SmallCaliberCentral

HI, I am new to reloading & new to this forum.
My isue is: I am getting different C.O.A.L. when seating 40gr Hornady V-Max bullets in Remington cases using RCBS RC Supreme press with Redding A-Series dies & Redding case holder. The lengths vary up to .02" Is this normal? I would hate to have to re-adjust every seating. Any advice will be much appreciated.

P.S. When I said I am new to reloading, I mean my first loads were done Yesterday.

Try seating bullet ,then rotate cartridge 1/4 to 1/2 turn and seat again ! Seems to work for me !

Tadunga Welcome to the forum.

If your measuring to the tip of the bullet then its perfectly normal.
Your seating die sets the depth further down the ogive of the bullet. Closer to where the bullet actually contacts the lands.
.002 is not much. I've seen some bullets measure that much difference using a collimator. Not very often though, usually .001 is the largest discrepancy. Hope this helps.

Thanks for the advice Lefty265, I will give it a try.

And to jo191145, I was thinking that but didn't know if it was normal. I thought maybe I received a bad batch. I guess my next question would be, how do I set the seating die to fit my rifle? Thanks for all your help.

If you are actually finding a difference in total length of .02" and NOT JUST .002", then there is something radically wrong. A difference in length of .002, when measured from the base of the loaded casing to the tip of the bullet, is not uncommon. If you take the time to measure your bullets BEFORE you seat them in your casings, I think you may find a difference of .003" is probably pretty common. Bullet tips can get damaged, especially the plastic-tipped bullets. A better way to measure the uniformity of the length of your loaded rounds is to measure from the base of the casing to the ogive of the bullet. That may vary somewhat too, but it will be more consistent in length than measuring to the tip of the bullets.

Thanks for your input. It is in fact .02" difference & not .002"
one would measure 2.255 & the other would measure 2.273, this is in the 40gr V-Max. The 32gr V-max bullets seem to seat within the .002 range with no problems. The other thing is after seating the 32gr at around 2.246, when I try to seat the 40gr I have to adjust the seating stem down about a half of a turn in order to get the 40gr to this length. Is that normal?

Ouch Silverfox
I totally missed the omission of a zero. .02 variations are not normal by any means.
No idea what could cause such a large discrepancy.
Somewhere along the way I had a seating die that had a floating seater plug in it. This caused me some troubles until I removed it and deburred it. Can't remember much about the incident but I think it was a lee die????

Recheck everything your doing and measure your bullets before loading as Silverfox suggested.
Let us know how you make out.

Okay, so I measured my 40gr V-Max bullets, and sure enough there is differences in the lengths. I didn't measure the whole box, but rather 20 or so & the range was up to .008" Now this isn't the .02" problem I was having, but when I measure from the bottom of the bullet to the ogive, I was noticing a fairly big difference. Maybe I bought a bad batch.

The 32gr V-Max bullets aren't giving me any problems & they are shooting alot better groups.

Tadunga--I went to my reloading room, picked out 10 of my 40 gr. boattail V-Max Hornady bullets at random and measured each one from the base of the bullet to the tip of the plastic tip and then measured each of those with my Stoney Point comparator and gauge with the .204 caliber insert on my digital caliper. Here are the measurements of those 10 bullets:



The extreme difference in the measurement on overall bullet length, as you can see, is 0.0085" and the extreme difference on the measurement of base to ogive is 0.003" for those bullets I measured.

Please pull those bullets from the casings that gave you an OAL that was .02" longer than your shortest OAL. Pull some from the shortest rounds too. Measure those bullets from base to tip and, if you have the tools to measure from base to ogive, then do that measurment too. If your batch of 40 gr. V-Max are off by more than the measurements I have listed in the table above, I'd encourage you to contact Hornady and see if they would send a new box of more uniform bullets to you. I'm sure that if they are off in their uniformity by as much as your measurements seem to indicate, Hornady would like to know what lot number they are from and see if there were some manufacturing problems that need fixing.

If you are loading a compressed charge you could have a big difference in col. .02 is too much difference to be reliably accurate. Something is not right. What powder and weight in your loads? Also are you weighing your powder or throwing?

Here's my findings.

Base to Tip | COAL
0.757 - - - - - 2.272
0.755 - - - - - 2.270
0.756 - - - - - 2.271
0.752 - - - - - 2.258
0.752 - - - - - 2.255
0.753 - - - - - 2.257
0.753 - - - - - 2.268
0.754 - - - - - 2.259
0.756 - - - - - 2.271
0.756 - - - - - 2.272

I didn't have the tool to measure the ogive. So this probably isn't saying much.

