The lesson learned for me here is that I should be sizing my bare boolits to use the thinnest paper (that is durable enough) so that my PP boolit has the best fit into a fired case.
Secondly, I had been patching my boolits long, twisting the patch, and then snipping the tail prior to tucking the tail into the base. I see now that the patches were cut to width to just allow for the tail to be tucked. Captain Curl found this out long before I did...
Don't know how they got the twisted tail though. The paper must have been quite pliable when wet. I am starting to think that the nice ladies patching these boolits must have had some sort of rolling machine to accomplish this...
Also, that the hollow base on a PP boolit is simply to provide a space for the patch tail to be tucked. I always figured that it helped the boolit to "bump up" to fit the groove diameter but the solid wad column on this original case makes me doubt that this is the true purpose. The cavity allows the base of the patched boolit to be as flat as possible.
What I REALLY want to see is an original example of a Gibbs copper coated bullet form the tail end of the 461 Gibbs development to see if it has a flat base. Anybody know?