Email: mment340@gmail.com

Phone: 07876 377609

The Wimbledon Match bullets have a traditional tangent ogive, building them involves many of the same procedures as the more complex bullets I make. The exact same procedures are used in the Mistral range of bullets.

Cleaning

An essential element in bonding the lead core to the jacket is that all metal parts are clean and free from any form of grease. I use a specialist surface active agent containing anions and cations at about 60oC to remove all traces of grease, the elevated temperature speeds up the process. The detergent then needs to be removed, using copious quantities of clean fresh water, several small washes are far more effective than a single large wash, then they need to be dried. I use a hot air blower to dry everything.

This is my standard method of cleaning. For bonded core bullets, once everything is clean and dry, the components should only be handled when wearing nitrile rubber gloves, even the natural oils from your skin can prevent the bonding process from being successful.

Weighing

Weighing components should only be carried out in a draft free room at constant temperature, and the components you are weighing should also be at ambient temperature. Hot or cold items being weighed will cause thermals around the balance causing variations in weight readings. This applies equally to when you are reloading your ammunition!

Note: I am an analytical chemist, I’m used to using balances (that is the correct term!) that cost thousands of pounds, not a couple of hundred. The reloading scales we use to make ammunition, and I use to make bullets, are adequate for what we need, but that is all!

Procedure

I’m going to use the 69 grain .223 Wimbledon Match bullet as the example in this case, each of the stages are depicted in the picture above;

• The lead cores are cast from pure lead, slightly over weight, and allowed to cool
• The jackets are then trimmed to the correct length using a pinch trimmer, and the excess removed. After passing through the trimmer the excess jacket should still be attached, but easily removed with a small pair of pliers or even pushed off by finger pressure.
• Weigh the trimmed jackets in groups of ten, to get an average weight for them. The exact number weighed will vary with the size of that batch of bullets being made
• Adjust the weight of the lead cores in the Core Swaging die
• Clean and dry
• Weigh the cores individually to obtain the best possible weight agreement, there is always a natural weight variance. So producing more cores than actually need is important.

The jackets and cores are now ready to be made into bullets

Making the Bullets

• Place a clean and dry, weight adjusted lead core into each of the prepared jackets.
• The next step is to pre-form the boat tail, at this stage the pre-formed boat tail will look like a traditional boat tail.
• After pre-forming the boat tail the rebate is formed in the boat tail finishing die.
• The ogive is next to be formed, if you have a look at the picture above, you will notice, on the bullet second from the right, there appears to be a small "spout" at the tip. This is where the jacket material has started to flow into the ejection pin hole, this is intentional.
• A tip closing die is then used to close the open tipto give as small a meplat that is possible.
• Clean and dry
• Polish. I use a vibratory case cleaner to polish the bullets, it usually take two hours to give highly polished bullets.
• Weigh indidual bullets and group into batches.
• Package and label

Our bullets are now ready for use.