Does anybody here swage bullets?

I see that Corbin makes dies, jackets, lead wire and whatever else for swaging bullets. Does anybody here do this? It may have some advantages over casting but it's limited to dead soft lead. With jackets, that's not a problem. Plain lead bullets would be an approximately equal to Speer or Hornady swaged bullets and limited in velocity. Cost effective? Labor intensive? How about that joy of making your own bullets?

Yes I swage my own bullets using several different methods. It depends on the swager's ability to think outside the box to really explore the different ways to create bullets using what available.

You can go store bought swaging dies, I have several. I also use a rcbs press, 2 9-ton swaging presses and it's always good to have/use an arbor press. Ovens that are used for powder coating can be extremely useful. They can anneal/soften a cast bullet to use as a core or cast cores to be reshaped into something else. As are lead melting pots or kilns or self cleaning ovens to anneal brass jackets if need be.

Common reloading dies can be extremely useful to make a verity of different swaged jacketed bullets.

Lately I've been swaging jacketed bullets only. And more pointedly jacketed bullets using free range brass as for the bullet jackets. The current jacketed bullets I make are for the 38spl/357, 44cal's, 45cal's, limited 30cal's & .224 bullets for the 223rem's.

If you want to be more specific with a caliber/cartridge I'll gladly try to help.

I have cast more than a couple of my own. never saw any point in swageing my own wadcutters.

It is a way to spend MUCH more money. I got rid of the high end swaging stuff. Kept my RCBS tooling. I started swaging bullets back when I was 11. It is a lot of work and you can buy very good bullets.

rwsmith said:

I see that Corbin makes dies, jackets, lead wire and whatever else for swaging bullets. Does anybody here do this? It may have some advantages over casting but it's limited to dead soft lead. With jackets, that's not a problem. Plain lead bullets would be an approximately equal to Speer or Hornady swaged bullets and limited in velocity. Cost effective? Labor intensive? How about that joy of making your own bullets?

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I got dies to do 223 from 22lr cases. Cost effective, well after buying the dies, my bullets are essentially free. It is labor intensive. I cast the cores, then they get swaged to final weight. Then i clean 22lr cases, dry them, then the get formed into jackets, then annealed in an old lee casting pot, then cleaned again. Then seat the core then final point form. I cast cores instead of lead wire because it is free. It is another step, but you still have to cut the wire & swage. An 11cav core mold came with the set.
They shoot pretty well, especially if i sort by jacket & bullet weight. Worth the effort? Yeah if you like to tinker & know you can be self sufficient. All i need is 7# of range scrap & sweep up all the 22lr i want. BTsniper sells complete setups to make 40cal jacketed from 9mm cases, 45cal from 40 cases too. 20" hvy ar, 3-9 scope at 100.

I've tried handgun bullet swaging using completely different equipment twice since 1971. Each time I came to the same conclusion: a fascinating process whereby one can make great bullets, but it's expensive (in comparison to casting) and components (lead wire and jackets) are not always easy to find. I won't get into the time consuming part as it may be no greater than bullet casting.

A component shortage might be alleviated by making jackets from salvaged brass as one poster mentions. Using homemade cast lead cores (don't know whether anyone still does that) can be substituted for commercial extruded lead wire.

To satisfy the curiosity of the creative, swaging can be enjoyable and worth the effort and expense. If an enthusiast only wants to shoot good quality accurate jacketed bullets in a rifle or handgun, there are many commercial bullets available. I've been away from swaging for a good while, but the store-bought bullets might be cheaper.

For use in all handguns and some rifles, I've found my own cast bullets work fine.

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!!!

EVERY TIME I SQUEEZE THE TRIGGER ON ONE OF MY PISTOLS, I SWAGE THE BULLET TO THE DIAMETER OF MY BORE. DOES THAT COUNT?

SORRY, BUT I COULDN'T HELP MYSELF. JP

Very interesting! I have a set of dies that are 3/4-?. I need to make an adapter bushing for my Rock chucker. I also have a home made 20 ton hydraulic press to swage rifle cases into another diameter, so I could make a plate for that for the smaller dies. Looks like fun.

Making bullets for sale = slow death, by starvation! I tried that with cast bullets!

