How to Setup a Full length Sizing Die - Easy and Accurate

setting up your full-length size and die can be very simple and yet there are several ways of doing it in my opinion controlling how far you're setting back the shoulder of the case is very important but it may not be to you today i'll show you how i do it but as always if you're happy with your own process by all means stick to it now first off some sizing dies are going to come with directions and some don't most sizing dies that do come with directions sound something like this place your press ram in its uppermost position the handle all the way down screw down the sizing die into the press until it touches the top of the shell holder and then to ensure all the play is removed add another eighth to one quarter turn one full rotation of your die should move your die down somewhere around 72 thousands that eighth to a quarter of return is somewhere around 9 to 18 thousands quite a significant distance when we're talking about sizing brass in most cases this will size it so your brass will fit i'm not sure it's the best for accuracy or case life but it may work others set their dies so it will fit in these case gauges again if you're just trying to know if it will chamber these will work just fine i guess personally i think it's still sacrificing case life and accuracy if you're setting up your die to fit your brass in a case gauge the method i suggest you use is going to involve calipers and headspace gauges if you want to do something you want to be able to repeat it and you want to be able to measure it or at least compare it these headspace gauges are essentially comparator bodies you can get a budget version of the headspace gauge from hornady or if you're looking for a slightly better tool short action customs makes a fine headspace gauge if you want to set up your dive for the best case life and accuracy the first thing we're going to need is fired brass from the chamber that we're loading for the second most important thing is that the brass has been decapped meaning the primer needs to be removed from the case all the brass measurements we're going to talk about today are undecapped brass because if we left the primers in they can skew our readings the way i set up my die some would call bump sizing however this is a full length size it's sizing all the sides of the case including the shoulder the general rule if you want to call it that is you want to bump the shoulder back at least two thousandths for a bolt action we'll discuss this two thousandths number a little more in just a second now there's a fun trick we can take our calipers we can zero our tool on a fire piece of brass set or die for contact size our piece of brass and see that we're very close two and a half thousands if we weren't close or we'd size too much if we want we could take a measurement with the back side of our calipers on our die determine what that is and adjust the measurement from the bottom of our lock ring to the base of our die with our caliper until it read what we the adjustment we wanted now that method works just fine if you have something like a coax but if you have something where you have to remove the entire die or unscrew the entire die every single time it may be easier just to adjust it in place one thing that i'll always recommend is adding a witness mark to your die it doesn't always have to be exactly where you're going to leave it but it's going to give you an idea of how much you adjust it i made a line on my lock ring as well as the die i knew depending on what my measurement came out i would adjust it and roughly how much it moves again a simple witness mark goes a long way there are fancier die lock rings out there something like this one from forester who has markings on it to help you make that adjustment a little bit easier every mark on here is roughly a thousandth of an inch one thing i will recommend is if you're going to be walking in your die and you're going to be using the same piece of brass if you're using a die like an rcbs or forester it's not too difficult to remove that expander ball so you're not overworking the neck on the piece of brass you're using to get your setup correct if you're using your expander ball after you've got your setting for your headspace you can return it in place use a different piece of brass and ensure your setting is correct you may find that a piece of brass you haven't sized yet responds differently to your die than one you've sized several times keep in mind when you're setting this up you should have your brass prepped the way you intend to do it when you've sized all of your brass something like annealing or not annealing is going to change your die setting so what about this 2 000 bump number shoulder setback or whatever you want to call it it's generally the number that i am shooting for when i reload at least for both actions it's gonna let your actions cycle smoothly but your breasts shouldn't be too sloppy inside the chamber for something like a semi-auto you might want to make that number three thousandths because you may be prioritizing function over accuracy if we're being honest though i'm not sure one thousands is going to make a huge difference this is the choice that the reloader has to make not some guy with a youtube channel when talking about this 2000s bump one thing that's popped up recently is how do i know my cases are fully expanded to my chamber like anything else when it comes to reloading measure it on this channel i always prefer to let the data do the talking as much as possible and there's often more than one way to solve an issue one of the examples we're going to talk about today is in 6.5 creedmoor and i happen to have a headspace gauge that's going to help us identify how much our brass has expanded we're going to put back in our 6.5 creedmoor insert if i was using the horny tool