Swaged Cores 'Silver Boollit' available?

[windrider919]

I usually hang out in the Paper Patch forum as I shoot .458 Win Mag PP. But I just got a CZ 527 in .221 Furball and I have to, I mean I HAVE TO try to PP a 22 cal bullet and see If I can get accuracy like we do in the big bores. So.....

Is anyone swaging a Pb slug of .218 or so as a core for anything? Like a core for a 25 cal or something? I want to try to Paper Patch for .224 cal and need a core that when wrapped with a double wrap of .002 paper will give me .225/6. The nose can be conical or round. I once long ago saw some cores for rifle bullet swaging that had a rounded/ sort of pointed nose instead of just flat ends and was told it was to ease the jacket swaging. I am looking for something under .600 long as I am shooting in a 12:1 twist and that length is the max to stabilize in that cal. Weight does not matter, just aprox .218 X .600 and some kind if nose end. If none of you already have something like that I will just try to make my own mould. A 5.5mm (7/32"?) ball end mill would do as a cherry. Then I get to try to mill my own mould blocks on an old, worn Chinese drill mill.... Scary thought but our shooting hobby is worth it, right?

Actually, I would rather try the swaged cores first rather than maybe waste a lot of time milling something that does not work. If the core worked even a little then I would have to make or buy a gen II attempt at swaging or casting a proper PP slug.

[ETG]

Why not buy an inexpensive lee 223 mold and make or buy a .218 sizer to push it through? You could make a sizer out of a 7/32" drill bushing pretty cheaply.

[windrider919]

The question was asked about making my own mould:

Today I drove into Houston and bought a carbide ball end mill in 7/32". I have lots of aluminum 1" thick X 2 1/2" so I will try to make a mould with that. My old drill mill really should be scrapped because it has over .050 backlash in X axis and has .017 in Y axis. plus the quill shaft bearings need replaced. Not a precision machine. Since the "end mill as a cherry" has to be equally machined into each block so the bullets will be round and must especially so that they will drop out of the mould. Too far past the center line one side or the other and the cast slug will hang / lock in. I have re-profiled drills before to make smooth sided bullets but they were in larger calibers. But the smaller the more difficult to center the drill. One or two or even three thousands off to the side in a .459 mould and the slug will still drop out of the mould. Also, all drill bits walk just a few thousands. Most people would never see it but it is there, leaving the center of rotation offset off of the center line. Causes the bullet to yaw in flight. Run through a sizer it always results in a lopsided base as the walls are straightened out. Remember, a sizer is not a swager. Displaced lead will move up or down and without a precise fitting nose punch the lead will move up but not evenly. In a situation like using a Lee sizer the bullet is not supported on the nose and always distorts some, usually acceptable amount, if the starting bullet is straight to begin with. The Lee sizer constriction is less than 1/16 long, not like the full length contact of RCBS or Lyman sizers. I do not want to buy a sizer because I got int PP because you shoot the bullet as cast. Nice simple and not a lot of involved, expensive steps like conventional cast grease grooved and usually gas checked bullets.

.218 Bee is a cartridge name, it shoots .224 bullets, not .218. 218 was the bore size of all 22 cal bullets EXCEPT rimfire for a brief while. The height of the rifling was smaller before being standardized at .004 land height. Like .300 is the bore size of .308. I will have to make or buy a .218 bushing/ size die to size the slugs I will make but to be effective it will have to be at least .5 long.

I have not bought a commercial mould for .224 because in my experience, sizeing down the diameter by .008 leaves a lopsided bullet [in a Lee style sizer]. It always sizes/swages more on one side than the other and occasionally the base is not square. No good for accuracy. And PP usually works best w/out the grease grooves in a conventional bullet anyway. Not perfectly smooth but machine tooling marks help hold the patch as it starts down the barrel. Now a swaged slug would be ideal because a properly made die removes all the voids and distortions of the cast slug. It is concentric and the center of rotation will line up with the center line, leading to accuracy. A (honestly, based on the best my equipment can give me) poorly made mould will shoot but will it shoot accurately? And that is why I am shooting, for accuracy. Otherwise why shoot? Obviously, since I bought the very expensive $18.00 ball end mill I am going to attempt it. It just would have been easier to test if someone had alredy had a usable slug I could have bought 100 of than to spend the time and money making a mould for an experiment that might not work.