Comments on: Handloading Safety Tip — Bullet Bearing Surface and Pressure

By: mike

mike — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 15:03:27 +0000

Just a lot of notions and no testing/evidence

By: Jerry Shaw

Jerry Shaw — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 14:11:13 +0000

A quick way to check what the bearing surface should be is to refer to Bryan Litz’ excellent Applied Ballistics for Long Range Shooting. It might not be perfect for everything you want to learn, but it’s the 98% solution. He includes bullet dimensions for most of the bullets you will most likely care about.
Having said that, the book doesn’t give a lot of advice on measuring individual bullets.
My own inclination is that there are a lot more points lost through bad wind calls than are lost on account of bearing surface inconsistency but your mileage may vary.
Good luck.

By: ELR Researcher

ELR Researcher — Sat, 12 Sep 2015 14:28:12 +0000

Re photo 2 – IF your intent is to group projectiles into those that have close to the same measured bearing surface dimension, and you are willing to accept that you will need to rationalize how to stop checking at some point (may take 4-5 tries to get a dimension to repeat exactly), this approach works fine (for me). I’m looking for consistent length of the measured dimension, not whether it reflects the definitional bearing surface length.