Okay. I can see your point about pointing a bullet. But In my case I can sort a box of bergers base to ogive a get 2 maybe 3 differnt groups. But base to tip may have several groups. But nothing indexes off the tip! the rifling touches the ogive and so does my seater die. So with a VLD bullet I want the ogive to be as close to possible to same to the rifling every time. I have found that as little as .001 at a time can make a difference!
So what does the OAL of the bullet do for me? I don't point bullets? Not trying to argue maybe I can learn something???
In your case, OAL sorting might do very little. I certainly wouldn't take the time to do it other than for the reason I described. My main point was that I think sometimes people use various bullet sorting methods without fully appreciating what a particular method will or will not do. IMO, I will never be able to reliably detect a velocity/pressure difference, or actually shoot the difference between groups of bullets that differ in bearing surface length by a few, or even ten thousandths. I also believe that weight sorting bullets into groups is a complete waste of time. Velocity is a 4 digit number. Unless the weight variance within a lot of bullets goes into the 3rd or second decimal place, it will not change your velocity enough that you can even measure it. In my hands, even relatively poor lots of bullets don't have that much weight variance. Having said that, I do weigh all my bullets, but only to cull out a very small number of really gross outliers that seem to show up in most lots. It's never more than a few, but they always seem to be there. Fortunately, weighing bullets to cull outliers is much faster and easier than actually sorting them into groups; pretty much a GO/NO GO exercise.
In your example above, I don't know what kind of seating die you're using, but many types use a mechanism such that there is a discrete distance between where your caliper inserts seats on the bullet ogive very close to the bearing surface, and where the seater die stem contacts the bullet farther out on the nose. It may not be a huge distance, but it is not zero. The seater die stem doesn't know or care what is below it's contact point on the bullet, nor does the caliper insert know or care what is below its contact point on the bullet. If you're going to sort bullets in such a way as to generate sort groups that will improve seating depth consistency, you really want to use a tool that sorts them by measuring the region between the contact points of the caliper insert and the seater die stem. Bob Green's tool does that. If you're sorting bullets by base to ogive, or by bearing surface length, then you're sorting by a region on the bullet that is
outside the two critical contact points. In other words, if sorting bullets by base to ogive appears to give better consistency in seating depth, it is likely mostly luck, because except for in extreme situations, seating depth is not usually dependent on the length of the bearing surface. As I mentioned above, I have found that small differences in the amount of shank in the neck do not normally cause velocity differences that I can reliably measure (i.e. small differences in bearing surface length). In addition, I find that there normally seems to be more length variation in the nose region of the lots of bullets I use, which is not surprising when considering the way they're made.
In general, there are many, many, many different ways to sort things, including bullets, brass, even primers. How much of that someone is willing to undertake will largely depend on how much time they can devote to sorting. So IMO, knowing specifically what different sorting methods will and won't do is of benefit because it may allow one to pick and choose which methods are the most likely to improve consistency on the target. I don't have unlimited time to do these things, so I want to focus on those methods that will have the most benefit with the least amount of time/effort. That is not to say that methods I personally choose not to use don't do anything at all, because almost any sorting method can have some effect. But for me, it's all about the "Law of Diminishing Returns". So I try to pick and choose carefully with regard to the sorting process to get the most out of the time I do have to spend on that aspect of reloading.
