Pee Wee and I started on the adventure to create really nice 30 caliber bullets in two bullet weights:
1) 168 Grain
2) 150 Grain
We're using 5.7 X 28 FN brass, that I have been saving for ages.
I wanted to share with everyone the process that we developed for forming these bullets using BT Sniper's 30 cal die set. There was a long learning curve involved with the brass handling, the selection of cores, to cut or not to cut the brass, etc.... So here goes..................
Through some of the trials and tribulations as we began to use this brass, we discovered that there were three types in my bucket full of brass:
A) Commercial 5.7 X 28, with a simple lacquer coating, easy to remove with alchohol
B) MIL Spec brass, with three dots crimped primers, with a stubborn, thicker coating, the only way to remove it was during the annealing process (discussed below)
C) MIL Spec brass, with three semi-circle line type crimps, and the same type of coating as in Type B
We started off with trying to dissolve the coatings with various chemicals, failing endlessly with Type B and Type C brass.
CONCLUSION: Anneal the brass to 800+ degrees, which burns off the coating to an ash...... We don't use any chemicals on the coating, just do the annealing.
NOTE: I bought a Lee 20 pound dipper type pot (not the bottom pour type, but rather the type that you would use with a hand dipper for the lead) for the annealing. The bottom 1/3 of the pot, when the pot is set on it's highest position, gets to a bright yellow state, which is at or slightly above the 800 degrees for annealing brass. We put a couple of handfuls in at a time, with brass only at the bottom 1/3 of the pot. We put a steel plate on top of the pot, to hold the heat in, and allow the brass to come up to temperature, about 15 minutes per batch. After annealing, you can either dump immediately into a bucket of water to cool, or as we chose to do, dump them out into a metal tray to cool slowly. The pot has never been used for lead, and so started off with clean insides. After processing a LOT of batches of brass, we noticed the plastic residue building up on the inside of the bottom of the pot. We scraped that all out, and resumed annealing. At some point the annealer stopped getting hot enough. Apparently, we had cooked the insides of the heating coil. A call to Lee had a replacement coil on it's way for under $20. It was easy to install. The new coil anneals just as well as the original.
After annealing, we had a bunch of brass which was very stubborn regarding the final removal of the ash/plastic residue. Walnut shell didn't do it. Normal SS pin tumbling didn't work as we had hoped. I had some ceramic pins which I bought some time ago, for brightening up swaged brass bullets after forming.
CONCLUSION: We used the ceramic pins, in very little water (just enough to make the pins damp), a slight amount of dish detergent, and some lemon juice (I have a high producing lemon tree in my back yard, so lemon juice is in endless supply). Lemishine also worked well. The ceramic pins are used in a rotary pin tumbler, and run 4-6 hours, changing the water every now and then. The brass comes out completely spotless no plastic residue, so ash residue, no staining.
After annealing and cleaning the brass, we use a 5.7X28 shell holder in a Rockchucker press, and a neck expander that I got from BT Sniper, and we expand the necks to accept the swaged cores. The cores are at .243" as cast, and after swaging to weight are at .252", too large to fit into an un-expanded 5.7 X 28 FN normal neck.
After neck expanding, we use a push through punch and die that came with the BT Sniper 30 caliber die set, and reduce the outside diameter of the 5.7 X28 FN brass from it's starting diameter of .318", down to .303".
We tried several ways to produce cores, including using some lead wire I've had for years. However, the core mold I got from BT Sniper serves to make really fine cores very fast. Again, the cores come out of the core mold at .243" as cast, and weigh 124 grains.
Pee Wee and I spend many hours trying to come up with a combination of cut length of brass, and specific weight of cores, trying to get lead to push all the way to the tip of the bullet. However, after many fruitless hours of trying, Brian Thurner mentioned that he never tries to get lead to push all the way to the end, and that the slight hollow points will fly perfectly fine. So, we weighed a sampling of the 5.7X28 FN brass, and came up with an average weight of 60 grains, including the primers, which we did not punch out for a variety of reasons.
Doing the math, for the 168 grain version, we calculated a core weight of 108 grains. And, for the 150 grain version, we settled in at 90 grains for the core weight. We got the best consistency in making swaged cores by doing the swaging in two steps. For the 168 grain version, the first push on the core brought it's weight to 113 grains. And, for the 90 grain cores, we pushed the first step to 100 grains. By making a slight adjustment in the die for each weight from the first push, we got cores that were dead nuts on at their respecting target weights, +/- .2 grains. That's pretty respectable, closer than the weights on the brass cases.
We next seated cores in the brass, obviously adjusting when switching from 168 to 150 grain bullets.
The final point form yielded very nice formed bullets with hollow points that are less than the knockout pin diameter. No cutting to length on the brass. That saved a tedious step. Thanks, Brian for that tip!
The 150 grain bullets are 1.105" long, and right at .3085" in diameter.
The 168 grain bullets are also 1.105" long (we didn't cut any brass) and also at .3085" in diameter.
The hollow point cavities on the 150's are slightly larger (almost imperceptible) than on the 168's. The lead almost goes to the tip on the 168's. The 5.7 X 28 FN brass seems perfect for making the 168's!
I'll use the 168's for load development for my M1A rifle, in 308 Win.
Pee Wee and I will BOTH use the 150's for stuffing into our 300 blackout rounds.
We made about 800 168's, and 300 or so 150's to start with. The 168's will serve for my use in the M1A for some time to come. Pee Wee doesn;t yet have anything that shoots 308 Win. The 300 Blackout needs, however, will demand many thousands of these sweet 150 grain bullets. We'll load them with Lil Gun powder, check your load data book for how much to use, OAL, etc.
I'll add images as I find the time. I just wanted to document the process for making these bullets, and hopefully save others the hours and hours of development time that we put into this project.
Perhaps some kind soul will make this post a "sticky"....
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Originally Posted by midnight
BT Sniper
