Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Canada A brief explanation of how bullets are made - with pix -- Pt. 2

I don't really know.

Before you assemble a bullet, you have to make cores. I use lead wire. They have to be cut and squeezed into cylinders for insertion into the jackets. Because lead is a dense material, cutting the cores to the same length produces a raw cores that are fairly consistent weights. But they should be squeezed into perfect cylinders so they fit into the jackets.



If I am using J4 or Sierra jackets, I open the container, have a quick look at them and put the jackets into trays. Then I add the finished cores.

With ready to use jackets and cores in hand, making the actual bullets is pretty fast. For open tip or HP bullets, two passes is all that's required. For lead tips, a third die is needed to dress the lead tip. I can make about 100-150 OT/HP bullets an hour when everything is ready to go.