How To Swage Bullets

These are the basic variations in bullets that require different sets or combinations of the swage dies:

Briefly, here are the steps in making a lead tip, flat base rifle bullet:

And here are the steps to make a paper patched rifle bullet, or a hollow base wadcutter pistol bullet, or any similar all-lead bullet regardless of the nose and base shape:

Obviously, there are thousands upon thousands of other variations of bullets you can swage, but all of them simply add a hollow point punch or a boattail base, or serrate the jacket, or put teeth on the end of the bullet by pushing it against a special punch...it's not brain surgery!

Once you know how to make a couple of basic styles, you know enough to make almost any bullet. Some special shapes may take a special tool, such as the perfect round ball. But by and large, the instructions that come with the dies are more than sufficient to teach a person who is capable of making handloads how to swage bullets.

Sometimes the sheer size of our web site and the wealth of tools we offer scares off people who don't take the time to look closer, and see that any given bullet only uses a tiny bit of all this equipment. We make nearly everything that has been made, for swaging, because we've been dedicated to developing the technology for over 30 years. But you don't need ALL of it! You don't even need very much of it...just the items that make the bullets you are most interested in building.

By taking the time to look over the design, terminology, and swaging instructions step by step, you'll soon come to realize that it is very basic, simple technology: you just press metal into shape within dies, expanding the diameter as you shorten the length slightly in each step. What makes it unusual, and the reason fewer people swage than cast bullets, is the high precision required to build the swage dies that can handle enough pressure to actually expand and shape solid, room-temperature metal. Making the dies isn't that easy. But using them is easier than reloading.

Because you are in total control over the materials and technique used to make your own bullets, you have an opportunity to build far better bullets for your own purpose than the mass producers will ever have. They must make millions of the same bullet to sell to tens of thousands of average shooters...so naturally, they can't be blamed for building an average product. It must be that way, by definition of mass marketing. You, on the other hand, are one person, and if you have read this far, you are not an average shooter. You may benefit by using an above average bullet, made the way you want it, in the exact weight, shape, style, and construction you've always wanted for a given purpose but couldn't buy from a high volume mass production supplier. They can't afford to make you a box of bullets, just the way you want them. But you can do it easily.

Swaging is faster, easier and more safe than the alternative of casting, since no hot lead is used. You can instantly make a finished bullet by putting material inside the die and squeezing it. It pops out on the ejection stroke, finished to far higher precision than is possible with constantly changing temperatures of hot metal with their expanding and cooling moulds. A swage die operates constantly at room temperature, so it remains the same diameter and is not influenced by temperature changes to the degree that you find in cast bullets. Because you don't have to wait for lead to melt, make a lot of test casts to heat the mould, and then clean up the mess afterward, swaging is faster than casting.

The precision of swaged bullets is legendary. Every world class record except perhaps in cast bullet competitions where swaged bullets are not permitted has been won by someone shooting a swaged bullet. Every mass producer and custom bullet maker involved in jacketed bullets or high precision lead bullets uses swaging equipment, most of it from the Corbin die-works in White City, Oregon. Olympic target shooters, military sniper teams, elite special forces groups, law enforcement and security organizations charged with protecting lives and property, and major defense contractors all use Corbin swaging presses, dies, and tools in their prototype development and short run production (we do not build mass production equipment). Everything about our approach to the business aspect of bullet making is aimed toward a secure, comfortable business you can run from your home with one or two people. The concept of exotic, specialty bullets sold at high return to a limited but intensely loyal clientelle through a low overhead direct-mail operation can make more net profit than a mass production company making millions of bullets but only pennies on each bullet.

To get a really good understanding of swaging only takes a few minutes experimenting with the dies. But you can also adsorb years of hard-learned knowledge in a few hours by reading the Corbin Handbook of Bullet Swaging, or get the full 30 years of experiments and developments with bullet designs in our multi-media swaging pack books, ebooks, and video dedicated to the art and science of bullets you can make at home with relatively simple equipment.