300 Blk Sizing Die Shootout - Part 1

all right folks it's time to dive into the subject of resizing dyes for 300 blackout I've been planning this video for a very very long time and just never got around to it because it's a pretty dense subject and my initial plan here is to have probably two videos today's video will kind of be the shorter video to introduce what's going on test out our concept and then the next video we'll be testing a whole bunch of different brass in all three resizing dyes that we've got to play with we've recently had some issues in 300 blackout I think it goes back about six months and there are a couple things that happened right around that time one I switched brass I had been using Lake City brass for a very long time and I switched over to Jim tech 300 blackout brass also around the same time I had been using my Forester resizing die a lot but I don't even remember the circumstances somehow I managed to get a case stuck in this guy and I buggered up the decapping pin so rather than order a new decapping pin and get it back into action immediately I set it to the side and switch dies and halfway forgot about it so somewhere along the line I picked up the RCBS set there a r-series dies and switched to using this die most of the time so I'm wondering if this might be the source of some of my issues I also have a lead I that came in my lease set that we used early on kind of proved that it worked just fine I had no issues with it at all and then it got put in the box and I switched to using my Forester most of the time for no particular reason well like I said we've had general accuracy issues for like six months and it finally led me to replace my barrel so the eight and a half inch barrel that I had in my SBR upper I replaced it and put in an 8 inch CMM G barrel I wanted to try out the one in seven twist wanted to see how how good that barrel would shoot since it's pretty affordable and it was also a little bit disappointing with accuracy so I immediately ordered a ten-point three inch barrel from ballistic advantage and we put that in several videos ago and we've been running with that guy now this is a good barrel this barrel should shoot and in the last video we showed it it would shoot it shot some nice groups but we had feeding issues in a bunch of bullets setback issues in that last video it was the 135 grain Sierra Varman er it has a little funky tip on it and it was it was not feeding well and if we were having a bunch of bullets setback issues when it rammed into something and whenever it did go to chamber home we were getting cartridges that were stretching so we were having neck tension issues our brass didn't have a hold of that bullet well enough and it was moving around so that's kind of what led me to finally decide to make this video I'm having some issues I don't know if possibly the Jim tech brass for some reason just doesn't result in sufficient neck tension to combat setback or the RCBS die that I started using around the same time is not giving us enough neck tension you know it's it's sizing the neck too large perhaps that's my theory that's what led us to today now we're going to forget all of that we're going into this with no preconceived notions so here is the outline of the basic test I want to do today I've got 30 pieces of brass the first 15 pieces are once fired Lake City brass I've got this guy colored green with sharpie yeah I got a little see I got green purple and red and I'm hoping that is going to help us track the brass and not get any mix ups I've also got the the dyes color-coded here as well so it's going to be very confusing as to which brass was prepped in which dye so that that's that's what the color is all about but that's what these are this is once fired Lake City brass that I have chopped it off just below the shoulder cleaned up that the case mouth where I chopped it off and then trimmed them all flat so they're all nice and square and they're the same length and playing around a little bit whenever these guys get formed into 300 blackout we should just need to maybe trim off a couple thousandths clean up the case mouth again and we're ready to shoot so there they are those are Lake City cases as ready to form as I can get them and the primer pockets have been taken care of military crimps removed all of that crap so a lot of the lot of the the hard work as far as forming goes is already done with those the other 15 I want to test today are the gem tech' brass that we've been shooting around here recently we got a big bag of like 500 of these guys not too long ago and this is primarily what we've been shooting the problem I don't have any pieces of brass leftover that have not been either sized or already fired so these 15 pieces are actually once fired but they were not fired in the barrel we're about to shoot it in so these weren't fired in my ballistic advantage barrel they were fired in either my 16 inch my eight and a half inch or my eight inch barrel so while I would like to have virgin Jim tech to test with I don't I've got these they're going to kind of be the ones we'll test as far as that so that's kind of the first video I want to form the Lake City and size the gemtech I want to do five in each of our three dies for one go see if they'll shoot a group and make sure that we're not having any bullet setback or stretching issues and that you know the natural neck tension of the case is enough to hold on to the bullet and we're not gonna crimp any today either just gonna seat the bullet and call that done the load for today is straight out of the Hornet Emmanuel we're going to shoot accurate 1680 which is my favorite 300 blackout powder for function you know that the new Hodgson CFE black is a similar sort of powder very gassy maybe a touch dirty not