Loading Bullets Upside Down

Ganderite

Ganderite

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I have done this a lot with military FMJs I pulled when making Mexican Match. I load them for my 30-30.

The bottom of the bullet is flat, so they can be safely loaded in the tube magazine. They make great 50 yard plinkers.

The bullet reduces case capacity, increasing pressure. This is fine for reduced power charges, but not good for full charges.
 
IIRC a South African PH named Brad Rolston was reverse-loading 750gr .50BMG bullets into a .500 A-Square and reported very good performance on large game.
 
I've seated bullets upside down just because a pointed bullet is a cheap and handy way to neck a case up to a larger caliber. I pull them and use the same bullet over and over because shooting them would defeat the cheap part.

I've got CEB ESP Raptors that are designed to be a boat-tail extreme hollow-point mono bullet one way; or a trunicated cone flat point solid seated the other way. They even have add-on plastic tips if you want to increase the B.C.
 
A 148gr HBWC in a .38 special loaded down side up expands to almost .70 caliber even at 750fps! Old Texas Border Patrol load for 2" hideout guns.....they went through one side of a steel 45gal drum at 100 yards out of a 4" S+W model 10........Harold
 
mbogo3 said:
A 148gr HBWC in a .38 special loaded down side up expands to almost .70 caliber even at 750fps! Old Texas Border Patrol load for 2" hideout guns.....they went through one side of a steel 45gal drum at 100 yards out of a 4" S+W model 10........Harold
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Yes. I loaded some HBWC cavity up in my 38Spl. Worked very well in a water test.

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Ganderite said:

I have done this a lot with military FMJs I pulled when making Mexican Match. I load them for my 30-30.

The bottom of the bullet is flat, so they can be safely loaded in the tube magazine. They make great 50 yard plinkers.

The bullet reduces case capacity, increasing pressure. This is fine for reduced power charges, but not good for full charges.
Click to expand...


I could be wrong about this but I seem to recall that during WWI the anti sniper shooters reversed their bullets so that they would cause the sniper shields to spall on the inside and drive the shrapnel into the sniper.

I have tried this as well. Many moons ago when stupid was a well used commodity we even loaded up some of the hollow bases with a few grains of powder and pressed in a primer. It worked well but only on hard surfaces like wood and concrete blocks. Very little penetration though.
 
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Dogleg said:
I've seated bullets upside down just because a pointed bullet is a cheap and handy way to neck a case up to a larger caliber. I pull them and use the same bullet over and over because shooting them would defeat the cheap part.

I've got CEB ESP Raptors that are designed to be a boat-tail extreme hollow-point mono bullet one way; or a trunicated cone flat point solid seated the other way. They even have add-on plastic tips if you want to increase the B.C.
Click to expand...

So you will force a .338 into s .308 caliber to neck it up, for instance?
 
I remember a story I read years ago about a hunter lost in a semi-desert area in Africa nearly dead from thirst,pulling and reversing SP bullets in his .270 Win.He needed H2O desperately so head shot an elephant and removed gallons of water from the stomach .May not be politically correct these days but it beats rolling over and playing dead.I believe it was in an old Outdoor Life issue.Harold
 
I have used reversed BTSP's for reduced loads in .30/30, 7.62X39, and .358... they work very well. I prefer boattails to flat base.
 
Some years ago in Handloader magazine, I read that in the 1950's a guy in Alaska used a 50 BMG barrel, cut 750 grain FMJBT to 450 grain and loaded all up in a 348 Winchester case in an 1886 Winchester. Today the load is called a 50 Alaskan. The following is from Wikipedia and jives with what I recall reading about this some years ago.
"Harold Johnson necked out the .348 Winchester case to accept a .510" diameter bullet, and Harold Fuller developed the barrel, marrying a .50 caliber barrel to an old Winchester Model 1886 rifle.
Since the rifle was designed for use on Alaska’s great bears, Johnson cut 720-grain (47 g) boat-tail .50 BMG bullets in half, seating the 450-grain (29 g) rear half upside down in the fireformed .50-caliber case. It didn’t take Johnson long to find out that the 450-grain truncated shaped "solid" would shoot through a big brown bear from any direction, claiming in 1988, "I never recovered a slug from a bear or moose, no matter what angle the animal was shot at"
 
WWII Finnish snipers used a subsonic load with a reverse loaded bullet very effectively against the Russians. The reverse bullet used up space in the case allowing the much smaller powder charge to be more reliable as well as creating more tissue damage on the receiving end. Accuracy was better as a conventional bullet designed for supersonic flight was not as stable at subsonic speeds unless it was reversed. I believe it was called a "cat's sneeze", referring to the reduced sound profile, and the 300 Whisper had some tie or relation to this round.
 
Dogleg said:
That's how I neck up .300 RUMs into .338 Edges, but in that case I use a 300 grain SMK and seat them right-side up and shoot them. In fact I was shooting some of those at 800 yards today.:d
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That's a pretty good trick. :)

I try to avoid cartridges that need necking up/down/blowing out/AI fireforming etc these days, but it's always good to know tricks. :)
 
I can't recall the magazine but a few years ago they did it to test accuracy- what do you have to do to get poor performance- by modifying the projectile only.
Turning the bullets around not only worked great but were accurate as well.
 
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