Soft seating

[Bradley Walker]

Is anyone having any luck just seating long with very little neck tension and just letting the bolt seat the bullet?

That seems to make so much sense...

 

[lpreddick]

i tried this. i tested this idea by seating a bullet really long, then chambering. i removed the round and measured the amount of seating before bullet into neck stopped and bullet into lands started. the necks tension reaches a point where it resists the lands pressure to push it any further, then the neck tension pushed the bullet into the lands. repeating this with multiple cases gave varying results. some cases gave in more and the bullet ended up deeper in the neck. if you can process the cases such that they are ALL the same, they would hopefully ALL allow bullet seating to the same point as measured by a comperator. this equilibrium point, in my testing, has most bullets seated .030-.040 into the lands. i use redding bushing neck dies and bullet seating usually expands these necks .001-.002 in. more neck tension could have you seated into the lands much further and excessive pressure could be a problem. consistency and the ability to replicate your results are a challenge.

 

[jlow]

From a mechanical standpoint, you have two competing areas where the bullet can be pushed into, so that is a problem. If you want to be very consistent, you would adjust the neck tension so that it is very loose, my guess is around finger loose. That way the lands would act like a seating die and push the bullet in to the neck. Never tried it but this is how I have heard it is done.

The only variable then is how consistent you push the bolt in because like a seating die, if you move it fast and hard, your bullet will seat deeper than if you push the bolt in soft and slow.

 

[FroggyOne2]

Soft seating is accomplished by keeping about 1K neck pressure on the bullet. Seating the bullet a lil long aand letting the bullet find where it wants to be. I have done this with several rifles and loads with great success. Consistancy with case neck prep is paramount. The way I do it is, size the neck and then run it back over the neck expander mandral. This allows the light pressure of the case neck on the bullet. One thousand of tension on a bullet from the case neck is enough to no move the bullet with your fingers, but it is light enough that when you close the bolt, it will allow the bullet to soft seat. Start running more pressure on the bullet with the neck and you run the possibility of just deep jamming the bullet in the lands of the forcing cone of the bbl. I also feel that it depends on the angle of the lead cut in the throat, as to whether it will lend it's self better to soft seating, jam or jumping a bullet.

 

[itchyTF]

Froggy-
A "for what it's worth". I know what you meant and not to be too anal - 1K is 1,000. 1 mil would be 1 thousandth (.001).

 

[FroggyOne2]

Itchy,

May I "jump" and say that is is being "anal". But I know what your saying my friend.

Knee Deep!

 

[LHSmith]

For soft seating to work accuracy-wise , I believe your attention to case prep detail will be the same as for normal seating. Individual pieces of brass each have their own rate of work hardening, and therefore the neck tension will still vary from shot to shot.
Second, you lose one parameter to allow fine tuning a load (adjusting neck tension), and some powders, N133 comes to mind, will simply not shoot well without a lot of neck tension.
Third, just finger tight neck tension is just too problematic. For hunting use, I would never consider it.....I've left a bullet stuck in the lands after extracting the case at too matches to know I'd risk loosing precious hunting time.....it takes special tools to clean-up the mess...and a good chance of taking your trigger out of commission.
Lastly, there are many BR competitors, who tried the "fitted" neck variation to this idea ( fitted means not resizing the neck at all with zero tension) and some won small group award with it.....but to my knowledge their success was never consistent, and in BR the "AGG" ( best aggregate group/ score at the end of the event) rules.

 

[jlow]

Again, never done it and not suggesting this is the way to go, but at least theoretically if you have any significant neck tension and that tension is not 100% the same (which is pretty hard), would it not translate to different degrees of jam?

So to compare this to seating via the regular method, you would still have that slight difference in neck tension but at least your bullet seating depth (and distance to the lands) would be consistent?

 

[Phil]

I use .001 neck tension and MOLY bullets with results in the ONES consistantly....

.20BR 39gr. Bkings.....chuck rifle on a Remmy 700

 

[LHSmith]

I use .001 neck tension and MOLY bullets with results in the ONES consistantly....

.20BR 39gr. Bkings.....chuck rifle on a Remmy 700

Don't waste that barrel on GH's, take it to every BR match you can and rewrite the record books.... or......even better......you might even get a write-up in the Accurate Shooter bulletin. You are talking tenths of an inch and not full inches, right?