Bullet seating question

[meatsweats]

[Sticks]

The bullets should seat like any other cartridge. Not a lot of love here for the Lee Grendel Dies. They work, but there are better options out there.

I use Bushing sizing dies, so I have a .003 neck tension when I seat and no crimp.

[JASmith]

Either the Lee die neck is too large, the expander ball is too big, or both.

A good way to check is to measure the neck diameter of a sized case and repeat with a seated bullet. That will tell you how much neck tension you are getting.

A second exercise would be to pull the ball, size a case, measure the resulting neck diameter and compare with the diameter as expanded. That will tell you how much cold work you put into the neck each time you size.

The ideal is to do enough cold work to make sure the neck is concentric and the neck tension is good but not so much that one gets split necks after just a few reloads.

BTW, spring back suggests the ball should be a tad larger in diameter than the final neck ID, so directly measuring the ball diameter won’t necessarily tell you what you need to know.

[bj139]

Boattail bullets are much easier to push into the case.

[meatsweats]

Thanks for all the replies. I’ll measure my sized cases and see what I get. The reloads shot fairly well today.
MS