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Brass for the 480 Achilles
is made by shortening .45 Colt brass to an overall length of
.900". I start by sizing and de-priming the cartridge. Next I cut it
with a sharp tubing cutter. It's easy to hold it in the case trimmer
... but not all tubing cutters will work with your cartridge in the
case trimmer. Some are too large to allow you to rotate the cutter
all the way around. |
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Once the cartridge is cut I expand the neck
with a tapered plug to allow the pilot of the case trimmer to enter
the cartridge. An old .50 caliber machine gun bullet works just
fine. |
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| With the neck is
expanded the cartridge goes back into the case trimmer for
final cut to length. |
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When the
case is trimmed to length then I chamfer and de-burr. The cartridges
are now ready for final neck expansion to allow bullet seating. They
can then be primed and loaded. |
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Bullets |
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So far the
only mold we have for the 480 Achilles is the Bittner 480-290-FNH by
Mountain Molds. This mold produces quality bullets. The bullets
actually shoot better than we thought they would. Or at least "I
thought" ... I am kind of a skeptic. Aaron did right well on the
design. |
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When I
have several hundred bullets cast, I lube them. There are 2 ways to
lube heel bullets. One way is to load the bullets into the
cartridges with no lube on them. When you are ready to shoot you can
then rub a soft lube into the grease grooves of the bullet. Any soft
lube such as SPG, Paco's Apache Blue, LBT Blue (soft) or the various
Alox blends like Javelina will work. |
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When
designing this bullet we made the grease grooves fairly small and
lubing that way gives some leading as velocities get over 800/850
fps.
Overall,
lubing the bullets with Lee Liquid Alox has given me the best
results. To lube them with the Lee Lube, I take a handful of bullets
and dump them into a plastic container.
Then I add
the Lee Liquid Alox. If you have not used it, just experiment as to
how much you need I usually err on the side of "too much" as
in the illustration below. |
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Put the
lid on the container, hold on tight and shake it around and up and
down and around and around ... hey! A rock 'n roll song! Do that for
a few minutes until all the bullets have a good covering of lube.
When the
bullets are covered with lube, pour them out on plastic sheet and
let them dry for 24 hours.
They are
kinda messy. Even "dry" the Lee Lube is sticky. Especially if you
have a lot of lube on them like I usually do.
One way to
deal with that is, once the bullets have dried, tumble them in White
Powdered Mica. This puts a nice slick film over the bullets that not
only deals with the stickiness, it helps lube things. You can order
the mica from Brownell's easily. |
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- Jim Taylor |
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