quite perfect but it provides excellent function and will run just about any gun so yeah that's gonna be our load for today is 19 grains of accurate 1680 with the hundred and sixty-eight grain Hornady a max these guys 168 grande max with a CCI number 41 primer so just a very generic load that I would expect to shoot well and we're gonna throw it into you know brass that's sized with different dies that's kind of the basics of it okay let's have a quick look at our three dies first up is the RCBS this is a small bass die SB small bass and pretty standard it does have a vent there at the neck all three of these have got vents so that helps a little bit with forming and crap you know if so you don't get lube dents and stuff very nicely made I very very nicely made dye out of our CBS so that's our first option next is the Lea this is a standard Lea sizing die nothing really special to see does have a vent hole pretty standard stuff and same thing with our Forster vent hole nicely made all three of these dyes are pretty nice the RCBS and the Forester are little more impressive in the fit and finish Department but overall none of the three are bad so let's pull them apart really quick and look at their different expanders alright first up is the Lea expander it is just held in with a little collet I guess I could take it out and show it to you there we go a little collet thingy that just squeezes it and holds it it is a one-piece design and the lead yeah these lead decapping pins are very beefy like it's tough to break one of these guys but if you do you've got to replace the entire the entire pin which includes you know your expander ball and that's what we're going to look at closer here in just a minute is the the expanders in the different dies and seeing if we can see any dimension differences between them so that's pretty straightforward not much going on there with the lead eye the RCBS die is a little bit different design I need to zoom out a little bit Donna there we go yeah maybe that'll be easier to see very simple you know locknut sort of set up here for adjustment and then here our expander will screw off and allow you to replace the decapping pin there we go our little decapping pin is a replaceable part slips inside of there and goes on to there so that's our CBS and that's also pretty straightforward the Forester is a lot like the RCBS except for the fact that it's got this rubber o-ring sort of deal and what you'll find is kind of the main part of the this guy it's not a tight fit there's some slop there so with this rubberized yeah this rubber o-ring sort of thing and this thing whenever it's tightened down it allows the entire decapping assembly to to move probably easier to see whenever we're you know put back together but it's allowed to wiggle and self-center itself so I think the idea is that's supposed to lead to you know a straighter neck better concentricity and all of that sort of crap this is also a replaceable decapping pin there it is that guy just slips in and out I didn't really need to take this all the way off and then the expander ball is actually threaded on and can be removed so just on you know the clever design side of the house I would have to give the the nod to Forester I like the fact that that is able to float a little bit whether it actually helps anything or helps to keep things straight especially when that neck is coming over the expander ball letting it kind of float and self-center that that makes sense to me so that's why I really like the the Forester die and that's the one I have primarily used over the couple years that I've been loading 300 blackout now what is very difficult is getting a consistent reading I'm the diameter of these guys that guy let's see there's a there's a 307 let's try another spot three O six five three zero six five three O six five looks like 307 and 306 five are the numbers I'm seeing a lot yep which leads me to believe that 306 five is probably the closest to reality so let me write that guy down okay next is the RCBS 306 306 306 five 306 306 five three over six five yep looks like this guy is also going to be a 306 five and last is the Forester 305 v 3o six three oh five five three oh five five yeah it looks like 305 five is going to be the number here with the Forester occasionally getting a 306 but most of the time it's wanting to say three oh five five interesting so this is a fascinating result so the die we've used the most forester assembly is two and a half thousand sploded diameter and these guys Lee and RCBS are one and a half thousandths below diameter this is very very interesting so this would inherently have more neck tension I think a thousandth more right I don't think the size of this is see what you get so like let's say this is three oh five five and our brass goes up in there the neck gets formed and then it gets pulled over the expander ball to set that final diameter there is some they call it spring back I think where the final diameter is going to be smaller than the 305 five of our expander ball all right you know what yeah I'm confusing myself and my brain is 100 miles an hour and I'm trying to figure all of this out here in step one but we don't need to we've got our dynamic diameters let's go ahead and move on let's form some brass and maybe all of these numbers are going to make sense in the end that's the hope at least all right so this is prime real estate here on top of the turret but I've got three spaces open here let's see I want to go leave Forster RCBS so let's put in the RCBS first so RCBS i don't know why they always make these yeah well I'm sure they use this same decapping assembly for a bunch of different dyes but this thing being 11 feet long always kills me I am the decapping pin on RCBS dyes is about 40 feet long