Engraving by the rifling.

Ben

Ben

Moderator
Staff member
This is the .30 cal., Accurate 175 BP plain base. ( A clone of the SAECO # 315 ) It is loaded in this photo in the 30-06 for my new Thompson / Center Venture. I like to take my " paper punching loads " and let them lightly engrave into the rifling. I think it helps to insure that the bullet is in good coaxial alignment with the center of the bore.

I've already shot these in the Venture. They are nail drivers.

Ben

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Kevin Stenberg

Kevin Stenberg

Well-Known Member
Ben i am assuming the loaded round was chambered and then extracted? I remember you usually use strait WW in most of your bullets. Whenever i try to have my bullets engrave like yours, they will not let the bolt close completely. And will not let the bolt close completely until there are no scuff marks on the bullet. My alloy varies from strait COWW to 50/50 (CO-SO) depending on the need.
 
Ben

Ben

Moderator
Staff member
Yes, you're right......the loaded round that you see in the photo was chambered in the rifle and then extracted from the chamber.

Remember that this particular Accurate design along with the SAECO # 315 are tapered designs. They both start out with a .301 " nose band and progressively get larger until they get to the 2 rear drive bands of about .3115". This bullet is easy to seat in this manner with almost any alloy.

I have other designs that are not so easy to do this with , and like you say , can be hard to chamber and could leave a bullet in the barrel.

Ben
 
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Ben

Ben

Moderator
Staff member
Seat the bullet out into the rifling slightly, keep the plain base bullet speeds in the 1,050 - 1,300 fps range and good things are going to happen.


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fiver

fiver

Well-Known Member
dang,,,, tough times, I remember when you used dimes and quarters...LOL.
I strive to get a good firm engrave on many of my bullets.
I even go so far as to mess with my alloy quite a bit to get it just right.
with one bullet in particular I use a fairly hard alloy and wipe a lanolin beeswax lube on the nose to make everything slide in place just right.
 
I

Intheshop

Banned
Agree with S Mac,that's an impressive pic.

Rambling alert! Most of my loads are bore riders.Love getting good engraving on all sides of a well tuned/fitted nose section.It seems certain rigs not only tolerate,ever so slightly different degrees and depth of engraving but..... depending on how the shape of the throat/fit is,you can watch this relationship change with the round count.Translated.... a brand new barrel throat "can" behave differently to seating depth than a worn throat.Even though I'm getting equal engraving on both(obviously at different seating depths).

I enjoy the crispness of new,unmolested throats.The gage,considering they have to get RUN up hard through the mag( push feed bolts).... is,I'm looking for *about a 10% number of "stickers"( bullets getting stuck on extraction). That's the best,maybe not only? way I have found to press the envelope of nose sizing/fit.And one reason for going "back" to a very slight crimp on bottle neck rifle cartridges.After decades of running no crimp.
 
JWFilips

JWFilips

Well-Known Member
Ben, I would have to say that is ideal for my liking also
Great photo
Any time I start to work up a new cast bullet load I always set the OAL to place the bullet in the rifling ( I only shoot paper and seldom are my loads a over 1250 fps)
Recently my alloy has been one part commercial hard cast range pick + 2 parts jacketed range pick....yes I do take the time to sort the range pick into catagories:oops:) this gives me a pretty consistantly bhn of 11-12
Impossible to get enough lead wheel weights anymore in the northeast.
To get the length: I use a neck sized case that has 3 slits in the neck 120 deg apart and start the bullet into the case....wipe a little lanolin on the nose so it doesn't stick in the bore when the case is extracted. I place the case in the chamber and slowly let the closing of the bolt set the OAL for the new load. Slowly open the bolt and let the cartridge eject into my hand. I would say 90% of the time this is pretty accurate but some bullet do stick and have to be tapped out or stick just enough to be pulled out a bit from the case neck to give a false reading. If I suspect that I then will go to the old marked cleaning rod method.
One note however; on a military Mausers you must place the head of the case into the top of the magazine before closing the bolt because the rim must engage the bolt face and extractor from underneath otherwise the extractor will put the case in too hard before the extractor jumps over the rim giving false readings and most time stuck bullet.
 
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fiver

fiver

Well-Known Member
about 60% of the case down in the magazine will allow you to feed an empty case.
you can always pull the bolt and slide the rim under the claw and re-insert the round if you hold the barrel straight up in the air.
but that can be one of those need a third hand type affairs too.
 
Ian

Ian

Notorious member
fiver said:
you can always pull the bolt and slide the rim under the claw and re-insert the round if you hold the barrel straight up in the air.
Click to expand...

I was gonna mention just that, but...

Wedge a kitchen match stick under the bolt release to hold it back so you can poke the "loaded" bolt back in with only two of your hands, leaving the third to do something useful like scratch your nose or any of the other things that always seem to need urgent attention right in the middle of doing something tedious.

Anyway, I'm the dissenter here on engraving the nose. I have too many auto-loaders, and the same techniques that work with them work with anything else. Don't get me wrong, engraving does work, but you have to be careful because narrow lands don't give much support to the bullet when it's actually being fired.
 
Ian

Ian

Notorious member
Here's a .30-30 bullet fired at full-jacketed velocities that engraved nicely and fit the throat nice and tight...yet still got sideways. The lands were unable to keep the nose centered when the powder was lit. Dropping the pressure about 6K psi and 150 fps cured the problem. My point being the lands can keep the nose centered, but only to a point and you can't always depend on that to make up for other problems. The AM copy of the Saeco 315 pretty much fills up all the space in the neck and throat of a lot of rifles, so there's nowhere to go but straight. I have shot the Saeco version in a lot of things (gas checked) and it's a great general-purpose bullet, whether the nose is engraved or not, with engraving being the "icing on the cake".

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I

Intheshop

Banned
Ian,how did you "catch" those bullets? Was it with the trap you were working on?

Base to centerline,squareness is controllable during the sizing..... but,the tooling isn't gonna be cheap,in time or $$. Heck,it'll be hard to even discuss the process,mainly because of how well(or not) the shop is setup.Back to,if you're a hammer everything looks like a nail syndrome?So if the shop is a grinding shop,they'll see it as a grinding oportunity,so on and so forth.Give a good process engineer a good budget,and a well equipped machine shop however......
 
Ian

Ian

Notorious member
Yes, I trapped those with oiled sawdust.

The case needs to fit the chamber with minimal clearance, the bullet needs to be seated straight in the case with a straight-line seating die, and the bullet needs to fill as much space as possible in the neck and throat of the rifle while still having someplace for metal to go without over-stressing the main structure of the bullet when it is fired through the "orifice". The Saeco 315 is a pretty solid bullet for accomplishing that in a variety of rifles, and if you work the alloy and powder together, you will get good results as Ben has shown. That design has enough bearing surface to stand some velocity, too.
 
fiver

fiver

Well-Known Member
which bullet is that?

I'm seeing a little bit of an anomaly on them.
if you look up on the nose area you can see the one fill the barrel a little better, but have better displacement of the moving lead at the full diameter.
the other almost looks like it started crooked and pushed more to the one side but didn't use the nose effectively even with the engraving.
 
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