Wednesday, June 23, 2010

The .223 PPI

That's the .223 PawPaw Improved. It's a new cartridge I designed today. It's an interesting design, but I'm not sure I can get anyone to cut a chamber for it, and I don't know how I'd extract the brass.



You'll notice that weird ring at the shoulder, that's the main design flaw.

I was at the bench today, reloading .223 Remington, using the Hornady V-Max bullet. After doing everything right, up to the point of bullet seating, I wasn't paying attention and screwed the seating die into the press. When I seated the first bullet, I felt something odd and withdrew the case. I figured maybe I had a piece of bad brass, so I put another piece of brass in the press. Got the same result.

As it turns out, I had the seating die too far down into the press. The crimp shoulder was grabbing the neck of the cartridge, couldn't crimp it, and was collapsing the brass at the shoulder.

Yep, even PawPaw screws up once in a while. I properly adjusted the die and the ammo started coming out perfectly. Lesson: Pay attention while reloading. Little details are important.

Want a close-up?



Pay attention.

8 comments:

Termite said...

I've done it myself. Remove your deprimer stem from your sizing die, and carefully run the shells thru the resizing die.
It worked for me.

Rivrdog said...

I thought this had to do with annealing, that if the brass was annealed, it wouldn't fold up like that.

Old NFO said...

Interesting... :-) We ALL make mistakes, and it's a question of how do we 'fix' em... :-) I'd stick those on a shelf as a reminder, but that's just me...

Anonymous said...

If you could figure a way to ream the chamber you might have a winner. :-)

Anonymous said...

Those almost look like art, especially with the red-tipped bullets. I think I'd keep one to look at, and reclaim the bullet and powder from the other.

Happy days!

Denis

ASM826 said...

On the plus side, your seating depth looks ok.

mostly cajun said...

At least they won't chamber, so you KNOW they're screwed up, unlike the primer that made it into the automatic primer feeder and ended up in a magazine to be discovered in the middle of a highpower match rapid-fire string.

Unknown said...

The crimp shoulder was grabbing the neck of the cartridge, couldn't crimp it, Best PPI Advice