I know that the majority of folks like to make bullets from pistol brass, but for those who are interested in how to do it with flat copper strip, this might be useful. I shoot a lot of big bore stuff, .510, .500 and .458 and wanted to be able to make quality jackets from flat stock. Last year I bought a Corbin Hydro press on the cheap, so once I learned how to use it, I plunked down the coin for a manual jacket making kit from Corbin. The pictures that follow shown that in use.
The stock I use is 1.4" wide and .093" thick. Don't even think about trying this with a hand press unless you have a lever about 10' long and have arms like Popeye. The gauge pressure is about 1350# when blanking the flat discs that ultimately become jackets.
This is what the business part of the blanking die looks like:
Views of the strip being fed through the die. I found it easiest to cut strips about 5' long and work with them rather than the full coil which is heavy:
The finished product:
I got just about 1000 disks out of a 50# coil.
Next up we turn the blank disks into a shallow cup. The cup that results is .800 in diameter with .080 thick walls. The system is supposed to work by putting the disk in the cup which is facing down and then running the punch through the die. I found that the disk was too heavy to work in that way, so I just placed it on top of the spring loaded platform which worked just fine. There is a nice lead in ramp which centers the disk in the cupping die, so no need to worry about getting it perfect. The blanks are lubed on both sides with a very light coat of castor oil:
In this view, you can see the finished cup, attached to the punch after it has exited the die:
There is a trick stripper plate that removes the cup from the punch. It is slid to allow the punch and cup to exit the die, and then once it has cleared the plate, you slide it the other way which gives a ledge for the cup to catch on and get pulled off the punch as shown here:
At this point, you are just reducing the diameter of the cup and making it longer with each draw. The next die takes the .800 cup and reduces it to .700. The next draw takes the .700 cup and reduces it to .560. In the photos below, the .560 cup is being drawn into the finished product, a 1.9" long .510 diameter BMG jacket. The walls are .041 thick. Corbin advises that you can draw down up to 80% of the previous cup's diameter with each draw. This is particularly handy as in my case, with the right punch, I can go from .560 to .510, .500 or even .458 in the final draw saving a lot of work. In theory, I should be able to go to .560 * .8 = .448 diameter if I wanted to. The punch has a collar that centers the cup on the punch so it is centered in the die. It drops away as the jacket is being reduced: