I have found that I do not get alot of case expansion in my 308 and 223 cases. Therefore I always align my cases in the chamber, and fireform the brass. I let the chamber determine the neck alignment. I do not use a neck sizer, I use the Sinclair expander body. I believe if you are not neck turning then your main concern should be inside neck diameter-for the obvious reason of neck tension. I do not concern myself with centering the neck to the case after fire forming, however I do align my cases in the rifle chamber. The expander body will not adjust the neck to the case, it will only size the inside diameter of the case-which is what I want it to do.
I believe neck tension is crucial to accuracy, and I do not trust the standard expander ball to give me consistent ID. And I believe the neck die with the expander ball works the necks too much. If your necks are too large you can always bump them down by taking the expander out of the die before sizing.
The majority of chambers in today's rifles are oversized, IMO. I do not do alot of work to control the outside of the brass. I concern myself with the inside volume of the case, and neck tension. A main component to pressure is volume, so I try to control inside case volume as much as possible-hence the fire forming. I always trim. Tom.
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West by God Virginia.
We need to stop using these terms today, "Sniper Rifle", "Tactical", "Assault Weapon".
Traditionally I use FL dies for hunting rifles, and Wilson bushing handdies for target work. I just came into a Remington VLS .308, And while I want better accuracy than I can get with FL, I'm not in the mood to start neck turning for another rifle, so I dont want bushing dies. Of the available neck-only dies, Forster, Redding, RCBS, and others, you've used, which produced the most coecentric ammo? Thanks.
Hate to say it, but if you don't want to turn necks and all, Lee collet gives ya the most coecentric necks on the inside at least.
This one's easy...... the Lee collet neck die is what you want. Not only does it produce very concentric ammo, it requires no lubrication (of your brass, that is) and it works the case necks less. I've used other neck dies, RCBS, Redding bushing type, Forster, etc., andthe Lee collet die isall I use now.
I know what you mean about being "passively anti-Lee". I am too. The collet neck die and Perfect powder measure are the only Lee products I own. They seem cheaply made, but by George, they just work.
A word of advice on the Lee collet neck dies though.......to get the best performance out of them, the internal working parts (collet and collet sleeve) may need to be polished up a bit with somesandpaper. 400 to 600 grit wet/dry should be sufficient. In operation, the collet fingers are forced up into the collet sleeve, thereby squeezing the collet fingers down around the case neck, thus sizing the neck to proper dimensions around a mandrel. The problem is that sometimes there are enough tooling marks (and evenburrs) left over from the manufacturing process that the collet fingers can't slide smoothly into the collet sleeve. Ipolish the tooling marks awayfrom the collet fingersand from around the mouth of the collet sleeve and I also apply a dab of grease around the mouth of the sleeve. After doing this, I've never had one of these dies fail to work properly. It shouldn't be necessary in the first place, but we're talking about Lee, so don't be surprised if you have to do this. It's really quite simple, though, and won't take but just a few minutes.
Allright guys, I'll admit to being passivly anti-lee (I only own their priming tool), but seeing these recomendations haspiqued my interest. I'm gonna give the Collet die a try. I'llgive my review after hunting seasonwinds down and I get a chance to do some load development.
You might ahve to do some quick polishing work on them, but once you get it right, they are pretty nice.
I use Lee collets for .303 brit and 6.5x55 and never had a problem with those. I tried rolling some hunting loads with my new Lee .308 collet die with 2x fired winchester brass. It seemed to size the necks to about 0.306" which I thought was a little loose but from my experience with other cartridges, seemed like it should be OK. I seated a bullet, the darn thing had absolutely no neck tension at all.
Does anyone have a good method for reducing the size of the madrel? Chuck it up in a drill and take some sandpaper to it maybe? Or should I send it back to Lee?
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