Bullet Jackets
During the late 90's, J4 (they were separate from Berger back then) shut down all their jacket machines for a complete rebuild. The jacket shortage this produced resulted in the layoff of 2/3 of our employees and some really tough times for Berger and several other custom bullet makers.
During this time I sent jacket prints to every draw house and stamping operation I found in the Thomas Register. Once each one saw the tolerances we required they all quickly said "not interested".
Now that I understand the process I see that the trick is not in some ancient Chinese secret. Many moons ago, JL Spivey, having been forced out of his partial ownership of Sierra, was highly motivated to go through the tremendous labor and expense of putting all the high precision (tight tolerance) tooling together to make the J4 jackets. We are going through a complete tooling up for 338 cal jackets and I can tell you the expense is substantial.
Fortunately, for all of us precision shooters Mr. JL Spivey had other presses making him money so this effort was a labor of love more than a profitable venture. One could estimate that it was nearly 30 years before he paid for his efforts (especally with the amount of jackets they sold back then).
As you might guess we do not have plans to publicize the prints for tooling and machine design (sorry Rory). I would encourage anyone, who has the resources, to produce precision jackets as this will reduce the burden we face in keeping the supplies up while making enough jackets for ourselves. Even if no one pursues this situation, we will never stop selling J4 jackets to custom bullet makers so do not fear an end to the supply.
Regards,
Eric
