sharp shooter
CGN frequent flyer
- Location
- Essex county (Ontario)
Do I need to crimp for my .375 H&H?
375 H&H crimping???
- Thread starter sharp shooter
- Start date
Unless you load single rounds only it's a good idea to crimp. The 375 H&H has enough recoil to move your bullets in the case. So a mag of rounds might get different seating depths by the time you get to number 4 out 5.
I almost never crimp .375s. If the bullets move under recoil there wasn't enough neck tension in the first place. I have scrapped dies and modified expander balls though, and pay attention to brass. Some brass in this caliber doesn't seem to want to grip that well, most notably with TSXs. The quick test is to press a loaded round against the loading bench. If I cant move them recoil never has. If I can push the bullets in, then a crimp is a poor band-aid.
I will make an exception for solids, partly because they will ride around in the bottom of the mag forever and partly to mark them as the "good stuff" and not some practice or test load in old brass.
I will make an exception for solids, partly because they will ride around in the bottom of the mag forever and partly to mark them as the "good stuff" and not some practice or test load in old brass.
Game control officer in SA had the experience of a solid failing to penetrate an elephant's skull, nearly ending his career rather abruptly. He recalled that the round sounded "funny". The shot was fired in the midst of a cull operation, during which the boss cow was shot first, and in the resulting melee, he kept dodging elephants, shooting elephants, and doing tactical reloads, striving to keep at least one round in the mag, "just in case." Well, "in case" happened, when a cow charged, he was down to the last round, chambered it, shot, got a funny sound, and his tracker threw his water bag in the elephants face, got her attention while the shooter dropped in a fresh cartridge and killed the cow.
All to set the scene for how, in reconstructing the failure to penetrate, he shot repeated rounds at a target, always leaving the one round in the bottom of the mag. At around the same round count as he had fired during the cull, he again got a "funny" report, and the recoil - which he noticed during traget shooting - was extreme. A second series of repeated discharges with one sacrificial round in the bottom of the mag, stopped this time a few shots short of the previous series, and lo and behold, the bullet had been set back substantially.
Crimp.
All to set the scene for how, in reconstructing the failure to penetrate, he shot repeated rounds at a target, always leaving the one round in the bottom of the mag. At around the same round count as he had fired during the cull, he again got a "funny" report, and the recoil - which he noticed during traget shooting - was extreme. A second series of repeated discharges with one sacrificial round in the bottom of the mag, stopped this time a few shots short of the previous series, and lo and behold, the bullet had been set back substantially.
Crimp.
With my 375 H&H I have had non crimped 270G X bullets move forward in the mag of my Brno 602. (WW brass, RCBS dies, non compressed charge) I now crimp for that case with my brass and dies.
I have no idea how bullets in a non tube mag would move back under recoil.
I have no idea how bullets in a non tube mag would move back under recoil.
