Lead, lead, led & leade

[TexasMac]

It’s obvious that lead is the main element in cast bullets and all are aware of the old adage “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink”. And surely you’ve led a group of folks at one time or another. But many of us inadvertently use lead when referring to the ramped transition from the chamber or free bore to the lands, for which leade is the more correct term. Many, many years ago when, as a novice shooter, I was reading and learning about chambers and bores, I remember this being a point of confusion.

SAAMI (Sporting Arms & Manufacturer’s Institute) defines leade as: “That section of the bore of a rifled gun barrel located immediately ahead of the chamber in which the rifling is conically removed to provide clearance for the seated bullet”. The key word here is “conically”, as in cone-shaped, otherwise completely removing the rifling results in free bore, defined by SAAMI as the: “A cylindrical length of bore in a firearm just forward of the chamber in which rifling is not present”. But SAAMI does recognize that lead and leade are used interchangeably by some.

When writing about chambers and bores it helps me to remember to use the correct spelling if I think of leade as an abbreviation or contraction of the leading edge of the lands.

Wayne

[SgtDog0311]

Hey There Wayne, Glad you posted this.

Lots of disagreement on terminology, some because knowledgeable folks call portions of the chamber and leade one thing and others just as knowledgeable call it another.

Throat is another one that different folks have in their head to mean something specific, or in some cases not as specific. I generally mean the conical portion of the chamber that transitions from freebore diameter to groove diameter, before the beginning of the leade. I once thought that conical angle generally followed the same angle as the leade, but that is not the case in most of my chamber casts

I think according to a more stringent definition the throat is actually everything past where case mouth meets freebore - to that point where the leade reaches its full height. So that would include freebore, throat taper and leade angle.

At least that’s my understanding, and I sure hope you don’t debunk it because it took me a long while to finally get to that through my thick head:-)