300 Blk Sizing Die Shootout - Part 2

welcome back folks it is time to continue our look at some 300 blackout fooling 3 sizing dives hopefully you watched video 1 or you're gonna be very confused and lost that was a long video it was dry and it was boring but we covered a lot of good info now we won't necessarily be covering again here today so this is definitely not a standalone video I'll try to hit the high points though just to jog your memory we have a lead I we have a Forster die and we have an RCBS die we have 11 different head stamps of brass 10 of which we've actually formed into 300 blackout from 223 or 556 whichever it happened to be here is the list of head stamps we're going to be looking at today pp you wolf federal 556 federal - 23 PMC PSD Remington Hornady and WCC pretty common stuff I tried to pick you know some at least mostly common stuff now when you're forming 300 blackout the neck thickness of your final product is the most critical thing or you know that's what you always read and it's been kind of well documented which brass is good and which brass is bad so our list today I've got two that I know are going to be bad ppyou and wolf all of the others are from the good list and I expect good results with them so here's the deal this video was supposed to be up yesterday but I can't seem to put it a video together because I've already shot this ammunition you can see we've got a whole bunch of empty brass everything's the same as the last video so everything up to this point is just SuperDuper boring and I can't make a good video out of it so I'm just going to scrap it all I showed loading I showed measuring crap I showed range time I showed frickin slamming the bolt home 800 million times on our different head stamps it all sucks and I'm gonna dump every bit of it I think we'll pick out snippets as we need them but as far as I'm concerned we're starting here where it gets interesting hopefully now the other thing that made it's pretty boring up to this point is things kind of went exactly as I expected them to so back to the list of nine head stamps for today and actually we'll go ahead and include the ones we tested in the last video Jim tech and federal or and Lake City five five six this is the neck thickness that each one gives you you can see ppyou 13,000 s wolf is 12 just a little you know thicker than we need the ones that I measured at ten and a half and eleven basically all of the others were testing no problems at all and that's exactly what I saw now over in this box you will notice some rounds that did not get fired this is the PPU and the wolf brass that I sized with the lead eye they would not chamber and you know that's kind of what we expected now the PPU that had the thicker neck you can see a very distinct line around not that far below the case mouth to be honest with you and you can see where it hit the chamber and got stuck so these were fun to yank out and there was no hope of getting these guys to chamber now when we moved over to wolf they wouldn't chamber but then when I ejected him there wasn't any mark on the on the neck let me see if there if any of them gave a mark on the neck I don't think they did this one gave a little bit of a scuff but I think with the wolf brass what held us back was the headspace because even though you know with a fooling sized and die you get the brass up in there you'd expect the outer dimensions to be more or less equal but apparently they weren't this wolf brass and actually the PPU as well just ended up with headspace a little bit longer than the others and I think that's what stopped it with the wolf now I was surprised to find that with the RCBS and the Forester dies I was able to go ahead and shoot this brass so they chambered no problem and they actually chambered reasonably clean like it didn't feel you know too mushy so that was a little bit of a surprise I still wouldn't use them I would still throw him in the trash before I've made 300 blackout out of him but with the RCBS and the Forester dies it sized them to use them all of the other head stamps gave absolutely no problems with sizing and once they were sized I measured their head space and they were they were the same numbers that we mentioned in the last video so the Forester was still short the RCBS was about right and the Li was too long basically the measurement below the shoulder that we had taken in the last video although that was the same dimensions were just they were identical now in the last in the comment section of the last video there were a couple people that for one mentioned some really great articles and stuff on the subject of neck tension I'll link one down in the in the description it's from like the mid-south shooters blog and it's just a little article about proper neck sizing how to determine how much neck tension you've got and that sort of crap and it was basically a summary of everything I'm doing and stumbling through and making our long hours long videos they summarized in a nice little article so if you kind of want this information but you really hate me just go click on the just go click on the article man there's no there's no reason to torture yourself he also gave a link to a video that the 6'5 guys did on their YouTube channel about a forester full length resizing die that's been custom honed apparently you can either order dies directly from Forester that are already honed to your specifications or you can send them your die and they'll hone it out for you okay minor technical difficulties for a second my battery went dead in my little audio thingy let's see if I can regain my thought we were talking about getting a forester die honed and what I mean is up in the neck area we'll get into that more here in just a little bit so both of the people in the comments had mentioned that they wished I had measured the cases after they had been sized around the neck and then seeded the bullet