so it normally really comes out the bottom a lot like if you're used to a normal die where that might seem sufficient nope that's not enough your expander ball is way the hell up in there and the problem is if your expander ball is not below the neck portion of the die here you can run into problems and crush cases so if you're ever having cases where you know they're just getting crushed that might be that there's not enough clearance between the part of the neck of the dye and the expander ball which should be just below it so yeah you get what I'm saying right there we go for the RCBS dye that's about that's about the right height one thing I kind of like to watch is whenever I'm screwing it in if you can watch the you know the tip of your be capping pin and see whether it's wobbling or not or a lot or not sometimes my reading dies it seems like the decapping pins get Bente or they were never straight to begin with and it's wobbling and stuff and but you can see here on the our CBS it is very stable very straight the entire decapping assembly it's pretty darn straight on this guy so I'm gonna set up all these guys the same screw them down until they touch and then go let's see yeah a quarter turn is too much yep screw it down until it touches and then go about an eighth of a turn beyond that that's what I'm gonna go with I want I want to get the piece of brass fully up into the die I want intimate contact between my shell holder and the and the bottom of the die at the top of the stroke so here for this initial sizing we want everything the die can give us all right there's the RCBS next up going in is the forster now they have some pretty elaborate instructions about making sure that the vent hole which i've got covered up somewhere there it is the vent hole is supposed to line up with the top third of the expander ball back about right there and you know you adjust the height of this dude there we go and then gauge it off of the height of the vent so right now where I've got it is a little bit too high I need to screw this guy out just a touch there we go that alignment looks a whole lot better there's no way I can get it on camera but you just eyeball it make sure that your vent hole is about in the top 1/3 and I think it's for the exact same reason I was just talking about on the RCBS about crushed cases and all that sort of nonsense getting that expander ball height correct can be important and it can be disastrous if you get it wrong so there's the the Forster that's about how much that guy sticks out and this might be a good opportunity I can show you how it how it floats and you look up here maybe and see it moving just a touch maybe not but yeah I like that I'll dig that okay setting this guy the exact same way down until it touches and then a little bit more less than a quarter turn you know say the same amount now the lead wins the award for the hardest decapping assembly to get installed properly because like I said this is just it just slips through this there we go so it's just slipping through and you've got to get it tightened down while also setting your proper decapping pin height what I generally end up doing is eyeballing it until I know how much it needs to protrude here on the top just yeah that's about right right there so if you look up here at the top just a little bit above flush so now I'm gonna watch that and hopefully it doesn't move while I get some tools where the hell did my there it is it's behind the camera it's hiding from me there we go now we tighten that guy down just a little bit and now it's mostly secure it's not quite tight we'll finish tightening tightening it in the press all right same installation instructions for that dude and actually now that it's in the press and tight now I can now I can move that expander up just a touch all right there we go now I think I got the least set properly now the advantage of the Li design is that since that decapping assembly is just in there and pinched with you know a collet if it hits something like you know a bird a in primer which we don't really deal with in 300 blackout or I don't know a case that doesn't have a flash hole everyone's fun you'll run into that instead of breaking the the decapping rod it generally just pushes it upward so if you ever see this guy growing on top that means you need to tighten it down a little bit that does occasionally happen so you know what I think that pretty much covers it you need to remark my dies with their with their color code some of it got wiped off like I said these are actually like uniform size I think they're like one point there you get it actually comes out to like one point three five three so one point three five eight is our minimum size after I form this I it should be about one point three six five I think so let me grab a little bit of reading imperial sizing die wax the next video where we're doing a bunch I'll probably use lanolin Lube but for this guy I want to use some reading imperial sizing die wax and really before i reassemble the dies i should have wiped the wiped each of the expander balls with a little bit of this but I didn't because I'm an idiot all right here we go first one up into the die felt pretty good and out comes our decapping pin right after I got done telling you that you need to make sure you get it tight I did not get it tight enough awesome all right we're going to need a second crescent wrench now it's getting serious okay loosen that gap a little bit hopefully the decapping rod will go right up through there without giving us any problems come on alright there's pretty much as tight as I can get it now let's see if we can get our decapping pin out there we go that's better so I need to reset that die from scratch let's see if our case came out to the right length