slick001 said:
the aol is 1.250 , i guess it is seating so deep getting into the roundness of the bullet itself. I found some load data for accurate 2 and this bullet, and that is the aol they called for.
Should I play with increasing the aol a bit to get the gap tighter, or leave it alone??? I test fired a few and they did cycle and shoot good
slick001, OAL is based on the bullet nose profile and whether the loaded round will feed/chamber reliably from the magazine. You can try 1.260" and 1.27" and see if the gap problem goes away.
Most 230 gr RN profile at 1.250" OAL have fed in all pistols I have shot. BTW, Winchester white box factory loads them to 1.275"
As others posted, you might be deforming the bullet with such tight taper crimp of .470". I taper crimp jacketed/plated .451" bullets to .471"-.472" and .452" lead bullets to .472"-.473".
Walkalong said:
Fact: No amount of proper taper crimp on an auto case can make up for poor neck tension.
As to taper crimp vs neck tension, this hijacked topic may warrant another thread discussion.
Here's my experience. I have flared case necks too much (especially in tapered 9mm cases) to the point that the bullet would move when I pushed on it with my thumb. I thought if I applied more taper crimp, the bullet would not move - Well, no. Applying taper crimp did hold the bullet, but the hold was not enough when I pushed hard on the bullet against the bench top, which is my proof of neck tension.
dmazur said:
Well, there's some evidence that excessive crimp can actually decrease neck tension, especially with lead bullets.
Brass can exhibit "spring back" ... Lead really doesn't show this property. So, you can "size" the lead down during crimping, unintentionally, and have the brass return to a larger ID after the case is removed from the die.
If you use range brass, the hardness/characteristics of brass will vary depending on headstamp, powder charges used and number of times it was reloaded. This is especially true of smaller high pressure case like 9mm. When I applied even more taper crimp less than the diameter of the bullet+thickness of case neck, I found myself deforming the bullet (resizing) whether it was jacketed, plated or lead. Increasing the taper crimp did not increase the neck tension; instead, it reduced the diameter of the bullet and bullet moved even more (on the tapered 9mm case the bullet actually fell into the case).
rcmodel said:
if you can push a bullet deeper in the case by hand before taper crimping ... your expander is too big and needs to be turned down a thousandth or two smaller.
+1. Your sizing die reduces the case diameter all the way down so the case wall applies pressure on the bearing surface of the bullet to the base. Taper crimp die doe not reduce the case neck all the way down to the bullet base, just at the case neck where nose profile starts to reduce in diameter. So if the expander die applies too much flare to increase the resized diameter of the case, taper crimp die reducing just the case neck end will not add to the neck tension ENOUGH to hold the bullet when pushed hard against the bench top.