and then taken the same measurement the outside neck measurement to see how much it grew whenever a bullet was seated you know another method of determining neck tension that seems to kind of be what we're doing here is we're taking several imprecise method and trying to come to a precise conclusion if they all agree that's kind of what's going on so I went ahead with this batch of nine head stamps and did that measurement they're talking about so as soon as I formed them I measured the outside neck seeing it a bullet measured the outside neck the results were pretty fascinating so these are the numbers I got from the lead eye you'll see that the diameter of the sized cases most of them were 0.33 0 or 0.33 1 except for wolf and PPU which were larger because of their thicker necks but if you look at that loaded case diameter and I don't even know how this is possible most of them did not change at all it looks like the wolf brass grew by one one-thousandth and the Remington grew by one 1000 most likely that's just the difference in the way I was measuring it or something but we basically saw no change now the bullets didn't fall into the case so there was a little bit there you know that they are getting grabbed a little bit but it's not even enough to move the the case out larger that was crazy now here are the numbers for the Forester in the RCBS you will see that across the board that neck diameter grew either 2 or 3 thousandths so most likely all we really need to do with our lead eye to get the same sort of numbers out of it is home down that expander ball a little bit to match the size of the RCBS and the Forester I think or at least I hope you know and really we still don't even know what's good because well I'll tell you what we need to look at the slam chart if you guys remember the slam chart from the last one well we've got a new one here for today and what I've done on this chart to hopefully make it more obvious is the blue lines represent the Forester and RCBS formed brass the red lines represent the Lea formed brass so it's a very distinct grouping all of the Forester and RCBS had one two or three thousandths of whenever I slammed him home four times the LEAs were all between four and eight thousandths so this is just more verification that that lead is lagging behind in the neck tension Department and it's not grabbing ahold of these bullets as well as the other two dies so at this point we've taken calipers and we've measured the expander ball in size of our Reese inside of our resizing dye and determined that the Lea wasn't small enough we've learned it all this crazy ammo and done all this crazy slamming home of the bolt carrier to determine that the lead doesn't have enough neck tension and our measurements outside the case neck before and after seating a bullet lead us to believe that the lead doesn't give enough neck tension I think we're ready to call it a fact my lead I just has an expander that is way too big now another thing that I noticed with the lis brass it all felt mushy or you know it all went into battery mushy you guys know that what I'm talking about right there's that crisp sound of an AR going clean in the battery and then there's that mushy gross sound that you get whenever either you're done super dirty or your brass just isn't fitting your chamber very well I got that with almost all of the lis brass and whenever I was doing all of my slam test I actually busted the crap out of my knuckles yeah you see need a band-aid maybe a hospital visit so the lis rounds were just having a hard time all the way across now someone brought up a very good point in the last video in the comments section of the last video saying that lis themselves I think he had copy and copied and pasted a email from Li technical support or something probably from a forum I don't know you know how those float around or maybe it was to him I don't know but it was a note for lis saying that their die was never intended to form brass so if you have problems forming brass and getting them to work in your gun too bad it's a product that was never designed for that this die is designed to resize brass either proper 300 blackout brass or formed brass that's been formed in a you know a forming die or another die that actually works well for forming I still think the dies too big right it could use a little shorter headspace and this expander Bowl isn't going to get any smaller no matter what brass we use so I think the brat I think the die needs some work I think them saying that it it shouldn't be used for forming is a is a cop-out but I wanted to bring that up because you know it's good point now on the subject of accuracy I basically I don't trust any of this data or any of this information God imagine having to sit there and watch me shoot all 27 of these groups they're all the exact same load they're all more or less an inch to an inch and a half inch and a quarter to an inch and a half whatever there were just so many rounds that I couldn't really properly wait for the gun to cool down it was it was a bit of a dumpster fire out there and I wasn't really able to determine much or even if let's say the Li was just way worse than the others well of course it is the freaking bullets are moving all over the place you know until we get these bullets stabilized I can't trust any accuracy data I don't care how accurate the gun shoots if the bullets moving every time we slam the bolt it's no good to us right now one thing you might have noticed in some of the pictures I showed earlier I'm a freaking idiot you guys know this already I try and tell you every video just about 168 grain a max that we were using I thought this was a brand new box of 250 it wasn't I ran out of bullets so the PPU and the wolf ended up you I ended up using the 165 grain Hornady SST so not a perfect match 150 165 versus 168 grains the shape is maybe just a touch different this has a candle or