Seating your bullet is the final step in reloading. One common question about bullet seating is the impressions, dents or blemishes left on a bullet after it is fully seated. If you’ve noticed a mark on the tip or ogive of your bullet, you might be wondering “Was my bullet seated correctly?” and if the mark is severe enough, “Does this mark affect my bullet’s performance down range?” or even “Do I need a custom seating stem to load these bullets?”
These are the right questions to ask, because the answer is not the same for every mark. Some of what you see is cosmetic. But some marking can give you a reason to pull the bullet and start over.
Why Does the Seating Stem Mark a Bullet at All?
A seating stem or plug is the internal, semi-hollow metal rod built into the interior of your seating reloading die. It works by pushing on the bullet’s nose as it drives the bullet down into your charged case. The cavity inside that stem is a fixed profile and dimension. So is your bullet. When the two profiles do not agree, the seating force from your die concentrates on a narrow band of contact instead of spreading across the ogive.
Add a thin jacket, an exposed lead tip, a polymer tip or a long secant nose, and that concentrated contact leaves a mark. Nothing is broken — the geometry simply does not match.
What Marks are Okay – And What Marks May Impact Performance
In general, thin, light marks on your bullet’s ogive after seating will not impact your performance when that reloaded round is fired. Severe impressions, deep, dented rings, or any scoring left by a seating stem will affect your bullet’s performance. These rounds shouldn’t be fired as they can cause ballistic and pressure issues along with erratic bullet flight.
Here is why: a deep ring is displaced jacket material. Once material moves, the ogive is no longer symmetrical, the bullet no longer engages the rifling evenly, and its balance shifts off axis. Downrange, that shows up as unexplained fliers and inconsistent velocity.
What About Scuff Marks and Blemishes?
A blemish or slight scuff mark from a properly fitted seating stem may not look 100% perfect coming off your reloading press, but odds are these bullets will fly as intended, reliably. Nothing has been displaced — the jacket surface is touched but not moved or cut.
RCBS’s team has loaded scuffed and lightly blemished bullets from our favorite lots and tested them well past 1,000 yards with no effect on group size or point of impact.
How Do I Tell the Difference?
The Fingernail Test
Run a fingernail across the mark. If you catch an edge — a step you can actually feel — material has moved and you have a ring or a dent that may impact your bullet’s performance. If the mark is smooth and only shows when you tilt the bullet in the light, it is a blemish.
The Caliper Test
Put an RCBS caliper across the marked band and compare it against an unloaded bullet from the same box. Anything you can measure is a dent. Anything you cannot measure is cosmetic.
What if I’m Constantly Marking Bullets? Do I Need a Different Seating Die?
A seating stem should match the bullet you are loading. When the stem cavity mirrors the nose, seating force spreads across the ogive instead of pinching one band of it, and any serious marks beyond the minor and cosmetic stop.
That is why modern RCBS seater dies use stem profiles cut for the bullets people load today — long, high-efficiency VLD and hybrid ogives that older seating stem geometry was never designed to contact correctly. Older dies from RCBS with original stems were not necessarily designed with today’s high efficiency, high BC bullets in mind. RCBS designs each of our seating dies and stems for the specific cartridge. For example, we design and manufacture our stems for longer, match-ready bullets for cartridges like 6mm Creedmoor popular for match shooting, while the stem design for cartridges like 45-70 Government or 30-30 Winchester will be designed for very different bullets.
Ever had a bullet get stuck in your seating stem? Was a bullet wedged into your plug?
That may be a sign of a mismatch between your bullet and stem’s profiles. This usually occurs when loading a modern bullet into an older die set or seating stem that was not made for a modern projectile’s profile.
If you are consistently and seriously marking bullets beyond the cosmetic, RCBS recommends picking up a modern seating die to fix most of your issues. If you are still experiencing problems, contact our support team anytime.
Precisioneered Reloading
Match the Stem to the Bullet
Caliber-specific seater plugs let you fit the stem to the nose profile you are actually loading — so seating force spreads across the ogive instead of pinching one band of it.
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