Hw30s. Very tight pellet fit.

[nced]

A couple decades ago I bought the Beeman sizing dies in several sizes and found that both the pellet head and skirt are sized which didn't seem to help accuracy. I ended up simply using them as a "go-no go" gage for sorting out the pee-wees that plagued the CPLs at around die #7. LOL......I had one box of CPLs at that time that contained 122 "pee wees" and three dozen "free fallers" that literally dropped through the bore of the R9!

Prior to switching from CPLs to the JSB Exacts I got two cases of CPLs that were extremely dirty (excess parting compound I guess) and needed washing, however they were well formed and shot accurately. Still....I tried the JSB Exacts because they were clean and the soft lead alloy didn't need lubing to minimize bore fouling like the CPLs. The first few tins of Exacts fit the lead rather loose but they were an easy to load pellet that was extremely accurate from my R9 so I ordered a bunch more. The "wheels fell off the cart" at a THAGC fun match when I literally had two dryfires due to Exacts flipping out of the leade when latching the R9 barrel and I cought the third that flipped out before shooting it. During that match I hit a paltry 22% of the targets instead of my usual 80% so I thought that the internals of my R9 were damaged by the dry fires. At home I broke down the R9 and found no mechanical issues so I started checking out the Exacts and this is what I found.......



 
After the JSB debacle I decided to make up "D" reamers for making a sizing die to size my CPLs. I made two and one die gives me a CPL with a 4.49mm head (for the new tight breech HW95) and one gives me a 4.52mm pellet head for the R9 and my friend's HW95. The die was made so the pellet skirt was rounded (if a bit oval) and expanded a bit as the head is swaged down a bit. Here are a few pics..........

 


Damaged CPL skirt in die.......

"Repaired" CPL skirt.......


I made up these dies for sizing CPLs since they have a rather large head size for a .177 pellet at 4.55mm which, along with the hard lead alloy, makes them very accurate from my HW springers but also hard to seat in the leade with finger pressure. I don't know how many different brands of pellets such a die/ram arrangement would work because the JSB Exacts were already too loose in my R9 leade and the head sizes were rather variable with most being smaller than 4.52mm so I sold the last 9 tins of Exacts I owned and reverted back to the die lot marked and dated CPLs that I had been using for a couple decades previously.

After selling my Exacts here is my latest order of CPLs........

I size and lube the CPLs as needed marking the boxes with size and an "L" to show that they are lubed..........