By Mike Nesbitt | Contributing Editor
The question about whether to resize brass for black powder rifle cartridges seems to come up with certain repetition, and now we’ll look at it again.
First, let me give you just a little background on why or how this subject came up again in my own shooting. I was shooting in a BPRC silhouette match, with steel animals at 200, 300, 385, and 500 meters which need to be knocked down. The rifle I was using was my heavy Model 1874 Bridgeport in .45-90 by C. Sharps Arms which has a MVA 6X scope mounted on it.
My shooting that day started out very good, I even got a 5-pin for rams at 500 meters, for hitting five rams in a row. On top of that, I was the high scoring scope shooter on the chickens, offhand at 200 meters. The pigs at 300 meters were the last targets for my partner, Allen Cunniff, and me and I expected to do very well on those critters. But, to my dismay and disappointment, my last four shots were all misses. That sent me on a search for what might have gone wrong.
My Starline cases for the .45-90 had never been annealed and annealing the brass has advantages in allowing the bullets to leave the cases, when the rifle is fired, more consistently than if the brass is left harder. I thought that might be the key to my missed shots and Allen took my brass and annealed it for me.
When I got around to reloading that ammunition again, getting ready for another silhouette match, I thought the brass should be full-length resized in order to ‘start over’ completely fresh. Only half of my 50 annealed cases were resized, just for starters. Those were loaded with 70 grains of Swiss 1½ Fg, the load I seem to favor, and the bullets were sized to .459″. Loading those cases was very difficult and the noses of the soft lead bullets, cast with a 25-1 lead-tin alloy, were certainly deformed in the seating die.
A couple of those loads were tried in the rifle’s chamber and they could be chambered but with difficulty. The swollen noses of the bullets “engaged” the rifling to the point that some of those loads needed to be chambered with a chambering cam, to force the cartridges into the rifle’s chamber.
When shooting black powder cartridge loads in the Sharps and some similar rifles, there is nothing wrong with using a chambering cam to completely chamber a rather stubborn cartridge. Most shooters of the single shot black powder cartridge rifles have a chambering cam in their pocket or their ‘line box’ which holds ammo and other shooting gear. My favorite chambering cams are made by Double E Engineering. These are priced at $60 each (along with about $7 for the postman) and Double E makes then for Sharps and the Highwall rifles, with either straight handles or with “bent” handles for use with scoped rifles. The easiest way to make contact with Double E is by email at ericegasse@gmail.com or call Eric at 909-762-0540.
After trying to seat the bullets in just two of those resized cases, I changed my bullet sizing die from my favorite .459” to a .457”, thinking and hoping that the slightly smaller diameter bullets would seat easier. They didn’t seem to and the force of seating the bullets continued to “swell” the bullets’ noses.
To make things clear, I was not compressing the powder charge while seating the bullets. Powder compression was done, using the expander die, by forcing a veggie wad down on the powder and compressing the powder to the depth needed for seating the bullets. So, the only forces on the bullets while being seated was the tension of the mouth and sides of the cartridge cases. A larger expander plug, in the expander die, would have certainly helped but that I didn’t have.
The bullets I was using were the .459” (as cast) diameter 550-grain slugs from the Hoch mold, nose-pour, with the small flat point that all nose-pour cast bullets have. After being seated with the seating die, the nose-pour “flat” on the front of the bullet could no longer be seen, that was simply swaged away.
So, the next half of those cases were not sized, the cases were simply belled in the expander die, primed, and then loaded with the same 70-grain load, using Swiss 1½ Fg powder, and using Federal’s large pistol primers for ignition. The .459″ bullet sizing die was returned to the sizer/lubricator and loading continued as I usually have done, seating the bullets into the un-sized cases with my fingertips. Then those loads were run through a taper crimp die just to hold the bullets in place.
This all reinforced my thoughts and practice of not resizing my brass with black powder loads in straight-walled cases. And, of course, I expected my loads with the un-sized cases, which had the non-deformed bullets, to shoot much better than the loads with the bullets which did have the swollen noses.
I hope you all agree with me that the non-deformed bullets should have shot the best. One tiny reason for that is because there was really no consistency on the amount of swelling for the deformed bullets, some did need to be loaded in the rifle with the chambering cam and some didn’t. I was certainly ready to “put my money” on the loads in the un-sized cases which had the non-damaged bullet noses.
Now I’m reminded of a story from several years ago about a man who bought commercial jacketed bullets, then weighed, measured, and even balanced them prior to making his loads. This was in a “varmint caliber” and he wanted the most precise ammunition that could be made. Out of, let’s say, 100 bullets, he had only 10 that passed all of his rigid tests. Those 10 were very carefully loaded, with competition primers and weighed powder charges. The other bullets, his rejects, were loaded as well but without weighing each powder charge and just using standard primers. The bottom line of all this was that he shot much better with his not-so-carefully loaded cartridges than with the loads where all factors were closely checked. Perhaps the human factor got in the way of his test while doing the shooting.
My shooting and comparing the results while using the cartridges with the swollen-nose bullets versus the loads with the normally shaped bullets, the swollen-nose loads in resized cases and the normal bullets in un-sized brass, certainly showed a human factor. The deformed or swollen-nose bullets were used at first on closer distances, at the pigs out at 300 meters. They did rather well, giving me seven hits for my ten shots. Then they were used at the turkeys out at 385 meters, not too bad again, knocking down four of those elusive birds.
Those twenty shots, plus the shots which were taken on the sighting targets, used up those loads with the swollen-nose bullets and I was glad to get rid of them. That’s when my attention was turned to the rams at 500 meters. Maybe that’s when the human factor clicked in because my shooting went down the tube! I can’t fault the ammunition so it must be my shooting that produced only one hit on the rams. Of course, my misses were all very close…
Then, just to complete my tale about the silhouette match, I got one chicken, shooting offhanded at 200 meters. And that single chicken was taken with a head shot! (Lucky…!)
The differences in accuracy between the ammo with the sized cases compared to the un-sized cases, not to mention the deformed bullet noses, would be more graphic if groups had been fired on paper targets. That way the difference could be measured. My shooting at silhouette targets can only result in hits or misses. And, what would destroy any trial for getting good groups, my rifle’s sights had been adjusted as needed during the silhouette relays.
My conclusion about this experience of deforming the noses of the bullets while trying to seat them in resized cases is simply to not resize the brass when reloading straight-walled cases. Of course, that is assuming the ammo will be fired again in the same rifle the brass was previously fired in.
I’ll probably reload and shoot with these annealed cases at least twice before taking this same rifle to the Matthew Quigley Buffalo Rifle Match in Montana. My thought is, if I can hit a chicken at 200 meters offhand, I should be able to hit the 350-yard bucket at Quigley!!
