Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Custom Rifles & Wildcats KE-Hornet chambers

I have gone through several "K-Hornets" over the years. I have enjoyed all of them. I only had one rifle at a time so I rarely needed to full-length re-size cases. My K-Hornet dies are old Lyman All-American dies with the black slip top box. I generally just neck size cases using a Lyman 310 tool neck size die screwed into a 7/8 X 14 die adapter.
When Ken Howell's cartridge case forming book came out I looked up K-Hornets and was surprised to see that my 24" Fox Ridge TC barrel chambered for the K-Hornet was in fact a KE Hornet. This didn’t matter to me and has the added benefit of a little more case capacity. Life continued undisturbed. A friend has just had his rifle reamed to K-Hornet, the reamer coming from a rental company in Oregon. The formed brass also measures out to the KE-Hornet dimensions. While it's not the end of the world, I think TC and the reamer rental company should mention that their chambers are not going to be a Killborn Hornet but rather the KE-Hornet. Does this seem unreasonable? It might prevent a disappointment to someone who has purchased a set of dies and then finds out his chamber is not what he expected it to be.

You're right. The reamers and chambers should be correctly identified, whether they're for Lysle Kilbourn's original K-Hornet or my KEHornet (KEH from my initials, BTW). Hornet brass is short-lived and persnickety enough without the added trauma of being fired in chambers and resized in dies that don't match.

Thats what I thought. i'll write TC and see what they think about it.
This was a pretty smart idea by you-? or Kimber-? No matter which version of K-Hornet was stuck in the chamber it will fire without difficulty. Yet your KE case will not fit the others. Kimber could sell custom loaded ammunition without any serious liability issues.

Those were some of the reasons that I gave when I suggested my version to Kimber of Oregon (the original Kimber) in 1979 or 1980. But Kimber never took any interest in what I'd hoped would become the Kimber Hornet. So when I did the book fifteen years later, I had to give my version a different designation -- thus it became the "KEH" Hornet, portmanteaued into "KEHornet."

This is quite interesting. I did a K-Hornet a while ago and was told it was not correct. I rented the reamer from and outfit that sent a different headspace gauge than fit for the reamer. I ended up just headspacing it so the reamer just kissed the existing rim portion on the barrel. It came back incorrect from the guy and I told him there was something wrong with his brass. I guess I was wrong. About two weeks ago, I did another K-Hornet and rented the reamer from Kieth RIce of White Rock. I sent a sketch of the "K" that i copied from a piece of fired brass and he responded that "...this is the first time in 25 years that I have heard of a 'different' K-Hornet." Thanks for clearing this up.