hAkron
Member
I've only been reloading for a few months and I'm having lots of success with .38 Special, 9MM Luger, & .380. I'm having nothing but trouble with .45 ACP. I picked up some brown box 230 GR LRN bullets and I had lots of feeding issues where the gun wouldn't go into battery all the time, and when it did accuracy was poor. I put those on the shelf and picked up some nice Hornady 200GR XTP's. I noticed that my crimp (I seat and crimp in the same operation on my RCBS rock chucker single stage, also using RCBS dies) was probably a little too heavy, so i backed it off a bit and assembled 25 rounds and took those to the range today and after the first round had the same issue. When I got home I took out the barrel and did a drop test. I notice that the case wall sticks in the barrel so the bullet isn't dropping far enough in. To make sure the barrel wasn't out of spec I dropped in a factory round and it drops right in. I do notice that where the bullet sits in the case there is a slight but noticable buldge, but nothing worse than I've seen in some factory ammo I've used in the past. I checked the diameter on my caliper and it is .451" (or as close as I can tell as my caliper only reads up to hundredths of an inch). I'm using pickup brass, but the problem is common among many different brands. I am resizing all my brass in the resizing die, and flaring the case mouth the same way I do with all of the other types of hand gun Ammon I reload and my crimp looks like what I think it should, so what am I missing?