03-29-2020, 01:38 AM
1Shot Wrote:No it is not necessarily the Lee die. If some cases that you think were fired in the other rifle run fine through the die it is not the die. If the cases from the new barrel are the ones that you are having this problem with then the chamber on this barrel just may be out of speck and too large. If you have not sized all the cases yet measure the case web of each. This will tell you which is causing the problem. If your case web is significantly larger than what the Speck says it is you chamber.
The Speck is .441 at the web. I measured a factory Hornady 123 SST round and it is .437 at the web. I measured a case that I have FL sized in my Lee die and it is .440 I measured a case fired in my Oden Works barrel and it is .441 and I measured a case that was fired in my Bear Creek Arsenal barrel and it is .4405 . This will give you a good idea of what you should check.
As far as Lee dies go from my experience over the past 41 years of hand loading there is not much difference between any of the dies. I have used about all makes. Yes some have different features and some look better and cost more but a lot of what I hear people say is about like "my Ford is better than you Chevy" kind of stuff. You can get a lemon with any of them. I have had more problem with RCBS than any make. In my experience I can load ammo using Lee dies that is just as accurate as people using other brands and I have proved it on the line in matches. If you do find that your Lee sizing die might be too tight contact Lee and they will replace it.
the problem right now is that I dont know which brass is which as far as which was shot out of which barrel, I dont like to name names but the first barrel was a BCA, I actually had 2, long story short I was a victim of BCA's 6.5 grendel barrel issue they had a while back, I sent the first one back and got one back not much better than the first, I ditched it and bought a grendel hunter barrel, the lot of brass involved here was fired and resized at least a couple times with the old barrel then some resized and shot in the new one which was a load testing ladder, which a few were max or near max powder charges, I then threw the whole bunch into the polisher and then went to resize them and ran into this problem, it looks like my die is trying to resize to around 4.40 judging from the brass thats running through the die ok, the majority of whats left of the fired unsized brass looks to be 4.43, but theres a few thats 4.38 +/- a touch and a couple as much as 4.45, I do have one fired brass that came out of the first BCA barrel that I kept just to future reference the damage the chamber was doing to the brass, that one measures 4.40, Im not sure whats going on here and would almost have to reload and fire some rounds in the new barrel to be sure of whats coming out of that barrel, but I have a set of hornady dies ordered so I think Im just going to see what happens with those first