Home Forums Reloading Big Game Rifles Bullet length issues

I was reloading with Hornady 143 gr ELD-X for load development. I measure to the ogive with a comparator for my overall length. Call it a little lazy but once I get my length and they are consistent for a few rounds I just load them up. Have been having issues periodically with fliers so this time I was double checking everything. Turned out that about 13% of my reloads were seating at a different depth. There was a max .012 difference shortest to longest. Measured the remaining 15 unused bullets in the box and the base to ogive max spread was .002. But the max overall length base to tip was .011 for 1 of the 15 bullets. Is this reasonable? Did I maybe get a screwed up lot? I still have 2 or 3 boxes, 100 rounds each. Hate to think I need to measure each of them before loading. I hunt with my guns and the longest shot I have ever taken was 500 yards. I still like to get my rifles shooting as accurately as I can and like working on the loads. This particular rifle is a 6.5-06AI Shoots great until the flier shows up. Even then it's still good for a hunting rifle but I want it better.

I had a problem similar to this with a slightly compressed load in 308 and 150 grn TTSX pills. Turns out the tip of the bullet was being pushed into the seater and sticking. When the die lifted off the bullet it would release at different depths and the brass base to ogive measurement was all over the place. This was with Redding dies. Switched to a Hornady seater and all was good.

Also if you are working up and the load is compressed at all you will get longer oal with the higher powder charge but all of the same charge should be very close in length.

You can run into issues also if bullet you are seating has a plastic tip. They can cause a variance in bullet length, stem to stern,due to the tips not being exactly uniform. but the bullet base to ogive should be close if not exact. Nosler seems to be the best on uniform tips; TTSX bullets are often quite different from the same box.


Caveat - this may have nothing or everything to do with your issue

If you have only been having issues with this box/lot of bullets, then that answers your question. Contact Hornady with the lot number and see if anyone else has been having issues. If it's a bad lot, they will probably make it right with you..

Hornsby supplies a different seating stem for the ELD-X, A max etc.
What die are you using?
I definitely see a lot of difference in meplats but often it is not really noticeable until you put it in a set of calipers..
Maybe you want a meplat uniformer? Check out the handloading pinned threads I think number 2 talks about meplats.

Not compressed loads. The die is a Redding Die. Contacting Hornady is a good idea. Maybe the best option is to see what their tolerances are on the overall bullet length with the polymer tip. It's a pain but my guess would be that checking each load and getting the ogive length the same will minimize any ballistic deviation caused by the overall length for what I am doing. Maybe my attitude should be "challenge accepted". ;-)

I noticed the meplats on long bullets while function testing rounds. Some would not quite clear the ejection port.
I can take a picture of the two different seating stems if you think that would be helpful.

.012 is a big difference. I always measure CBBO, when seating bullets, the bullet tips for a OAL measurement can differ too much IMO. For seating consistency I sample bullets by measurement from any new box, usually doing 15 - 20 bullets. just to see what I`ve got. Some boxes are really bad. In 7mm, the ELDM and X bullets have been very good, about the .002 you found. Bergers have been excellent. I really watch my seating process or technique. I`ve found that bullets that seat easly, lite inside neck lube, or lite neck tension, are more consistent in measurement than those cases without.
YMMV