about one point three six zero crap I was hoping for a little bit longer than that all right RDR dies reinstalled and much tighter this time let's see if it gives us a little less problem yeah forming this brass really doesn't take much effort right I mean it's not a not a difficult procedure at all alright there we go this is the last one of the first lis batch here they all seem good so it looks like I did get the freaking length a little bit shorter than I would have liked but that's okay it's it's between minimum and maximum but it's it's all they're all like three five nine three five eight so they're right about trim length which will work just fine no problems there okay the next dye is our Forster they'll just double-check and you know that they're definitely getting good contact with the shell holder so our cases all the way up inside of the die yeah see this guy's a little bit longer one point three six two and now that I think about whenever I was trying to figure out what length I should trim my blanks to come out the right length this is the die I was using this is kind of you know this was my target was about one point six one point in the lower one point three sixes you know like this to one point three six five something like that was really what I was hoping for out of all of them but they'll all be fine okay five pieces with the Forester no problem at all moving on to the RCBS yeah the first one into each die I'm really kind of loading it up with some Lube there just to make sure that expander ball gets a little bit on it all right while we're over here we've got the die set up I'm going to go ahead and resize my gem tech' brass as well alright although our brass has been resized now so let me wipe them off a little bit of alcohol to get this lube off and then we'll take some measurements see if we can tell any difference between our different dies so I've been trying to use the tools I have at my disposal here to take as many critical measurements as I can first of all the overall length of the rounds all of them I've measured them all they're all between one point three five eight and one point three six four now what I found is the lead I resulted in the long in the in the shortest brass it did not stretch much one most of them are right at one point three five eight now the next guy the Forster die gave us the longest brass here's a good example here one point three six one five a lot of these guys are 361 362 363 so they are the long ones the RCBS are somewhere in between there you know 1361 will see some 1350 9s some 13 Thea there's a 1358 yeah so forster stretched it the most followed by RCBS and then the lead I stretched the least it was the same deal with the gem tech' brass the next thing I did so the the Hornady headspace gauge kit or whatever it doesn't really have one of these that are specifically for three or blackout like I don't know what the datum line measurement or whatever is but the closest we've got is a 350 so believe that hole is 0.35 0 it does stop on the neck of the 300 blackout whether it's the proper place I don't know but it should be at least enough to index consistently off of to take some measurements so I put it in my calipers ID 0 my calipers right there and then that's our measurement this was a very surprising measurement the league gives us a very consistent one point zero seven eight inches the Forester is one point zero six for 14,000 shorter than the lead eye the RCBS gives us one point zero seven two usually these are a little bit fiddly yeah 1.07 - yeah is what I was getting the readings with the gem tech' brass were somewhat similar let's see the next no the next I did I tried to measure the inside of the neck which is very difficult with a set of calipers but I tried anyway what I came up with was three or four here in the get a little bit more shallow yeah this is a very very crappy measurement to take it is very hard to get a consistent reading but I tell you what I tried it earlier I was getting 304 on most of these yeah I don't know let's just forget that one screw it the expander ball size is the most important part and that's what directly affects that next size so we we have a better measurement with the expander ball we know the Foresters a little bit smaller which should mean a little bit tighter neck this one earlier I was getting some somewhat repeatable readings where the these were giving me 303 and the others were giving me 304 so I think our Forster brass has gotten yep a little bit tighter neck there the next thing I did was I measured neck thickness now I have actually got numbers for all of the different head stamps we're going to use yeah this is pretty much impossible to read on camera but the number I ended up getting was ten and a half so I'm getting about 10 and a half thousands reading with the Lake City brass our gem tech' brass is about an 11 11 thousandths thickness yeah it's right at 11 that you can't read but I've been yeah looking at that neck thickness 10 and a half for Lake City and 11 for gem tech' the other measurement that I was able to get a nice consistent reading on is right below the shoulder yeah like right below where the shoulder is getting 360 for the lis 358 here for the Forester I can find it Yap 358 and then the RCBS was also 358 yeah perfect and that number was the same with the two different types of brass so the leaves were 360 RCBS and foresters were 358 so that's pretty much it that's what I've got for measurements here of the brass it's pretty much ready to rock I'm gonna hit this guy with a quick chamfer and deburr and then we'll be ready for primers let's get these guys loaded up alright so I'm just using a hand primer here no problems here with the Lake City brass we got the military crimps removed pretty well before