Ivan

I've swaged jacketed pistol bullets for decades, started with the 1/2 jacket (cups) and lead cores. I also cast a lot of lead cores and swaged them into lead swc's/hp's/hbwc's. It just seamed casting and swaing went hand in hand. I could take and cast bullets like these lee 311-93-1r rn bullets and use them in the 32cal pistols & revolvers & 30cal rifles. I'd size & lube them then swage them in a set of home made swaging dies to turn them into 93gr hbwc's for the revolvers or turn backwards a use them for pest control bullets in the 308 or 30-06 with light loads of pistol powder.


Used to do that with a lot of cast lead bullets using swaging dies to turn them into hp's or hb's bullets or both. As the bullet lubes got better I didn't swage as much of the jacketed pistol bullets as I used to. And now with powder coating it pretty much took over the jacketed bullets role.

A couple years back I decided to re-visit swaging pistol bullets. The main reason was $$$. They had all the free bullet jackets I could ever use laying around at the range. Namely the 380acp/9mm/40s&w brass cases. Here we go again, free brass for bullet jackets & free range lead for cores. So I started looking around at the reloading dies that I already have along with the dimensions of other reloading dies. The idea was to either size the brass down into usable jackets or bump them up ( a lot easier) in diameter for usable jackets. So I started going to gunshows spending $5 for a single die or $10 older die sets. I used them as my bullet forming dies.

I didn't want to trim any brass so I thought about it decided to go with either a blank making die set or fit a shotgun crimp die to something to make a "XTP" style hp. The end result is either a thumper of a fn bullet or one heck of a xtp bullet using nothing more than common cheap reloading dies and free range brass and lead to make jacketed pistol bullets.

Jacketed bullets for the 9mm/38spl/357 made from either 30acp cases (150gr bullet) or 9mm cases (175gr bullet). Using a 222 remington seating die to form/swage the bullet.


40s&w cases are caveman simple to turn into swaged jacketed bullets. I used a hornady blank die to make the XTP notches and a winchester 243 die to form these bullets for the 45acp. Those bullets can be used in any 45cal firearm. 308 winchester dies can also be used to form these bullets. THe difference between the 243 & 308 is the 308 die makes 1 heck larger flat nosed bullet.


40s&w cases used to make 44cal bullets. These are caveman simple to make also using nothing more than a 6mm/224rem seating die to form/swage the bullet.


Any of these bullets can be made with just the different reloading dies to make 1 heck of a fn thumper or a hp is simple enough to put into them using nothing more than a punch and a mallet. I use cast bullets for cores and if I use a hp for a core or a cast hbwc for a core the hp is already their.

These bullets are easy to make, hit hard and would be the cat's meow for anyone having leading issues with a firearm. Or a firearm that takes/need and odd sized bullet. And they really shine in the over sized micro-grooved bbl's in the lever actions.

Well you can make bullets maybe not available but except in rare instances can't make better bullets than you can buy...especially cheaper. When I made my first bullets I used 22 cases for my hornet bullets. When I bought my first 220 Swift I found that they were not heavy enough jackets for the speed of the swift...or the 22-250 either. So to make bullets for the swift I had to buy commercial jackets. Supplies to make bullets are not cheap...and Corbin stuff is very expensive. . You can make good bullets..Don't expect to save big bucks.

Skeet 028 said:

Well you can make bullets maybe not available but except in rare instances can't make better bullets than you can buy...especially cheaper. When I made my first bullets I used 22 cases for my hornet bullets. When I bought my first 220 Swift I found that they were not heavy enough jackets for the speed of the swift...or the 22-250 either. So to make bullets for the swift I had to buy commercial jackets. Supplies to make bullets are not cheap...and Corbin stuff is very expensive. . You can make good bullets..Don't expect to save big bucks.

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Same thing here.at 22-250 vel,all I would have is a white puff of smoke from the bullet desintegrating at aprox 15ft from the muzzle.Had to keep the velocity down to around 2800fps.Got around 1 1/4'' at 100yds.
I still use my Corbin press to make .38Spl HBWC out of my cast rejects bullets.That way,I don't have to remelt them.But yes,making your swaged bullets is labor intensive.
Qc