These are not compressed loads. I used Wenchester brass with 26.9gr of H4895. 40gr V-Max bullets of course. I am weighing each load with the RCBS 505 scale.

Do you think I should call Hornady?

Without measuring to the ogive I'm not sure its possible to diagnose your problem on the web. But hey I've been known to miss things pun intended.
Your projectile lengths are within norm but that doesn't matter much for your problem.
We need a base of cartridge measurement to ogive to understand where the problem lies.
The fact that the 32's seat normally suggest its the 40 gn bullets fault but................

If the base of cartridge to ogive measurement is radically different then I would look to the seating die for errors.

If the base of cartridge to ogive measurement is the same but your overall length is differing by .02 then the bullets have radically different ogive profiles. Not good and I'd call Hornady.

Push come to shove, temporary problem solving, You could reverse a sized case on your loaded ones and "very gently" get some "ROUGH" measurements to the ogive.
Also I would remove the seater plug from your die and use that to measure also. Its been years since I removed mine but check everything out on the die. I'm not even sure if anything could go wrong with a Redding A series design. Its all I've used since 2004 and never a burp.

While the plug is out twist a pill in it. It should leave a ring near the ogive where it contacts the bullet.
I've seen other brands of dies that would seat VLD bullets from the tip. The interior shape of the plug was fine but it ended flat not allowing a relief for the sharp tip of a VLD.
A quick shot in the drill press to deepen the plug and a little honing solved that issue.
With .02 variances this should not be your problem but check it out anyway.

With a little investigating you should be able to determine where you variances are coming from.

Nice thing about Redding besides their quality. If anything goes wrong you simply call them and they'll ship whatever you need free.
No questions, no shipping broken stuff back. Your word is good enough for them. I like that policy.

Which reminds me. My 223 Redding seater came with the wrong plug in it. Memory tells me it was a .32 caliber plug.

So I pulled the plug, and this is what I discovered:
Base of bullet to where the seating plug touches - 0.53
Diameter of bullet where seating plug touches - 0.145

Thought it might have been a 17 plug so I called Redding and they tell me that is right. The 204 and 17 seating plugs are the same; stamped with a 25 on top.

Below is a pic of a 40gr V-Max in the seater plug.



Your thoughts?

Geez Tadunga
This post is becoming most embarrassing. For me that is

I went in the basement and disassembled my seater I've been using since 2004.
You might not believe this but it didn't take me long to figure out I've been using an RCBS seater after looking at your picture. If you discount the 4 years that is.
I could have sworn I was using a Redding all this time. All my sizing dies are.

Anyhow, While its apart. Lets compare.

Base of bullet to base of plug.
.499-.501`
Diameter at base of plug.
.168

Judging by this its clear (my old lot) of 40 V-Maxs is setting deeper into the RCBS plug than the Redding.

My 40's are WS2 coated which makes this easy. By spinning them in the seater plug I can tell the plug is not entirely seating at the base of the plug. (closest to the ogive) Instead it seems most contact is near the base of the red tip. Not a good thing but what the heII do I know.

Color one of yours with a magic marker and give it the spin test.

Try measuring a bunch of different bullets while in the seating plug. Any variations?

I measured the entire seating assembly to base of bullet with my RCBS unit. I got .001 variations.

I removed my Redding .224 caliber (#23) and tried the same tests. The plug seats much deeper along the ogive while still maintaining the profile of the V-Max's ogive nicely. The same set of bullets netted .000 variation.

Besides the fact I'm using an RCBS seater I learned it might not be a terrible thing to use a Redding .224 seater assembly in a 204R die
Of course the real measurement that counts is base of cartridge to ogive. A different measurement entirely.

If anyone ever wants to try this be careful. The Redding .224 seater plug travels slightly past the bearing surface. At least on the 40 V-max, other pills may vary accordingly.

Basically if you were to seat the bullet deep enough its possible the seater plug might contact the neck of the cartridge. This would give variations according to brass length or if you push hard enough it might act as a crimp or crush your brass.

I need to go catalog my dies now so I know what I'm doing

Problem solved!!!

After measuring the rest of my 250 count box, I was able to separate 2-groups of bullets. Using the seater plug I measured from the base of the bullet to the top of the plug, and found that one group of bullets measured .01" longer than the other. Looks as though I received two separate batches in one box.

Thanks for all your help in this matter. Guess I will stick with 100 count boxes from now on.