I started the videos they're going in nicely I'm just going to throw these charges I've got my RCBS Uniflow powder measure set up to throw 19 grains and accurate 1680 it throws so accurately that it's not worth the time to weigh them out for a test like this this should be a somewhat compressed charge and I did that on purpose because you know have had people comment and asking me where they load compressed charges and they find that their rounds can grow even over time just sitting in you know sitting in a box the compressed charged cans can push the bullet out so I'm hoping in a similar vein you know if we got a nice little compressed charge whenever we slam a bolt home or something the powder will be putting a little bit of pressure on the bullet maybe make it more prone to jump if it's going to jump you know or grow if it's going to grow so I need to it's been a couple hours since I set up my powder measure so I need like to run a couple charges through it make sure any settling that's happened doesn't give me heavy charges to start out with make sure I get all the all the powder out of that piece of brass good deal now I'll just throw them right here in the trade just to show you the powder fill you need a flashlight assist I think there it is right there right at the base the neck right where the shoulder starts is where our powder level is and this big hundred and sixty eight grande max is gonna protrude down into the case quite a lot all right so our target overall length is two point two one five get this guy dialed in all right I think I got or die close to point two one six so yeah it kind of pretty close to that two point two one five number so like I had mentioned earlier we're not doing any crimp at all so we're just seating the bullet and that's gonna be it tell you what once we finish seating these so this one this next one is the Forester I'm not really feeling any differences in the feel as far as seating goes right we think that the neck here with the Forester brass might be a little bit tighter but it doesn't feel it doesn't feel bad but this is a really nice boat tail bullet that's easy to seat anyway so maybe if we were shooting flat based bullets we would notice the difference all right so the one last measurement I wanted to take was basically just around the neck with the bullet seated yeah like right about there and I'm getting 334 everything makes a lot of sense to me because you know that measurement there should be bullet diameter plus the neck wall thickness on each side I mean that's basically what you're measuring so the Jim Tech and the Lake City brass we're both you know 10 and a half to 11 thousandths of neck thickness so if you take a bullet that's 308 let's see what what was our number 330 you know we take a 308 bullet and we've got a total of 330 so we've got 20 mm to account for and we're doing that with about 11,000 sub wall of neck thickness on each side so the math works man all right here's the thing we're just about out of daylight this might be a somewhat dark shooting session but I want to shoot them let's get out there all right well that figures I'm rushing it's almost door and my camera decides to have a memory card malfunction I have no idea how much of the previous segment was actually recorded all right folks it's freaking amateur hour over here had it had a memory card failure and that's just all there is to it lost a bunch of footage but we must press on continue with our quest despite the challenges so the first thing I did when I got out there was I grabbed one round from each of our rows our Lake City and our Jim tech grasp so I started with the Lake City brass that was recent or that was formed with the lead I took an overall length measurement of it and then I put it in a magazine which that's another thing we need to talk about I did finally get one of the 300 blackout pmags and it kind of made a big difference made life a little easier so we'll talk about that here in just a second but so I got my one test round put it in the magazine put it in the gun and use the bolt release to slam it home I then ejected it took a measurement and repeated the exact same thing so one round from each row I slammed the bolt home four times and I have put the results into a chart format in which you will see that none of them were perfect they all grew in overall length every single one of them but you'll see some very interesting patterns here on this chart the worst of the worst was the Lake City brass that had been formed with the lead I you know very top right-hand corner there and if we follow it back so the first slam it grew to it grew two inches from the original second slam that increased to five third slam and increased to 7 and then finally the last slam made it 11 below it you'll see the gem tech' brass with the lead I was the second worst so our two worst results came from the lead dive now the RC bein our CBS and Forester were pretty darn similar to one another you'll see him group there with the gem tech' brass at five and six thousandths of jump both of them seemed to grow a thousandth or two every time you slam the bolt but it just wasn't quite as drastic as the lis brass and the best of the best down there at the bottom was the Lake City brass with the Forester and the RCBS die brass after four slams they had only grown mm and mm and it seemed to be stable like those last two Slams didn't result in any change so the one that looks out of place here is the is the top one the Lake City brass with the lead i if this followed exactly what I would expect that would be down below the gem tech' Forester you know we kind of have a group of the gem tech' and then the Lake City below it but for some reason that Lake City Lee load just didn't just wanted to keep on growing so these