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Simple jacket making dies and press
New to Cast Boolits and just starting my adventures in jacket making and swaging. My goal is to start from scratch and learn what it takes to make an accurate .264" bullet. I've built a prototype rig based on a 2 ton arbor press. I've designed the basic dies and had them CNC machined by a online prototyping company out of AISI 1018 steel which will be carburised to about 50 RHC and further polished. The punches are off the shelf HSS rods in 0.1mm increments. All I've done is grind a radius and polish an ever slight taper. The punches are held by a ER20 collet fitted to the ram. I'm using 1" blank discs from .0275" copper sheet that is fully annealed. My swage lube is a 50:50 mix of castor oil and pure lanolin. So far the results look promising. I have managed to form a complete 1.3" .262" jacket with very little effort. I'm now starting to build some measuring gear to really attack the wall thickness and concentricity control and hope to make some improvements on the set up. Eventually I will look at something that resembles the Wilson straight line dies. Slow but very accurate. Once I'm happy with the jackets I'll start looking at swaging gear. In the meantime, I'm really enjoying the process and hope to learn and share more on the forum.