308 win Sizing Issues

Paul 752

New member
EE Expired
Rating - 0%
0   0   0
Location
Calabogie On
New to reloading and having some issues. I reloaded .223 and it worked fine. When I went to set up my dies (hornady) I noticed that before I even sized the cases the bullet would go in the brass and in some cases drop right down into the brass. Any idea what causes this ? I am not sure how i will get the die set up when the bullets are falling through into the case.

Any suggestions would be helpful.
 
are you trying to put a bullet in unsized brass. if so thats the problem. set your sizing die to touch the shell holder and resize. the neck should be tight enough to hold the bullet firmly.
 
Well you said they fall through BEFORE you resize them. If the cases had been fired they expanded and now need to be resized, then they should have the right tension on the neck to bullet fit. Not sure if I missed something here.
I have 200 once fired .223 brass here and they are all a loose fit, but once I run them through my sizing die the bullets will fit tight. I have a bushing die with several bushings so I can choise the amount of tension I want. Most die sets have the one size for resizing built into the die. Hope this helps. Cheers Roscoe
 
when a round is fired the brass expands to match the chamber of your rifle, leaving it larger than its supposed to be, thats why an unsized case will be loose at the neck. resizing puts the cases back to normal.
 
why do you need a bullet in the case to set up your resizing die??

the bullet falls in cuz you havnt resized yet as mentioned.

on a side note. if you re-loaded all your .223 stuff with out resizing, you may want to step away from the loading bench and start reading so you know whats goin on in the process......
 
Please do not take this the wrong way, but in what you wrote, you had mentioned that you were new to handloading. Welcome into the fold, but when you bought your gear and set things up...did you even bother to read the introductory parts of the loading manual?

I am suspecting that you merrily bought all this gear, including new brass for your 223...right? Are you doing the same with new 308 brass or was the brass given to you (as fired)?

The bullets would have seated in...albeit, likely not very well because quite a bit of that new brass is not exactly round at the neck. I always run them through my resizer and then de-burr first before seating a bullet. It saves on mangled cases when trying to seat those flat base bullets.

Now to the matter at hand. EVERY reloading manual has an introductory section on the principals of reloading and (Hornady and Sierra) have excellent step by step procedures from the start to finish.

Do not EVER skip a step. The results could be injurious to your heath and your rifle.

As stated before, every fired case in required to be resized. The part I am confused about is how in the devil did you think you could seat a bullet in an fired case? The resizer die also removes the primer. Before putting a bullet in, you have to have the seated the primer, de-burred the case and added the correct amount of powder already as a minimum.

I suggest doing some reading before hand, otherwise, sell your reloading gear and just buy the ammo because you are a likely candidate to getting hurt.
 
Thanks all I guess I made a stupid newbie mistake thinking that if some die sets came with expanders that the brass would have to be expanded first. Obviously my logic was flawed and the sizing die is to make them fit tighter.

Thanks all who responded and sorry for my newbie mistake.
 
Thanks all I guess I made a stupid newbie mistake thinking that if some die sets came with expanders that the brass would have to be expanded first. Obviously my logic was flawed and the sizing die is to make them fit tighter.

Thanks all who responded and sorry for my newbie mistake.




What's actually happening , is when the brass is rammed up into the sizer die it's sized smaller then what it's ment to be (brass is stretchy so it needs to be smaller) then as the brass comes back out its pulled over the expander ball to the correct size
 
Back
Top Bottom