results are fascinating and like this video was supposed to go up already but I'm taking my time with it I was going to try to finish it up last night but I decided you know what let's sleep on it let's think this through I've done a little bit more research as I've gone along about neck tension and I've learned a few things so you know the so if we go back to our expander ball sizes I think early in the earlier in the video I called the RCBS a point three zero six five it's actually three zero six zero and even back there during that part of the video you can see on the calipers three zero six zero was really what I was getting the most so I'm kind of revising that measurement because for one I think it matches reality I mean I think the measurement is closer to three point zero six zero and it also matches these results I think it helps to make sense of things so you know hourly brass was the worst when it was we know when it came to growing overall length and that expander ball was the biggest I think that's what's going on right I think that point three zero six five expander is just a little bit too big now a little bit too big is a whole lot better than a little bit too small because we could pull out that expander and polish it up and and try to reduce its diameter and I think maybe towards the end of this series what maybe we'll do that maybe we'll we'll go all the way through this video in the next video or whatever whatever it takes to get through all the brass with the dies the way they are right now and then maybe we'll do another video of optimizing each die you know talking about what we saw from each die and doing what we can to get the breath but the best brass out of it and I think for the lead that's going to be trying to reduce the size of that expand or just a touch to get a little bit tighter neck fit so you might ask how so you know one of the groups look like how did this result on paper you saw them earlier but let's have a little bit closer look with using what we know now and you'll see the to leave groups 1.37 up there on the top left and 1.80 on the bottom on the bottom left those are the two biggest groups the Forster in the RCBS were a good bit tighter you know they're between that one inch and one point four inch so you know the groups from our Forster and our CB s were just a little bit tighter now it was he was getting dark and I was rushing a little bit and these were shot pretty quickly but I was still doing a halfway decent job our gun might heat it up a little bit but as far as the hold I was pretty close to what I could do when I'm really taking my time but it was rush just a touch just you know just throwing that out there the velocities I don't know if they're significant I doubt it other than outstanding standard deviation all the way across the board which is what we see out of accurate 1680 and see if he black and these sorts of ball powders where we can get a nice little compressed charge they really shoot consistent velocities and it's surprising even you know even though here we were you know our rounds were stretching as they were getting chambered so if we can figure out that problem and get it to where the round is very consistent and not stretching at all maybe they'll tighten up even more I'm sure the groups will a back to the velocity so you'll notice the the Forester does have the two lowest velocities of the six group but they're so very close I don't know whether that's significant or not I think as we move on with the testing and gather more data maybe we'll be able to see whether it is significant so the question I'm left with at this point if we go let's go back to the stretch chart is this good or bad because we kind of stacked the deck here against ourselves because we used a heavily compressed charge and we did not crimp at all so with those two qualifiers this may be outstanding you know maybe only getting to thousands of stretch out of our Lake City and Forester and RCBS combinations maybe that's outstanding maybe just a very light crimp they'd stay at zero and we'd be in good shape maybe even the lead you know that seemed to be pretty bad about stretching with that larger expander ball maybe just a touch of crimp and I in a good portion of this would go away we're gonna have to find that out as we go along so let's take our fired brass and go through a couple of our you know our critical measurements that we took earlier and see how they compare okay so our over cases have now been fired in my gun and as we take this measurement we should expect to see the same value from all of them since this was a nice hot load these should be very wealth fire form to my chamber so the first and probably most important measurement here is with our headspace gauge our 350 headspace gauge let's put our you know up there the numbers we got previously 1.08 - let's grab another random this one's actually a gem tech' where the last one was a was a lake city fiddle fiddle fiddle when putting zero eight three 1.08 - these are still dirty and there's you know some gunk and stuff that might throw off my measurements a little bit but this is yeah it looks like 1.08 - is kind of the average seeing one every once in a while that's spigen shorter or longer but i think it's mainly just from cases being dirty and maybe not sitting in here nicely whatever one let's call it one point zero eight - so if we go back to our previous numbers we can see that okay a piece of lea brass where previously we had a reading of one point zero seven eight now it's one point zero eight to that shoulder whenever it fire formed blue forward four thousandths that's not bad but if we go over to the Forester which was one point zero six four that's eight 18 thousandths that this shoulder blew forward during fire form