Factory Crimp Collet Sleeve Slots off-center

For appearance sake, we would like the slots cut into the crimp sleeve to be perfectly centered every time, but the production techniques required to offer the die at a reasonable price make this impractical. Also, the slots cut into the crimp sleeve do not need to be perfectly centered to get an even crimp. It takes a little mathematics to explain why. We will use a 308 Winchester cartridge case for an example. 

A typical 308 Winchester cartridge has a case neck diameter of .340 inch. We bore the crimp sleeve out to .005-.015 inch over case neck O.D. before the longitudinal slots are cut. The slots are .022 inch wide, and there are 4 slots. Therefore when the collet is fully closed (this much crimp is rarely needed) the diameter of the closed crimp sleeve will be:

.350 x pi = 1.100 (circumference of bored hole)
- .088 (.022 inch slots x 4)
1.012 (circumference of closed collet)

1.013 / pi = .322 (diameter of closed collet)

So we can see that at maximum crimp, the Factory Crimp die will close down to .322 inch or .018 inch less than the typical .308 case neck diameter. The worst it could be off center (if the slots were tangent to the hole) would be .018 inch. Using trigonometry to calculate the angle we find that .018 inch over a case length of 2.015 inch is .512 degrees, or about 1/2 of 1 degree. This would be scrapped. With the slots only slightly off-center, the actual angle is negligible, probably less than 1/10 of 1 degree.