A different way of nose sizing with NOE tools

Maybe someone already came up with this idea, if so, apologies ahead of time. I don’t mean to steal anyone’s thunder.

So, the impetus for this idea was my experience with nose sizing my bullets. I always had to apply a lot of pressure and many times I’d size farther down towards the base than I wanted to. I wanted to have a way where I could just operate the press and not have to worry about oversizing.

The main idea is to use a shell holder to hold a sizer (nose or body) which will act as 1) a way to center the bullet and 2) a positive stop for the nose sizing process. Now the shell holder isn’t opened up enough to fit the flared side of a sizer. I measured it at 47/64 so I gave myself some room and used a 49/64 woodruff key cutter in my mini mill (it’s a good tool, vastly more useful than the minilathe, but I’m sizing up to a 9.5 x 32 next spring, if all goes as planned) and opened up the rim slot in a #8 Lee shell holder. The finished product is pretty nasty looking and doesn’t have a 100% grip on the sizer but it holds enough to get the job done.
 
Now that we have something that we can put the sizer into (“upside down” in relation to how it’s usually used) we choose a sizer that the bullet of which we want to nose size can fit into snugly but able to drop in with zero insertion force. The idea is that the bullet will sit in this sizer and hold the bullet such that when we nose size the outer rim of the sizer in the shell holder will stop the nose sizer from going too far down the bullet.

So, we have the whole package now. Except, the bullet does not sit high enough to have its nose sized! To account for this I made a bushing out of an empty case, cut down to precisely the size needed to make the bullet protrude from the sizer in the ram of the press so that the nose may be sized.

I know this illustration is wordy. If anybody’s interested enough I can take some pictures and post them.

It works great, for me anyway. I can do 2 bullets per minute. Not blindingly fast but at least I’ll have bullets which will obdurate and fill the grooves making for much more accurate ammo!