that's a lot so the Forester is bumping the shoulder back way too far whether that's a problem yeah not really I've been using this diet a whole lot over the last year and I've found excellent brass life so it may not be a huge deal like like something like that would be in a bottleneck case with a with a larger shoulder but it seems it'll be this you know this little shoulder is able to deal with getting set back too much but like I mentioned at the end of this series maybe we'll just go we'll go die by die and optimize it setting because you know we have control over that all we have to do to reduce the amount that it's setting the shoulder back is just screw the die out a little bit you know we don't put the the case so far up into the die now if we could back out that Forester die enough to where maybe we're only bumping it down to you know one point zero seven eight like the Li or something like that as long as it's still sizing the body of the case enough that's fine that's completely fine so we'll be yeah we'll be checking that in the future the next setting or the next measurement I want to look at is that size right below the shoulder 0.36 - this is a lot easier when you're not reaching around a camera all right with the lead die it seems to be like 365 0.365 364 something in that range over here to the Forester brass 364 364 and RCBS 364 so they're all the same we'll do a gem tech' here just for the heck of it 365 ish 363 whatever close enough so if we look once again the lis which was a 360 straight out of the die is getting blown out the least right our tightest well actually the Forester in the RCBS were both about 358 so they're just you know the shoulders getting expanded during fire forming a couple extra thousandths so I think that's that's pretty much the measurements that matter here and it tells us that the lis is just barely sizing enough for my gun so the lead eye does have a history of people complaining about you know having function issues and not and just their brass not getting sized quite enough and this makes sense right if my if my chamber was just a little bit tighter either in headspace or diameter here I could certainly have function issues but luckily the three barrels I've shot in so far the lead I'd does okay with but I can see now why others might have issues it's pretty close so the RCBS seems to be the the next smaller die shorter headspace shorter shoulder width and then the RC and then the Forster is the the shortest of all very short headspace so we're definitely learning I'll tell you what while we've got this up II closely view here let me show you this 300 blackout magazine really quick the differences are pretty subtle but there's there's two big ones that I'd notice right off the bat if you look at the ramp here you know the angled part right there you can see that it ends right about at the little that says five five six if you look at the 300 black the proper end of the 300 black you'll see it's it's steeper and it makes its way all the way down a little bit faster there yeah there's some focus got a little bit too close yeah you can see that it just slopes a little bit faster there the other one I'll say well let me pull the bottoms off these guys this is a m3p mag there we go so it should be you know the same generation now here's the other big difference probably gonna be difficult to get this guy to focus where I want it to focus but you can see these ribs right right there that ride down the length of the magazine there's the 300 blackout and this is the five five six magazine you can see the three inner black out is a good bit smaller it seems to be positioned roughly in the same spot it's just a whole lot smaller and differently shaped so now let me put them back together and I'll show you what that means actually I should have probably given you this view of the the ramp stuff I was talking about where the five five six just extends a little bit farther here's a very good test case this is the big ol ugly 200 grain maker rex bullet monster ogive just a big old hunk of copper there and in a traditional five five six magazine when you slop it down in there goes in fine but when you go much further it hits that guy and the tip of the bullet is forced inward so with 223 mag your rounds go in and then the noses start getting smushed inward which is not cool man not cool at all there's a second show you it does the same thing on the other and that initial force that it takes to get over that little ramp kind of makes it a pain in the butt to to load rounds into a five five six magazine now our 300 blackout magazine you'll see it goes down in there and now it can be pushed straight down and it never touches it never touches that little piece at all see if I can actually get it to where it'll show it it can't yep so now they go in and slide right past that very easily and it keeps them straight just like it's supposed to and it just makes pop and rounds into these magazines ten times easier than it used to be I mean it used to be a little bit of a pain in the butt and now it is not much smoother now alright so where does this leave us well one thing I should mention there were no function issues at all I lost my video evidence but you can trust me these all fed just fine ejected just like they should and there were zero function issues now I suspect in our next video that will not be the case if we go back to the neck thickness chart that I had earlier this gives you a preview of the other brass head stamps we're going to be forming and testing in the next video and you can see that ppyou has got a thirteen thousandths thick neck wolf 223 has a twelve thousand I think those two were going to give us problems and if they do or when they do I'll be fascinated to see if it happens with all