where the other guy doesn't but it was the closer match I could come up with and it was actually just fine the the velocities with this dude were actually a touch lower even though it's a little bit lighter bullet the velocities were a touch lower with the SST but we're talking about like 10 feet per second a little slower so barely any difference the excellent performance with accurate 1680 just continued all of our standard deviations most of them were in that three four five six reign like we saw from last video which is just ludicrous but we did see a couple in the teens but overall accuracy was fine velocities were fine didn't really see any anything major that I want to comment about on that except for the fact that I think in the last video I mentioned that with our velocities the for stirred I was giving the lowest velocities in the last video that continued it was very very slight usually just three or four or five feet per second slower than the others but it was still slower so I don't really have a good explanation for that but out of the you know the nine head stamps we tested today I think eight of them the force to Forster dye resulted in the slowest velocities okay back to what I had mentioned a little bit ago about the Forrester dye being able to be honed there they're all in the press actually I'll tell you what let's go over to the press real quick so there was a really good point brought up in the last video that honestly I should have incorporated into this test and I was about the shell holders so the last video the whole time we were using the reading shell holder number 10 and I was actually just looking like the point where this is really given kind of a good little cam over feel if I switch dies it's not nearly as heavy a cam over with the lead died and I'm able to screw the die down a little bit more I'm not sure yet how much difference that'll make okay lis shell holder and the lead I screwed down basically all the way as far as it needs to go I've got a couple pieces of Jim tech previously fired brass here okay and I'll tell you what just to double check ourselves I'll go ahead and size a couple pieces with the reading shell holder so we don't have to just trust the numbers we wrote down the in the last video okay it's readjusted to match the reading show holder all right now Hornady comparator time alright so with the reading shell holder one point zero seven four is the number I'm seeing and that's exactly what I had written down when filming the previous video let's see yep one point zero seven four so one point zero seven four is the number with the reading show holder I'm gonna feel like the world's biggest dumbass if this is a significantly shorter well one point zero seven three is the smallest number I can get with this piece and I've wiggled it fifteen hundred times now I can't get anything shorter but this other piece is one point zero seven two so this is excellent news so the the properly shell holder that came with the die gives us an additional one or two thousandths of additional headspace to work with so if I wasn't an idiot and I would have thought of this thing like I just didn't even dawn on me until until that comment came through I really really should have yeah I realized used the the lis shell holder with the lead I and will do that going forward because we've got some more tests to do here right that's all there is to it we need to sand down the expander in our 300 blackout die we need to try our we need to try and lessen the headspace on the Forester died to a reasonable amount the only one that's really kind of seemed to be working just fine no need to modify anything is the RCBS or at least with what we know now it seems that way so one thing I've brought up in the earlier in the video was the Forester honed I you know offering and I want to show you guys what that would mean so our expander is what really matters no matter how far the die body brings the neck in the expander is going to get drugged through it and open it back up so the thought behind getting a precisely honed I would be that whenever it goes all the way up in there it doesn't get sized down so much just to then be expanded on the way out so what allows you to do is get it to where it just barely squeezes it in and then whatever it's coming across the expander it just barely squeezes it back out so there's just less movement and it's easier on the necks right it's gonna work those necks a whole lot less in order to make that a viable solution for you though you need to be shooting the same type of brass or not necessarily the same type brass but then you know your your neck thickness becomes even more critical because that die body the expander ball everything is going to be custom sized for you know a particular brass thickness so not really something we want to deal with in 300 blackout for crying out loud but in other calibers with more expensive brass or we're looking for more precision or something like that it's it's might be something to think about but for us here we're not gonna worry about it here's what I want to do though just like I was mentioning how you know the die body is gonna bring that neck way in smaller than the expander so the expander that can then you know open it back up well how far down does it size it so what I want to do is pull the expander out of all three of these dies and I want to run a run a piece of brass up in them and take a neck diameter now the worst thing we could find especially on this lead i if we that it's already big like it's already too big so if it's not squeezing down the brass enough I don't care how small the expander ball gets it's not gonna make any difference right we need it to you squeeze it down enough so that there's enough for the expander ball to get through and sized properly I need a wrench for this dude you know with these Levi's the decapping pins always want to fall straight