Well, I think that I am making some progress. It seem's that I had a combination of problems. The first box, as stated, needed to be full length sized to get bullets seated into them. Fire-forming these cases straightened them, but some turned into real bananas in the Redding bushing die. Eventually (I never said I was smart) I was able to track the bad cases to the .249" bushing that I had got just for this Lapua brass. This was the second part of my troubles. There was a sharp edge on the leade that I polished out with 400 wet and dry on a tapered punch. This actually shaved a bit of brass off the necks of some cases. This eliminated all the bananas so I opened another box of 100, reasoning that if I had to size and fireform them it wouldn't be the end of the world. Sending them back would be a pain too.
Well get this, the remaining 3 boxes are perfect. Same lot number but these are staight out of the box. Darned if I know what happened to the first box, but there isn't anything wrong with the rest. The first 100 were OK after the first sizing and fireforming too. Things are definitely looking up, but I was very close to giving up on these cases for a while. It could be just a freak occurence.
Has anybody else ever got a bad bushing from Redding?
Model70guy
