'Repairing' pulled mil-surp bullets with a LEE push through sizing die.

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A very kind reader sent me a package. In it, a large bag of .30 Caliber bullets. More specifically, ancient pulled military bullets of the 175 grain FMJ Boat Tail persuasion.

All the bullets had some rather outstanding pull marks, as if they had each been grabbed in the jaws of some freakish bucktoothed beast, and yanked from the military 30-06 ammunition with malicious intent. The ridges from the pull marks measured roughly .003" above the body of each bullet, a substantial deformity that could effect function and accuracy.

The image at the beginning of this article shows two bullets side by side. On the left, the original pulled bullet as received, except for being run in the polisher for an hour. On the right, the bullet after I did something to it... and with it's .003" ridge ironed out and the bullet made round again.

How did The Fat Man accomplish this bit of miniscule magic? He ran the polished clean bullets through a LEE .308" push through sizing die.

This die is press mounted, and uses the force of the ram to push each bullet through the die nose first, till it's fully sized and pokes out into a plastic bin on top of the die. This allows full length sizing with all the force of the press, unlike a Lubrisizer made to do only lead bullets.

The LEE die is not expensive, costing only about $20 in each size.

So... the big question.... How did the bullets shoot after the whole rammy squeezie thing was done to them?

To find out, I loaded a handful into well prepped Remington commercial cases over 47.0 grains of IMR 4895, with a CCI magnum primer. The cartridges were loaded to a 3.331" overall length, and then treated to a crimp from the LEE factory crimp die.

Off to the range with Liberty, my trusty M1 Garand, along with some Greek HXP ammunition from the CMP.

The Greek is what I have shot in matches so far, and it does a fair job. As such, it seems a good baseline for comparison.

First up, a target with an eight round clip fired on it. Here we see about typical results from the HXP. It's decent mil-surp ammunition that's reliable and fairly accurate.


And next up.... the hand loads using the resized pulled 175 grain bullets:


Yes... they shoot... and damn well. It helps that Liberty is one of those rare rifles that just wants to shoot straight. Given that predilection to accuracy, if the round will shoot... Liberty will shoot it well.

There's nothing wrong with those ugly old pulled bullets that a little loving attention won't cure. The target above is proof of that.