As Usual, You Were Lied to

It’s a wonderful day. I just saved hundreds of rounds of .45 ammunition from the factory-second bin.

Something like 12 years ago, I got an ammunition press, and I got to work. I figured it had to be pretty simple to operate. After all, they sell them to millions of people who aren’t engineers.

Once I got started, I learned that ammunition presses aren’t the greatest products. Little unforeseeable problems pop up all the time. You can’t just do what the manuals tell you to do. That won’t work. You start out following the manual, and then when the problems the industry doesn’t like to talk about start popping up, you have to come up with solutions.

Are you planning to make ammunition for a semiauto pistol? If so, this is your lucky day. I’ll tell you what you need to do if you really want your ammunition to function. If you don’t listen to me, you can probably stumble around and come up with a way to make your ammo work in your own carry gun, but if you let friends try it in their guns, they may end up driving home from the range with cases stuck in their chambers.

When you make ammunition on a progressive press, which is a press that takes multiple rounds through various stations that do different things, you have to use at least three dies. A die is a press attachment. Your press will push your casings into the dies and pull them out, and each die does something different to casings.

The first die pushes the old primer out of your casing, if you’re using used brass. It also removes any bulges caused by firing. Now you have a skinny, round casing with no primer.

Before you go to the next die, your casing sits on a gadget that shoves a new primer into it.

After priming, you come to a die that flares the mouth of your case so you can shove a bullet into it.

The next station is a powder measure. This is a weird device that measures powder and dumps it into your casing. Now you’re ready for a bullet, so you shove one into the flared mouth.

After this, you run into a problem they don’t tell you about.

You still need the press to seat the bullet correctly in the casing, and you need to get rid of the flaring on the case mouth so the case isn’t too wide to go into your chamber. Hornady, the company that made my die sets, wants you to think you can do this with one die. They sell three-die sets. The last die seats your bullet with a rod sort of a thing that pushes the bullet down when you raise the cartridge to the die. There is also a hollow tube in the die, and its job is to contact the case mouth lightly on all sides and compress it just enough to get rid of the flare. This is called crimping.

It doesn’t work.

Actually, it does work, but not very well. It’s not simple to set up. You have to adjust the height of the crimping part so it just barely crimps the mouth. Then you have to screw the seating rod down to just the right height to give you a cartridge of the correct length.

The crimping ring is rounded on the inside, so it bends the casing mouth inward as it crimps it, giving you a rounded edge all around the mouth outside the cartridge. Because the crimping part only touches the end of the casing, it won’t necessarily compress all of the flare. Parts below the contact area may still be too wide for your gun’s chamber (or the smaller chamber of someone else’s gun) when you’re done. Also, you lose the clearly defined rim on your case. It ends up with a rounded rim, and lots of guns use a sharply defined rim to situate cartridges in their chamber.

You can end up with a cartridge that balloons out slightly just below the mouth. Then your casing may get stuck part of the way into your chamber. Chambers aren’t straight cylinders. They’re tapered. Your rim has to be small enough to slide into the narrowest part of your chamber.

If your rounds won’t chamber, the rims are probably the issue. You can check it by using a Sharpie to paint your casing. Chamber it as well as you can, extract it, and look for the areas where the ink is scraped off. You’ll probably see shiny brass around the rim and nowhere else.

Guns of the same caliber don’t have identical chambers. Some chambers, especially on guns made to be accurate, are tighter than others. Some guns have loose chambers in order to make sure ammunition always goes in and out reliably, so if you use a gun like that (like a Glock) to test your rounds, you may find you can’t shoot your ammunition from, say, an expensive 1911. You may take your freshly-made thousand rounds of ammunition to the range and find out you can’t shoot any of it.

People will give you extremely bad advice. They’ll tell you to use your chamber as a gage when you set up your press. This is how you end up at the range with no usable ammunition.

There are two things you need to do, if you want your ammo to work.

First, you need a taper-crimp die. Hornady was just playing with you when they sold you a three-die set. You need 4. A taper-crimp die will compress your casing with an internal cylinder that makes contact over a long area. It squeezes the casing. It does not roll the rim inward. You end up with a casing which is the right diameter from bottom to top, not just within ten thousandths of the mouth.

To make a taper-crimp die work, you leave your old combination seating and crimping die in place, but you back the crimping part off so it never touches the cartridge. You only use the combination die to seat bullets.

Second, you need a case gage. This is a precisely machined steel tube. A company called Wilson makes them. They’re worth the money. Don’t listen to bubbas who think hammers are good tools for seating primers.

You drop your finished cartridge into the gage. If it falls right in, you’re all set. There is no commonly made chamber on earth that won’t chamber your round. You don’t have to worry about it working in one gun and sticking in another. If it doesn’t fall in, you need to adjust your crimping die until it does.

You use your case gage while you’re setting your dies up, and then your ammunition works.

I didn’t know these things until recently. I just assumed Hornady and the people I talked to on forums would give me intelligent information. Big mistake.

By the way, if your best buddy tries to help you out by giving you reloads to get you through the shortage, you better test them in your gun’s chamber. Don’t just assume they’ll save you when BLM drags you out of your car.

As of this morning, I had hundreds of .45 rounds I couldn’t trust to run in my PC1911, which is a moderately snobby 1911 made for shooters, not killers. The ammo worked fine in my SW1911, but it’s a less expensive gun with a looser chamber, probably intended to make it more reliable. The rounds used to stick halfway into the PC1911’s chamber. Really annoying.

Today I set the taper-crimp die up in my press, all by itself, and I ran every round through it. I tested them with the case gage. Now I’m all set. My target ammo works. My defensive ammo works. I kind of wish I had bought a Glock in .45 ACP. I guess there is still time. Or maybe there isn’t. It looks like they’ve disappeared.

I bought a big jug of Vihtavuori because people said it was great for .45 accuracy. Now I can go ahead and start filling casings.

To sum up, your setup will look like this: decapping/sizing die, primer punch, belling die, powder measure, seating die, taper-crimp die. Do things in that order, admit Hornady had you fooled with the three-die set, and get on with your life.

In a few hours, I went from being bummed out about my .45 situation to feeling like king of the far-right prepper nuts. I’m almost cocky enough to try making rifle ammo.