Thread: 223 tight chambering?

Which begs next question....what actually IS over length??? I have numerous different answers in hard copy loading manuals from 1.750 trim to in Winchester book to 1.765 in new vitavouri manual.1.760" seems to be most popular length.

Originally Posted by Micky Duck

Which begs next question....what actually IS over length??? I have numerous different answers in hard copy loading manuals from 1.750 trim to in Winchester book to 1.765 in new vitavouri manual.1.760" seems to be most popular length.

A lot of cheap measuring gear that a lot of people have would barely be accurate enough to measure 5 thou. difference. Haven’t seen a Lee trim gauge that doesn’t trim to length when screwed into hider all the way.

SAAMI max cart length is 44.7 mm.
https://www.nzhuntingandshooting.co....76/index2.html

Issue resolved.was my bad. I had maybe at very most half mm between die n case holder. Screwed die down further and squished case down that tiny bit more and suddenly chambering perfectly . The inertia puller can sort the few already loaded. So only casualty is my Lee trimmer insert now being tiny bit too short.i can work around that by unscrewing a tiny bit. Overall case lengths were not enough to be issue,which I originally believed then second guessed myself.

Greetings,
Out of interest I went out and measured a couple of R-P new .223 cases out of my stash. They measured 44.52mm or a bit shorter than the cartridge max of 44.7mm. I trim cases every load and trim to 44.6mm. I also size cases for a shoulder bump of 0.05mm so case stretching is minimal. One of my rifles does this with the standard shell holder and the other needs the + 0.002" one. In short if factory loads chamber OK and handloads do not then the handloads are the problem. It is just a matter of finding where the tight bit is. Trim your case, give the chamber a good clean and don't ignore the seating depth of the projectile. Some of those .223 chambers are short and projectile differ from batch to batch. Current Hornady projectiles need to be seated deeper in my experience.
Regards Grandpamac.

Here's what I wanted to say in post #25
Quote "You kind of have to run them into the lee whackamole dies again in order prime them and seat the bullet using the lee classic loader sets. It wont really change the shape of the brass much as the neck should already be down to size using the FL die." Unquote.

@Juicy.Probably 20+ years since I used my Lee Classic Dies but I'm pretty sure you tap case out of die and sit case on top of priming tool with die loosely sitting on top of case to prime and to act as powder funnel then use as a guide for seating bullet with priming anvil tool. Only going by memory but I've done hundreds of 223 & 308 with those things. I would suspect FL die wasn't adjusted right ot cases are over-length. Sorry about the original nonsensical post.

Yeah the issue was I did the full length resized thing but inadvertently didn't quite get it right down hard enough.

We've probably all done it at some stage if we're completely honest with ourselves Micky Duck.

I've deliberately done it for twenty five years...partial length resized.just don't work with a tighter chamber lol

Greetings,
Fiddling with the .223 and others I have found that chamber tolerances are much tighter on recently manufactured rifles.
GPM.

We all try to set our FL die to work the brass as little as possible eg. neck only or just shoulder bump. All well and good for that one rifle chamber but the moment you do cases for some other rifle it’s back to the drawing board eg. basic factory setting.

Thought it was a pretty drastic step for first port of call