of the dyes or whether it only happens on some of so that that's kind of that's what's coming next and also I'm not quite done with this brass especially like you know the Lake City we formed it we shot it that's fine but what about a resizing you know now that it's formed does the same behavior continue after it's you know resized again so I think what we'll do is we'll move forward and do our additional we've got like nine nine Moorhead stamps to test with today's procedure once we get through that we might run them all through a tumbler and then load them again with the same dye just to verify what we found in the initial forming loading yeah and then after that like I was saying maybe we can talk about optimizing each dye so this is getting bigger and bigger it's hilarious I'm you know I've already edited a lot of this video and back in the beginning like today was going to be the short video we're just going to cover the test really quick and we'll be done I mean seriously I started this video thinking it was going to be twenty minutes and it's probably gonna be an hour but I feel like we've covered a lot of ground and we've made some fascinating observations here well with our first two pieces of brass so I don't feel like we've wasted time I'll tell you one thing I've learned through my research as I'm doing this there's only so much that neck tension can gain you or a smaller expander can gain you so we know that our Forster has the smallest expander at point three zero five five and we know that our bullets are point three zero eight so let's say that I just I wanted more neck tension and I took this for the the expander ball out of my Forster die and took it from point three zero five five all the way down to point three zero four so a full four thousands below bullet diameter well you reach a point where when you seat a bullet if the next to small it's simply going to stretch out you know the bullet is going to stretch it out and it won't result in any more effective neck tension than you would get with maybe say our Forster sizer now with just point three zero five five so just reducing that expander ball size does not always necessarily just mean more neck tension you reach a point of diminishing returns I guess and what people talk about a test that people talk about doing to test this is let's say we had five different expanders and we sized them all with those different expanders and then we seeded a bullet into each of the five and then we pulled out the bullet from each of the five and then we've measured the neck of each of the five so we should see at some point where you know maybe a neck that wasn't sized quite enough is going to be larger and then one that's smaller it's going to get smaller and smaller and smaller but you'll reach a point to where it evens out and they're all the same size because inserting the bullet just spread them out that far and they were only a and they were only able to retract a certain amount for some reason I just I find this hard to put into words you know or find words to explain myself so why is the Lake City better than the gem tech' so far at resisting bullet movement is there some quality in the Lake City brass that makes it more elastic or maybe there's some quality in the gem tech' that makes it slicker Lube richest is that a word is Lube richest a word I gotta look that up stand by yes Lube richest is a word and it has an interesting second meaning alright but we're looking for smooth and slippery with oil or a similar substance I don't know whatever I'm talking about inherent Lube British this is the gem tech' just naturally slicker and there's less friction to overcome between the case neck and the bullet I don't know and I don't really know how to test it or I haven't thought up a way to test it yet and maybe as we test you know all of these more examples of different brass will see this phenomena more and more you know maybe somewhere in this box is some ludicrous lubricious ness and will find that this ludicrous lube richest Ness is so slippery that even the Forester died results in brass where bullets just can't hang brother yeah this is a big it's a big thing to ask out of a little bit of brass right that 300 Lac out these are big ass heavy bullets you know I I and that's another reason why I chose one hundred and sixty ain't grande max and even though it's a little bit heavy for a supersonic but I just wanted that mass right I wanted that that mass slamming home to may be illustrate this problem more I don't know if it's working or not but we got results so I think this is where we'll call it quits for video number one like I said man we're on a journey we're on a quest I cannot believe how long this video is but I feel like it's good info so I don't feel bad about it I'm just surprised so the next week we've got nine Moorhead stamps to test I'm going to need to think about it a little bit I may need to split this into two videos just to reduce the possibility of confusion as I go along and to maybe keep the length of the video in check I'm not sure but all I know is we got something good started here I think we're getting good feedback and we're on the verge of solving some problems I think so if you want to help support the channel you know help me buy some new fricken memory cards or something similar come check me out at patreon.com slash reloading I really appreciate all the support over there and I will see you guys probably in a day or two yeah I'm not sure there probably won't be a video tomorrow but something the next day so I'll see you guys then

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

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Id: Cx84P7q2JgI

Length: 58min 29sec (3509 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 10 2017