BTsiniper Makes 1 heck of a product & as you can see Fredj338 is very good with them
Very nice Fred!!!
I use a set of Corbin swaging dies for the bullets I make for the 223rem. These things are just TTTTTOOOOOOOO much fun!!!! Last years experiment was to put together cheap/cheap/cheap combo's of bullets/brass/firearms. I was looking for MOA accuracy with my home made bullets. The person I bought the dies from included 1000 copper jackets with the dies. figured I try the factory jackets 1st and get those dialed in and then switch over to 22lr cases for jackets. The thinking was if I could do it with factory copper jackets then the only difference would be the free 22lr brass jackets.
So I had my dies & jackets, the next big decision was the lead cores. Again I figured I'd buy .187" wire & make bullets with the soft lead and and get the bullet making process down. Then I'd switch over to home made cores and get them dialed in. So I bought a spool of lead wire that ended up costing me $.015 a bullet.
Ok, dies/jackets/lead cores, time to make some bullets. So I ended up making 62gr hp's. It was easy to do and didn't take long to dial the bullets in. The nice thing about making mistakes when swaging bullets is the mistakes become bullets to season a clean bbl.
For brass I decided to use free range brass. I did sort into 2 groups, nato & commercial. I did trim all of them to length if needed and full length sized them. Actually I full length size everything.
The firearm for the test bed. I saw fin feather fur was having a sale on the cheap Savage axis rifles chambered in 223rem that had a heavy bbl, acru-trigger and a scope with them for $299 with a $50 mail in rebate. My search for the holy grail of el-cheapo rifles was over!!! I took the scope that came with it and sold it for $50. The end result was $300 + tax ($21) or $321 for the rifle - $100 ($50 rebate + $50 for scope) for a grand total of My new test rifle for $221. I put a $500 scope on it to test the home swaged bullets with.
Well I had the bullets/brass/firearm so now it was time to figure out the loads. I had some 15/20? year old WW846 pull down powder (around 1/2# from a 8# jug) laying around and thought. What the heck might as well burn it up breaking the bbl in, sighting the scope in and do a little initial bullet/accuracy testing. So I loaded up all the mistakes I made figuring out how to actually swage bullets and get the dies dialed in (around 50 bullets) and loaded them up for bbl breakin and sighting in the scope. Then I did some simple ladder test loads using 1/2gr increments with mixed nato range brass.
Well I did the 5/5/10/10/20-shot clean the bbl/breakin thing and shot some groups.
While nothing to write home about, it was a real eye opener. I took a cheap rifle, mixed range brass, old pull down powder and home swaged bullets and got MOA accuracy on the very 1st range trip.
FUN-FUN-FUN!!!
Didn't matter which way I measured that round 22.0gr load it was MOA.
Checking the other way.
Well I didn't plan or expect MOA accuracy to happen that quickly. So I burned the rest of the WW846 up playing around fine tuning the home swged bullet/powder combo. The groups stayed right around what's pictured above, the only thing I could think of was it's the mixed nato brass.
So I started learning how to make my own bullet jackets from 22lr cases. It was pretty strait forward & actually easy to do. So I made the bullets the same way I did with the copper jackets, this time I used my own 22lr/brass jackets. I've always had good luck with several different rifles chambered in 223rem and 55gr to 62gr bullets using 25gr to 26gr of bl-c2. So I figured I'd load up a 1/2gr ladder test using my home swaged bullets & bl-c2. This is that test target.
The plinking bullets I make from 22lr cases for the 223rem.
The next step was to make a mold to cast my own cores. So I made an adjustable core mold that casts 1 core that is .187" and 1 core that is .312". The .187 is for the 223rem the .312" core is for the 9mm/38spl/357. So I learned how to cast cores, got the mold adjusted correctly and made bullets with my home made cores instead of the lead wire for cores. I found no difference in accuracy using either core.
At the end of the day I took a cheap rifle ($230), free mixed 223rem range brass, free range lead & free 22lr cases that were laying around and easily achieved MOA accuracy with nothing more than plinking/blammo ammo. Next years project is to develop a "pet" load using the same mixed brass, mixed 22lr cases and range lead cores for a 14" bbl'd contender chambered in 223rem.
After that it's build a ar and and use the same combo of free brass/lead/22lr jackets to make MOA plinks/blamo ammo.
Swaging isn't for everyone. I have a lot of free time this time of year with cold temps and snow on the ground. I view swaging as nothing more than an investment that pays for itself. The dies will do nothing but go up in value and I will be able to sell them for more $$$ than I have into them. And if nothing else the $$$ I saved on bullets will pay for 2+ primers for every pull of the trigger.
The hook was really set with me when I got MOA from the very 1st outing with the home swaged bullets. As with casting bullets I take a since of pride in my swaged bullets and it truly is a pure joy to make my own bullets and see how well they preform.
The other thing swaging jacketed bullets has taught me a lot. I look at commercial jacketed bullets differently than I used to. Thru making my own jacketed bullets and testing different cores has given me a learning curve that huge. The other thing that making my own swaged bullets has taught me is to spot quality. You should take a good hard look at the bullets Fred has in his picture above.
Those are some extremely high quality bullets he made, make no mistake about it.
Sorry for being so long winded, swaging bullets for the 223rem is a hoot!!!