Excellent article, John. Thanks for sharing your experience with us.



Bobnob17,

I check a majority of my loaded rounds on a Sinclair Concentricity Gauge. I don't find that the boattail bullets necessarily seat any straighter than flat base bullets. They are just easier to handle getting started into the case mouth.

The factor that seems to make the most difference in how straight the bullets seat is how well the bullet seating stem fits the front end of the bullet.

Some of my older seating dies do not work well with sharp-pointed plastic-tipped bullets like the Barnes TTSX. I had a rough time yesterday seating 140 gr TTSX bullets in 7x57 cases with an older Forster Bonanza seating die. Many bullets were loaded out of round as much as .010", and I needed to use the Tru-Angle tool on almost very round to correct them to acceptable straightness (for me, .003" or less).

Redding offers an optional VLD style seating stem for their seating dies, to better handle the sharper-nosed bullets.

I am glad you are getting good accuracy with your boattail bullets. And as John noted in the article, the boattails do achieve less wind drift than the flat-base bullets.



Nifty-250

"If you don't know where you're going, you may wind up somewhere else".
Yogi Berra