Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Cold welding of bullets.

While all this is very intersting regarding maintaining accuracy and all, I hve seem some worse cases senarios where cold welding really caused a problem.

Last year my brother in law gave me some 270 Winchester ammo since he had sold that rifle. He said he wanted me to pull the bullets. All this was ammo that either myself or another friend of his had loaded around 1978. He said he did not want someone else shooting it.

So, in my spare time I began pulling bullets using my RCBS kinetic bullet puller. It seemed to take a lot of pounding to get the bullets to come free. Finally, I pulled a bullet only to retrieve it from the bullet puller with the cases neck firmly attatched to it. Rather than pull the bullet, the bullet puller had simply pulled the neck off the case. Now that seems like an extreme cases of cold neck welding.

I am just going to throw all that brass away, I do not think it s safe to reload.

Here is a simple tip for those that haven't run into this problem before:

When you need to break down ammo, even fairly recently loaded rounds, first run them all through a seating die and push the bullets down into the case just a tiny bit further. This will free the bullet and make extraction of the bullet much easier.

This is especially true of very old ammo when using the kinetic (hammer) bullet pullers. (smack, smack smACK, SMACK SMACK!!...).

I recommend the Hornady collet bullet puller over the kinetic pullers.

+1000

would you say then, that the same would hold for factory ammunition?