trimming the taper?

[Hoot]

Do you have any spent brass that you have processed to the point of being ready to reload, but not reloaded yet? If so, what is the average resized length of a handfull of them? I ask because If for some incredibly odd reason, your die is sizing them longer and narrower, as in able to fit in the chamber with a shaving alongside, they will still pass the thunk test, but not fit when in battery without being shoved past the chamber lip. Also, if you hand cycle the round from the mag and ease it into the chamber, you should not be able to thumb it into battery using the forward assist and reasonable force, if it's too long. While I've never seen a set of dies do that, I have only used about 14 dies sets total.

hoot

[tbirdman74]

Hoot, from what I can remember, most of my brass comes out between 1.686-1.694. I have never really noticed a change in length after resizing. On a side note, does your resizing die have an expander ball on the decap rod? This is the only non-bottleneck cartridge I reload and it just seems odd to not have one in my dies.

[Hoot]

Hoot, from what I can remember, most of my brass comes out between 1.686-1.694. I have never really noticed a change in length after resizing. On a side note, does your resizing die have an expander ball on the decap rod? This is the only non-bottleneck cartridge I reload and it just seems odd to not have one in my dies.

No, I'm guessing they realized we need all the neck tension we could get.

OK on the resized length. Just didn't want to leave any stone unturned. I'm guessing Bushmaster/Remington/Cerberus discovered that they could increase their profit margin by eliminating the Quality Control check at one or more of the manufacturing steps. No way they test fired those two. Very disappointing.

Hoot

[tbirdman74]

Just waiting on the email from bushmaster with the shipping details, while I was tearing down the rifle, I thought one more test was in order. Loaded a dummy round with a piece of new brass, 1.695 length, and a 250 ftx about .150 longer than normal. It would fit in the top of the magazine and let the carrier slam home. It shoved the bullet back into the case to just shorter than a factory round with a nice little cut around the bullet where it should go into the leade. Best I can measure it with a micrometer it's showing a diameter of .4495-.4500. I guess my theory on the whole thing is when the bullets were shaving themselves on the leade, the sliver was staying in the end of the chamber wall and when the next round slammed home, it was deforming the cases. I guess we'll see what happens when they get it on their bench. Also learned a valuable lesson. First dummy round was a 300 gr deep curl, and didn't think about deburring the case mouth on new brass. Wrong answer. Destroyed one piece of brass and one deep curl...

[Hoot]

Many chambers are cut in a two step process. The second step is the finish reamer. It takes the last, little burrs off and establishes the leade. My guess is that both of the problematic barrels brought to light lately, missed the finish reamer.

Hoot

[Texas Sheepdawg]

This is grounds for a recall.

[tbirdman74]

Recall? Ehh. Warranty? Ehh. I just want to get it fixed. Waited all day for the "shipping info" email, and what do you know? You guessed it. Guess I'll give them another call in the a.m. if it doesn't come tonight. Kinda heartbreaking, now I have to pick a different gun to take with me to go shooting in my off hours. Hmmm.... decisions, decisions, decisions.

[Wicked Hunter]

My upper was shaving bullets also, one thing i noticed when cleaning it is that it was shaving bullets alot more than i thought it was. I would find the occasional shaving on the shooting bench after having to "morter" a stuck round out. What i didnt know is that my trigger group was also slowly filling up with these slivers. I figured it was only doing it once in a while and would get over it, but after dumping about 12 of these slivers out of my lower i'm going to guess it was doing it almost every time and only occasionally did it give me problems. I'm going to agree with the others here that Highly recommend sending your uppers back to Bushmaster to get them fixed. What if one of those shaving were to fall into the wrong part of my trigger group and not alow the hammer to lock back? If i'm not mistaken i would have a full auto thumper on my hands and would not be the least bit ready for it! My upper is fixed now and it was done by a GunSmith. He said the bur was very small but would have probably never went away on its own.

[tbirdman74]

Well, with no response from bushmaster, I took it to a local smith, he's gonna rent reamers from 4D and run it through. The said he would polish the chamber and feed ramp. Guess we'll see how it turns out. I'll update you when I get back next month.

[wildcatter]

I have and do thunk test my reloads, and have never had any problems before, but after this last round, they thunk but stay stuck in chamber. Have to push them out with cleaning rod. I think I have one more box of factory, not sure if I have thunked them yet.

Well, if they thunk, but get stuck, something's wrong, ya gotta figure it out..

..t