I thought that some of you may find this interesting, so I made some videos of each step of my bullet making process. These are the bullets that I use in Benchrest Competition. They are 117gr 30cal bullets, 7 ogive, made on J4 jackets.
I won’t go into exhaustive detail, as there are a ton of small details to consider, I am mostly just going to highlight the bigger steps in the process.
Step One: Core forming
Lead wire is cut to uniform lengths and then swaged into identical cores.
Then, the cores are seated into the jackets. This step forms the base of the bullets, as well as the outside diameter. In many ways, core seating is the most critical part of making bullets, as getting the lead into the same place each and every time results in properly balanced bullets. Sounds simple, setup takes hours…
I always wanted to swage some bullets. I almost bought a full Corbin set up in 22 and 30 along with an oven at barn burner prices but it sold quick. While researching I found Corbin was right down the street so to speak but haven’t pursued it any further.
I did get i to casti g though a few years ago when I got into SA revolvers in odd ball calibers and have aquired an assortment of 4 cavity custom cramer style molds that cast HPs in 32, 357, 45 and 475.
Definitely not a time friendly operation. On average, I spend about 8 hours per 1000 bullets. This is spread out over a few days.
When I was learning to make bullets, all of the old timers who were showing me the ropes made it very clear (multiple times) that “winter is for bullet makin and huntin, the rest of the year is for benchrest”
