Blackwater
05-30-2015, 01:29 PM
Just thought of this and apologize for not posting it sooner for some of the newbies here. My CRS disease is the only thing I have that's getting stronger, it seems. Anyway, we all WILL, if we haven't already, encountered the results of the fact that nose designs for cast boolits varies much more than the Jbullets' do. This sooner or later will result in our finding that the seater stems in our seater died leave rings or other marks on our boolits. The solution is really simple. It's been long ago and I can't recall where I learned it, but all I did to prevent those nasty, ugly and sometimes problematic rings is to cut a little piece of relatively hard plastic so it'd fit the top of the seater stem, use some glue I can get to release afterward, or just enough bees' wax to hold it in effectively (just enough to form a vacuum if the boolit's tip tends to stick and try to pull it out from the stem) and readjust the stem's depth so it seats the boolits at just the right OAL to crimp and feed in whatver guns were involved in the issue. This could come in handy when loading the WFN or WLN types, too. New stems can be made, of course, with broad and flat tips for seating flat nose boolits of all types, but this is a quick stop-gap method to get us through some initial loadings of new to us boolits.
Seater stems for pistol dies usually come with both one for SWC and one for RN types. When loading JHP's, I usually if not always just use the RN seater. It tends to let the bullet's point slip and slide into better alignment, and tends less toward flattening out the HP's usually soft points or opening up the often tender slit portion of the front of the bullets' jackets.
In reloading, it's ALWAYS the "little things" that make the difference between frustration at the range or really bad results in defensive situations that make very a significant difference in outcomes. Like the computer principle "Garbage in, garbage out." Maybe it's not "garbage," exactly, but the more thought and care we put into our loading, the better the results we'll inevitably get. It's that way in all we do, really, and the current trend to say, "That's good enough," CAN sometimes bite us in the butt, so .... it really takes very little actual TIME to do things with care. It just takes a bit of attention and thought about the details, and we get sometimes MUCH better loads for our boolits. FWIW?
Anybody got any more little tidbits of wisdom or info that we might all benefit from regarding seater stems??? I know some of you must have some good input here.
Seater stems for pistol dies usually come with both one for SWC and one for RN types. When loading JHP's, I usually if not always just use the RN seater. It tends to let the bullet's point slip and slide into better alignment, and tends less toward flattening out the HP's usually soft points or opening up the often tender slit portion of the front of the bullets' jackets.
In reloading, it's ALWAYS the "little things" that make the difference between frustration at the range or really bad results in defensive situations that make very a significant difference in outcomes. Like the computer principle "Garbage in, garbage out." Maybe it's not "garbage," exactly, but the more thought and care we put into our loading, the better the results we'll inevitably get. It's that way in all we do, really, and the current trend to say, "That's good enough," CAN sometimes bite us in the butt, so .... it really takes very little actual TIME to do things with care. It just takes a bit of attention and thought about the details, and we get sometimes MUCH better loads for our boolits. FWIW?
Anybody got any more little tidbits of wisdom or info that we might all benefit from regarding seater stems??? I know some of you must have some good input here.