There probably will not be any bunnies on my part as this is more about fire-forming brass for the AI with the .311” round ball. To recap, I'm trying to keep this as simple and as pain free as possible. I'm using the Lee dippers to drop the powder, I don't want to measure anything, and using the Lee Loader for most of the work. It does make it simple and quick.
I am impressed with the forming but think I will refine my technique a bit. The first thing I learned was that I need to swab the chamber between each case formed.
I polished a case and then died it with a marking pen and then polished it again so that just the indented area or crack would be highlighted. Here is what it looks like.
Could it be the size of the patch that I'm using to hold the Unique at the primer? Is is slamming forward and creating an area of stress as the case is formed? I've tried two sizes, may go to a poly-foam material so it burns quicker? Not using the patch resulted in inconsistent case forming. I might drop back down to the 1.0cc dipper with a poly-foam patch and see what that looks like.
The good news is that the .311” round ball is amazingly inaccurate! That is good so that I will not feel bad about walking up and shooting a hundred rounds of them into the target backstop. In that they feed through the magazine very well and once I have my forming technique down, I can load up and shoot the whole lot very quickly. The only time constraint will be that of filling the magazine and then running the swab in and out between the shot. May be three a minute or thirty minutes for a 100.
Oh, the velocity sat at 2395 FPS! QuickLOAD guessed 2550 FPS and 12.3K PSI. When correcting the calculation for range temperature and using a trick that Unclenick on Shooter's Forum taught me, changing case capacity until the FPS expectation meets actual, the pressure looks like it would be only 9.3K PSI. I don't know if this is valid for such a reduced capacity plus adding the patch. Either way, there is not a lot of pressure being generated.
