doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Roll crimping help!

I have empty hulls in 10, 12 and 16 roll crimped and use them when changing gauges. I raise or lower the table and bring the crimper down on to the hull mouth and set my stop. Then they ae uniform. When changing from 2.5 to 2.75 I just adjust the table height. I pour the powder and seat my first hard nitro card and check for uniform height, insert my lubed fiber filler and a over powder card or another nitro card depending on hull length and again check for uniformity. If they are not all the about the same I use a bit more hand pressure to compress the column a bit more. Pour in the shot and again check. If necessary I add or subtract a little shot to gain uniformity. It only takes a few pellets. Once everything is the same I apply the roll crimp. They look great and perform better. Both smokeless and Black powder. Cheddite hulls work great for this and with I mostly use roll crimped shells for black powder for 1 shot and toss. Do not like fooling around with reforming the hull mouths and with 3 dram loads the hulls start to get pretty fried. More money than brains I guess. Federal papers also can be roll crimped but they do not look as nice, even when trimmed to 2.5 inches.

The Remingtons are 12 gauge cut to 2 1/2" low pressure used in my 1892 W.W. Greener. Leaving an I/8" of hull and 5 turns it is finished.


The jig I made myself and will use it for 16 gauge roll crimping. These are brand new 2 1/2" Cheddites. The roll crimper is a BP and does a fairly decent job but I also have a hand crank and like it better and is faster.

Those are just too pretty to shoot! I'm impressed, do say the least. How you get that BPI crimper to do that I may never figure out. Nice work!

Brent, applying light pressure generates the heat to make the crimp roll. As to the speed, I can't remember but what ever I used it for before is what it stayed at.
Again from the looks of your hulls they are too long. If you have them all cut to that length just add a two more over shot cards to bring the height higher. You are trying to roll too much plastic.

I think you are right about the too much plastic. The loads are 1 oz loads but 1 1/8 oz with the same powder and wad would be very safe according to Lyman's tables. I'll try it tonight.

Seriously, those shells look perfect. Absolutely perfect.

Is anyone using high brass shells? I use the old hand crank and when using high brass they always stick in the holder. I though about sanding it out a bit but haven't tried that.

Tamid the problem could be that the length of the brass is slightly oversize causing it to stick.

Brent these are 10 gauge 2 7/8". Naturally the one on the left is 6 crimp and has 1 1/4 oz. of shot. The other is as you can see 1 1/8 oz. shot. To properly crimp this load, 2-16 ga. .125 fibre wads were inserted in the shot cup to give the crimp you see. This was also done with a hand crimper.


I forgot how to resize the pictures in Imgur. Can't use Photobucket any more.

"How many cranks does it take to roll crimp a shell with a vintage hand cranked crimper?"

Answer: One Old Crank. Gil

I love beautiful ammo. But when it comes to shotguns, I'd settle for "good enough" and I'm not there yet.

This is what rifle ammo should look like. I can make SOME ammo look good. Sadly, everything seen in this photo was stolen - really.

Most handload/reloaders (that I know) would agree that .410 is one of the most difficult rounds to "make pretty." Here's what my old French RTO does with .25" above the osc. Gil