Thanks, jmoore.
MC

Melvin, JM fairly accurately answered your question. The bullet nose should slide into the muzzle without a lot of effort and should leave faint rifling marks. If you push a bullet nose into the muzzle, and you can't remove it without pliers, then it's too tight.

JM, if you size the bullet nose after the tumble lube you won't need to crimp. I'm not a big fan of crimping cast bullets in bottleneck cases.

Thanks, Charlie
I think I will have to nose size. I cast some .308, 165 Sil bullets for my BF 30-20, and a bullet will not go into the bore. Near as I can measure a slug, it is .301 bore.
Thanks
Melvin

high standard 40 wrote:
JM, if you size the bullet nose after the tumble lube you won't need to crimp. I'm not a big fan of crimping cast bullets in bottleneck cases.

In actual fact, the bullets get two lubings, one before sizing and one after. I could try doing just the one, but for some reason I think it worked better in testing. Doing the lubrication before sizing was a HUGE help in running them through the dies.

The bullets in the XP100 aren't seated very deep, so the crimp is right in the lube groove. So only the gas check and one band are covered. What happened to me with no crimp was that the bullet would stay in the bore with the gas check remaining in the case. The upside was no powder spillage, and the rounds seemed to reassemble and fire fine just by running the case back into the chamber. Mostly worried about a loss of accuracy.