down so I usually put it right there in the primary station and then all right there we go so our expander should be loose there we go all right so lead I get Sally shell holder all right so now if we put this guy up in there with no expander ball to open it back up this guy should be pretty small unfortunately I did not a shirt the size the case with each die before I pulled it out because I don't have numbers for Jim tech brass like back to our chart where we had sized case diameter all right good it looks like it's 326 so that's at least four thousandths smaller than the smallest number we came up with earlier or whatever you know yeah hopefully you get what I'm saying so we we do indeed have room to move on our expander that dude so this guy is small enough so that we can say in this guy down a little bit and it's still gonna hit some brass okay same test with the Forester yep got the nope I got that I need to put the reading shell holder back in all right so the Forester died has given me 323 I need to write these down what did I say for the Li 326 yeah 326 and 323 so let's have a look at the RCBS hi this guy's also 323 hopefully this makes sense so when you know on its upward path into the die it takes it down like with the RCBS here it takes it down to 323 and then whenever it gets pulled across this the expander ball it brings it up to like 3:30 or 31 where the most common numbers we saw so it's moving in from fired diameter 323 and then back out to about 30 good so I mean it seems to be like all three of these if we wanted to mess around with the expander balls even on the Forster and the RCBS we've we've got the room so except for the general suckiness of the lead eye that we've seen so far I think the other thing we've learned is that the exceptional crappiness of the gem tech' brass seems to be unique at least in our samples so you remember of last video the gem tech' brass even with the our CBS and the forster die we got more bullet movement right more stretch on our Slams than we did with any other headstamp period and it was not even close so that means either there's some specific property about this gem tech' brass that is making it more prone to round stretching or there's something screwed up with my process to where i have prepared this brass in a manner that makes it especially crappy and sometimes that you know if you read far enough down the threads about neck tension you will see people that complain about stainless steel tumbling smoothing off the inside of the neck too much and reducing neck tension so maybe I've got the next to these guys a little too slick maybe I need a neck brush rough them up a little bit or maybe just that day for some reason I didn't get the lube off enough or something but you know what these sort of problem seems like it would be an every couple rounds sort of problem you know this was consistent we never tested one that was good so I'm still a little bit baffled I'm looking forward to more testing with the Jim tech before we absolutely call it crap but at this point it's pointing toward Jim tech scrap if you guys have Jim tech available if you would do that if you just load up a dummy round with some Jim tech and maybe another sample of another type of brass measure your overall length and then just keep slamming your bolt home taken overall length measurements and see if you see the gem tech' especially crappy with round stretch I would be interested to see your findings as well and we're going to keep testing with it so I think that's where we should in this video we didn't learn a whole lot but we covered a lot of ground you know we verified a lot of things that needed verified so that's good I think for the next video here's what I want to do here's what I want to do in the next video let's let's say in down orally expander let's yeah let's work on this lead eye a little bit in the next video I think I'm prepared to say that there's no hope with it in the way that it is right now so let's say in this guy down we will also work with our Forster dye to try and get a more reasonable headspace number so it's not over sizing our brass and I think we might bring some crimp back into things I do I've got a bunch of these 147 grain m80 bullets you know they're not the best for accuracy early so far haven't found anything that really shoots that accurate with them but it's a good test bullet got a cane lure and all that crap so maybe that's what we'll do in the next video well switch over to 147-grain m80 will switch to just just because we're out of 168 so no other reason we'll switch to a load that's not compressed right we had that heavily compressed load that might have been helping push those bullets out so we'll switch reload there's not compressed we'll do our die modifications to the lis and we'll adjust the forster better and we'll probably bring some crimp into the equation so with all five of those things we'll need to you know do it incrementally but I want to dream up a few tests and see if we can get to the bottom of this bullet setback issue I mean honestly at this point we don't even need to shoot any more rounds until we can figure this out we've got enough information we've got enough ideas and plans so we need to we need to get that straightened out before we get back on the range wasting bullets alright folks that's where we'll leave it I appreciate all the feedback all the comments I read every single one even if I don't get to take the time to reply all the time if you want to help support the channel come check me out at patreon.com slash reloading everyone little bit helps and I appreciate all the support over there and I will see you guys next time

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 20,395

Rating: 4.952096 out of 5

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Id: wMJK2xz4mc0

Length: 26min 50sec (1610 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 13 2017