Hornady seating stem problem

D

Dogslayer24

New member
Hi guys, I switched out my old stuff and bought these Hornady new dimension dies a couple months ago. Anyway, I went to seating some 22-250 bullets and noticed the seating die was putting a little ring near the tip of the bullets. So I took the die apart and up inside the seating stem there is a little ring from where they machined the inside of it out, but didn't get it smooth. I called Hornady and they promptly sent me another stem. Only problem is that the new stem also has a ring.
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I have a .204 die and the stem on it is perfectly smooth and don't have this problem.

So I was just wondering what I can do to smooth the ring off inside the stem, if any of you guys have dealt with this before?
 
It is almost normal. It does not hurt accuracy.
If you send Hornady a bullet they will send you a stem that does not do it. Or you can polish it yourself.

Jack
 
I have had this happen with a few die seating stems from various manufacturer's the last was Forster and it was a 22-250 die as well.
Jack's advice is right-on.
 
I spun one like that in the lathe in my shop and polished it out. You could probably do the same thing with a drill and some steel wool.
 
There are a few things you can do. Keep in mind that the radius cut on the seating stem may have been designed for a different bullet shape. This means that the full force of seating the bullet is concentrated on a sharp edge.

A common mistake is having the crimping going on as your still pushing the bullet into the case. You can back off the die a full turn and reset the seating depth to see if the problem goes away. DON'T CRIMP UNLESS YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO.

Make sure your not trying to seat bullets in cases that have not been properly chamfered. Resizing dies that have undersized expanders will make it overly hard to seat the bullets and aggravate the formation of those rings.

Some bullets like the Hornady V-Max are easily distorted if the seating force is fairly high. If you chuck the seating stem in a drill motor and polish off the sharp edge inside, it should help.

If you truly have a raised ring inside the radius of he seating stem, it will take more polishing to smooth it off. It's not impossible that Hornady's tooling may have had a nick in the cutter that machined the seater radius.

The last resort is to send the seating die and a sample of the bullets your using to Hornady and have them put a suitable radius on the seating stem. I'm sure they would accomodate you without cost.
 
So Hornady sent me a new stem but I was still getting the ring in the bullet. I polished the h*ll out of the stem with steel wool and still getting the ring. The bullets look like crap and I'm not too happy. Apparently it's too much to ask that I want my bullets to look normal?
 
Go back and re-read my post and see if you can eliminate some of the possible causes.

Just for drill, try seating the bullet only half way into the case and see it the ring is noticeably less pronounced. If you see a shiny ring but no denting, then your likely using the crimping section of the seating die in the last part of the stroke. If the usual deep ring is still showing up, the seating force is higher than it should be. This can be caused by an under-sized expander in the sizing die and/ or Improperly chamfered case mouths.

Don't give up. The last resort is to send the seating die and a sample of the bullets your using to Hornady and have them put a suitable radius on the seating stem. I'm sure they would accomodate you without cost.
 
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