i'd be using the d400 again this is with a comparator body and so i'm going to look at the measurement i get from my headspace gauge and my comparator hopefully you guys can see that the measurement i'm getting is one four four six five this again is a comparator it's not actually measuring the headspace but that's all we need to do since that was the headspace gauge it was used to index our barrel we know that since that goes in our chamber that our brass has to be a minimum of that length 14465. now for today's test i start off with 20 pieces of brand new horny brass the headspace measurement on our new brass was anywhere from 1.444 to 1.465 inches so we have two cases at each charge weight going from 38.8 grains of h4350 to 41.5 grains of h4350 behind 142 grain sierra match king i'm going to put up one of the strings velocity and pressures that we took along with this just to give you an idea of what the cases were exposed to i don't think that most people would be loading to that low of a case pressure but we can see that the total variance on our entire lot went from one four four six all the way to one four four seven measurements very close to our headspace gauge so since our max charge had that one four four seven should we just subtract two thousands from that one four four seven measurement go for one four four five and be done probably not a horrible idea but what if our brass hasn't fully expanded well let's take a look when we talk about full length sizing remember when we're sizing all sides of the case what's actually happening is the case is going to get longer and if you're not bumping the shoulder when you first set up your sizing die your headspace measurement will actually grow before it shrinks we can use this to our advantage to find out the answer to this question now in this case i pulled out my short action customs die because i can actually gut it and since the bushing in this die sizes both the shoulder and the neck and i cannot lose my setting and just size the outside dimension of the case sizing only the body of the case got this to one four four eight five so the headspace measurement is larger than when it started now we can use this case and cycle it through our action and see if it cycles smoothly or not i removed the firing pin with the bolt and then re-inserted the case and cycled the action i could tell that there was extra friction with the case that had been sized on the body only the other measurement that was interesting is that it actually lost a half of thousands after it was cycled through the action so what number are we to pick one four four seven one four four eight let's look at some brass that's been fired three times green are the full length options and the yellow are neck only options again three firings this is lapora brass versus hornady but it's been fired through the same barrel same chamber in the end i really don't think there's gonna be a huge difference in these measurement values but ideally you would always have the same brand of brass we can clearly see that this laptop brass our initial when it was new started off a headspace measure around one four four four or one four four five five and all of it has grown to either one four four seven through one four four eight our neck only options i think are very telling because those have had nothing move the shoulder and three firings with a pretty stout charge of h4350 personally i prefer not to have my bolton chamber sizing my brass but you do what you feel is right i'm going to call the number for this chamber either 14475 or 14480 for the reference measurement so where does that mean that i set up my die my resizing goal is going to be 1.4455 inches i can pretend that there's no variance in my sizing process but frankly that would be a lie but it is pretty much within a thousandth of an inch of total variance so as long as my headspace measurement is 14460 or less i'm relatively happy now my 6.5 creedmoor is set up as a minimum headspace so it's very hard for me to oversize with a standard die but what about our 223 die how bad can it be it's a pretty much brand new forester full length sizing die except for that magical probably not even an eighth of a turn after contact with the shell holder we've changed our head space gauge for our 223 version we're going to zero it on some fired brass and size our case clean off our lube and we can see we've moved the shoulder on the case back ten thousands if accuracy and case life are on your consideration this is the wrong way to set up your die maybe that's just a forester thing right well let's pick up our rcbs again basically my brand new rcbs small base sizing die set up our size knives so we just make contact give it that extra eighth of a turn might not even be that it's certainly nowhere close to a quarter take our next we're going to find another piece of fire 223 brass it's basically identical the last one but so re-zeroed it lube our case and size it clean off the wax and there we've got eight and a half thousandths i'm not sure of any application where we need to resize our brass eight and a half thousands if you're hoping for max accuracy and case life this probably isn't the optimal way of setting up your die it's overworking your cases if you just measure the dimensions of your brass what possible advantage is there of overworking your case this much sizing your cases correctly is just one part of the reloading process choosing the correct powder is also very important check out this video here to see how we evaluated 10 different powders in 223 remington for velocity and pressure to pick the best one for our application until next time stay safe in small groups

Channel: Bolt Action Reloading

Views: 34,011

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Id: 6mgIJinR1qI

Length: 10min 24sec (624 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 20 2022