they turned out just fine. I found that depending on how you grind your cutting tool, has a lot to do with the quality of the finish. I made a push through sizer for my 12 gauge Lyman 525 slugs with the same 7/8" bolts. The walls, (as expected) were thin, but it works perfectly. I did polish the insides of the dies with a steel rod wrapped with fine wet/dry paper.
Regards

[garandsrus]

I have used mostly threaded rod and the sizing dies work well. I don’t harden them but can’t imagine lead bullets causing any appreciable wear for. 10,000+ bullets sized.

[Scrounge]

I have used mostly threaded rod and the sizing dies work well. I don’t harden them but can’t imagine lead bullets causing any appreciable wear for. 10,000+ bullets sized.

If you roll the bullets in grit, and push them through, you'll get wear. That is, after all, how such things are lapped. You can use any metal softer than the the metal you're lapping. Brass is often used for that purpose, but so is lead. If you don't want to actually lap the die, use clean lead. Easy-Peasy!

[Faret]

One work around I have found is if your press takes an adapter. Then you can pull out the adapter and custom make a universal holder. My lee and Rockchucker are threaded 1-1/4-12 so I can take advantage of the bigger size to make bigger things that would not fit in the standard 7/8 -14 thread.

[454PB]

I use all thread 7/8"X14 for push through sizing dies and do not heat treat them. Some have sized several thousand boolits with no measurable wear.

[littlejack]

As Faret said, I did make one die with a bigger I.D. than the 7/8-14, for another 12 gauge push through. I did use a grade 8 ×1-1/4 -12 bolt for this die. Worked perfectly. Plenty of side wall for that one.