Polishing

[MiddTennTaco]

Am I the only OCD person who enjoys polishing the imperfections out of soft points with fine steel wool and microfiber cloth? It makes the brass really shine, too.

Are there any negative side-effects for the ammo?

And is there a reason why the factory doesn't do this? Soft points are always so... randomly multi-faceted.

[Clod Stomper]

You're probably not the ONLY one, but one of a very few.

Probably no negative side-effects. But no positive effects either, unless you enjoy looking at your ammo more than you enjoy shooting it.

Why doesn't the factory do it? They do to an extent. They polish off the color from annealing. If they really went overboard, ammo would cost that much more. And I'd rather not pay extra for pretty ammo.

As far as soft-points, a few small dings and dimples won't affect much. If the nose is all out of kilter, it can affect accuracy. If the rounds are loaded through a repeating rifle, especially an autoloader, it's going to get all banged up again before it's fired anyway.

But if you enjoy it, go for it. Edited November 16, 2012 by Clod Stomper

[MiddTennTaco]

Now that I feel like I have neurosis for trying to perfect/fix these expensive rounds.

I just feel the bullet would have more accuracy with a rounded and smoothed nose. Aerodynamics? Makes sense to me at least...

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[Clod Stomper]

Your thinking process is right on. I read an article a while back where the author compared the accuracy of soft point bullets with proper tips and deformed tips. The messed up tips really did affect accuracy. I don't remember if he polished some to perfection and compared those to factory.

IIRC, when he cut off the deformed tips, the accuracy returned.

As far as small dimples and dings, I think if you were a world class shooter shooting at 600+ yards, you would see a difference in accuracy between out-of-the-box and polished tips. But then you wouldn't be using soft tips anyway.

I'm a bit OCD myself about some things, so I understand. If it makes you feel better, by all means do it.

Disclaimer: I have done absolutely NO personal testing to determine if what I'm saying is true. I'm going mostly by what I read in that article. But if it were a big issue, we'd have heard more about it, I think.

Perhaps that would be a good experiment for someone (besides me) to do and report on here.

Good luck,

Will