I made bullets for 8 years, loved it. It is really rough on your shoulders.
If you are going to be making bullets for competition, it would be very helpful to have a machinist's background. Also, if you are the type that loves working with small details, you will enjoy bullet making.
Here is an example of a few of the details that you will be working with making bullets.
For instance, one of the great secrets is seating the cores properly in the jackets. Every lot# of jackets may have a thicker or thinner jacket. Some jackets are contaminated. Some jackets have too much run out. You need to buy bullet jackets in lots of 50K at a time.
You need to have punches ground in .0002-.0003 intervals to seat the cores properly. The jackets are tapered, so the lead level in the tapered jacket will vary from lot# to lot# in the jackets. Proper inspection technique on inspecting seated cores is as follows: Using a magnifying loop, look inside the jacket with a seated core, you need to see a very slight scraping of the punch just above the lead level in the jacket which indicates that the punch is a perfect fit for that thickness of the bullet jacket. If there is any lead squirted out around the punch that seats the core, you know that the punch is too small for the lead level in the jacket, and that the bullet will not be balanced.
Another thing that really helps, make sure that the cores are seated properly, is to set the pressure on the core seating so high that the thinner bullet jackets will actually pop from the pressure, which will be maybe 5 in a 1000 at the most. On my match bullets, I seated the cores twice, after letting the cores normalize in the jackets for a week.
If the above details seem like a hobby that you would like to per sue, you will love bullet making.
My entire house ended up being a bullet making plant. I had lubed jackets laying on paper towels everywhere, and I must say that it was an addiction no doubt.
For a guy that likes to shoot extremely accurate rifles, making bullets opens up an entire new world for a shooter. So much of our shooting is tradition and very little experimentation is really done.
I had a 8s ojive carbide die set with a .070 Meplat. For example I made 40,45,50,55,60g, 62g bullet flat base and boat tail in 6mm. I shot the 40 & 45g bullets on an .750 jacket at 4000 fps in my Heavy varmint rig, accuracy was unreal, it was of course short throated for these bullets. Another bullet that I think that was one of the very best was a 60g on a .750 jacket with full point up. I shot more zero's at 100 with this bullet than any bullet that I have ever shot. The 62g bullet on an .825 jacket was unreal also at 100. Of course, at 200, I went to a 66g bullet.
If you decide to get into making bullets, It is expensive to get all the punches of the correct diameter, but once you spend the money, you are fixed.
The only items that wear out are the boat tail punches, after they get so thin, they will have to be reground to a re-bated boat tail punch.
I got real tired of changing benches at registered matches, I lost the competitive bug. So, I started shooting around 25,000 rounds a year at ground squirrels and P. dogs. Now for varmints, bullet making open up an entirely new world because you can regulate the size of the hollow point that is on the bullet.
