Corbin Handbook of Bullet Swaging No. 9 Revised September 2012 by David R. Corbin Corbin Manufacturing & Supply, Inc. PO Box 2659 White City, OR 97503 USA www.Corbins.com 1 Corbin Handbook of Bullet Swaging, No. 9 Revised September 2012 © Copyright 2004, 2012 David R. Corbin All rights reserved. May not be reproduced by any means, including electronic and mechanical, without the expressed written permission of the copyright holder. Published by: Corbin Manufacturing & Supply, Inc. PO Box 2659 White City, OR 97503 USA 541-826-5211 Mon-Thurs 10am-6pm Fax: 541-826-8669 24/7 E-mail: [email protected] www.Corbins.com 2 Table of Contents 1. Introduction to Bullet Swaging ..................................................... 5 2. What is Bullet Swaging? .............................................................. 10 3. Bullet Swaging Secrets ................................................................ 25 4. Tubing Jackets ............................................................................. 48 5. Drawn Strip Jackets .................................................................... 67 6. Base-Guard Bullets ...................................................................... 77 7. Draw Dies ..................................................................................... 82 8. Making Lead Cores...................................................................... 97 9. Swaging with a Reloading Press............................................... 106 10. Bullet Swaging Presses............................................................ 127 11. Lead, Base-Guard, Gas-Checked and Paper Patched Bullets ............................................................ 156 12. Jacketed Semi-Wadcutters..................................................... 172 13. Full-Jacket, Flat Base Bullets ................................................. 183 14. Lead Tip Bullets ....................................................................... 196 15. Rebated Boattails..................................................................... 205 16. Shotgun Slugs and Airgun Pellets........................................... 212 17. Bullet-Makers’ Tools................................................................ 217 18. Custom Toolng ......................................................................... 228 19. Lubricants and Chemicals ...................................................... 240 20. Books and Software ................................................................ 248 21. Delivery Information .............................................................. 253 22. Warranty ................................................................................... 260 23. Non-Disclosure Agreements .................................................. 263 3 4 1. Introduction to Bullet Swaging Good morning! I’m Dave Corbin, and for over 40 years I’ve had the second best job in the world: I help people make the state-of-the art bul- lets that you’ve read about in the gun magazines. Nearly every custom bullet maker started with equipment developed at the Corbin die-works. They have the best job in the world! All you have to do is scan the pages of nearly any magazine catering to handloaders, and you’ll see dozens of ads from our clients; the articles are constantly talking about the bullets our clients make, and the major ammunition firms are buying the bullets made on Corbin equipment for use in their premium ammo. There has been a lot more research and development that you don’t read about, because it isn’t intended for the general shooting public. I can now include a small amount of that infor- mation in this edition. Corbin Manufacturing publishes an e-book called the “World Direc- tory of Custom Bullet Makers” listing hundreds of individuals and firms whose names you may recognize if you are familiar with handloading. When I read the list, I remember someone’s enthusiasm for the new busi- ness venture they were able to start, thanks to the power of bullet swag- ing. Olympians and world champions in every field of firearms sports, from benchrest to air gun competition, using everything from paper- patched blackpowder bullets to custom fin-stabilized shotgun slugs, have come to the die-works where we have toiled for the last quarter century and into the first quarter of this one, some just to improve their already- outstanding achievements, and some to help others become better shoot- ers by manufacturing new ideas in how a given bullet should look and be constructed. Engineers from the Department of the Army, Air Force Armament Labs, Sandia National Laboratories, DuPont, Northrop, Lockheed, Mar- tin-Marietta and other defense-related organizations have visited us over those years, sometimes sketching ideas on napkins during lunch. Tools and designs we worked on are in use today all over the world, wherever a long range, high precision projectile or a very special purpose bullet that could only be made efficiently by the high precision techniques of swaging, is needed for the job. Whether it is protecting an important public figure at long range or picking a pine cone from the top of an experimental tree, whether it is surveying a dense mountain jungle with remotely launched flare projec- tiles designed for vertical firing stability, or stitching mirror-based bullets 5 in an arctic ice sheet from a low-flying aircraft so a laser beam can mea- sure the depth and estimate the strength of the ice to hold a transport plane, or whether it is the grim responsibility of instantly stopping a ter- rorist before he can take the life of another hostage—regardless of the purpose, we sat through many meetings pouring over blueprints, com- puter readouts, and sketches, helping design projectiles for visitors from the far corners of the earth. Yet, this work is only the continuation of development begun by other pioneers of bullet swaging: people like Ted Smith, who founded the old SAS Dies in the 1950’s; Harvey Donaldson, who experimented with some of the first dies to make .224 bullets from fired .22 cases; Walt Astles and Ray Biehler, who developed the principle of upward expansion and the two-die swage technique which replaced the RCBS single-die take-apart system; Charlie Heckman, a pioneer swage maker; and so many others whose names are probably unknown to modern shooters, but to whom all shooters owe a debt for their contributions to the perfection of bullets. You may know that the RCBS company (initials of which mean Rock Chuck Bullet Swage) got started making bullet swaging equipment, but soon dropped it in favor of more easily produced reloading dies. You may even have heard Speer Bullets was started by Vernon Speer swaging .224 caliber bullets from fired .22 LR cases. But bullet swaging played a much larger part than just that, in leading to the products and companies you use today: Hornady, Sierra, Nosler, Barnes, Swift and a host of other mass production operations owe their very existence to the concept of bullet swaging. Today, more than four hundred custom bullet firms—operated by people who probably differ from yourself only in having taken the step of putting their intense inter- est in firearms to work at a profitable and enjoyable occupation—produce specialty bullets. We call this field “custom bullet making”, the elite corps of bullet manufacturing providing initial concept advances sometimes copied years later by the larger “mass production” bullet makers. So, what is bullet swaging and how do you do it? What do you need to get started? How much does it cost? What are the advantages and draw- backs compared to casting or just buying factory bullets? Can you swage hard lead, make partitioned bullets, make your own jackets, make plain lead bullets or paper patched slugs? I answer those questions a thousand times a week and I never get tired of it. But to save you a lot of time on the phone, I’ve written most of those answers here. If you read through this book and think I have left something out, you are absolutely right: I left out about seven more books of information! Those are available if you care to read further. 6 Swaging is so simple you can do it correctly after just a couple of tries. Then you’ll see it’s also extremely versatile and powerful: you can do one more thing, and then one more after that, and soon you will have the whole top of your loading bench covered with one-of-a-kind bullets, some of which no one in the world has ever made before. That’s why it takes at least seven more books to make a dent in the vast array of things you might do, could do, if you wished. Only your imagination limits the possibilities. A deeper study of the specifics of bullet swaging technique and tool- ing, including products made by people other than Corbin, can be found in the book “Re-Discover Swaging”, so named because swaging was, in fact, discovered once before and then almost lost: during the period of 1948-1963 there were many die-makers who produced swaging equip- ment, but none of them offered a comprehensive enough range of prod- ucts to insure their own survival, or that of the swaging arts. Corbin Manufacturing was the first comprehensive effort to preserve and further the technology with information, supplies and tools from one source. Whereas other die-makers tended to be secretive and often died with their secrets of bullet making, Corbin began publishing information that would help advance the field, from our beginning days. Bullet swaging, by the way, is pronounced “SWAY-JING” and rhymes with “paging”.