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Bullet Assembly

With a cup and core bullet, it is simply a matter of placing the formed core into the rimfire jacket and squeezing the two together. Here's a picture of the four assembly stages but with a commercial jacket. There are three dies that make these into a finished bullet.

1. You slide the finished core into a jacket. The outside of the jacket is greased so that it will not stick in the die. The picture on the right shows 200 bullets waiting for step two. That is, seating the core under pressure.

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2. The bullet ram is raised and in conjunction with the punch, pushes into the jacket and seats the core. A couple of things happen. First, thousands of pounds of pressure are exerted onto the lead and jacket. As a result, the bullet swells slightly, almost to the finished diameter of the bullet. The second is that the lead core sits below the end of the bullet jacket. This will help for the third step when the point is formed.

3. After coming out of the core seater, they go into the second die which forms the point. PF (point forming) dies can be ordered with different ogives to create everything from an RN to an ELD.

4. For my bullets, I use a third die called a tip former. Looking at the above picture, the TF die smooths the lead over and finishes the tip. In this case, a modified protected point. The above bullets are .314s, but all the dies work the same way. Once the bullet comes out of the TF die, it is ready to reload.



This is my bullet bench. The first press on the left, is set up to produce bullet cores. The middle press is for core seating and/or jacket making. The bottle catches the finished rimfire jackets. The third, for point forming and tip forming.

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Note

For OT (open tip) target bullets or HPs, the lead does not extrude past the tip after point forming. A different punch is used which keeps the tip a precise diameter. In the case of the HP punch, it also presses slightly into the top of the lead to form a hollow point in the lead. There is no tip forming die, so the process is faster because only two dies are needed.

www.corbins.com and www.rceco.com produce dies and equipment for people who want to make their own jacketed bullets. Corbins was originally formed by brothers Dave and Richard Corbin. Richard left the company and started his own - rceco. Dave recently sold corbins.com. Both are older fellows, so it's time for the next generation to take over.

This last picture is an RN 65 grain bullet I designed, loaded into into a 223.