Terrible piece of brass!
Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2012 7:13 pm
I had the house to myself for a few days, so I got re-acquainted with my reloading bench... I ran in to a piece of brass, however, that was amazingly bad and I wanted to share the joy.
For those that don't know/do care, I prep my brass on a Lee 1000 progressive press and do the final stages (powder/bullet seating/crimp) on my classic turret press. I was in the process of doing the final stages on quite a bit of 38 Special brass. When I seated the bullet on one particular piece of brass, something just didn't feel right. I'm not sure exactly how to describe it other than it felt that the pressure needed to seat the bullet was way too light. Each caliber/bullet combination has a certain feel when seating the bullet/crimping, etc, and when something changes, I like to take a look and see what might have been going on.
I stopped immediately and gave this round the ol' squeeze test -- and sure enough, the bullet slid further in to the case with finger pressure alone. Not good!
I wasn't sure what had happened yet, so I pulled the round apart and re-sized the case and re-flared. My theory was that somehow, this one ended up with too much flare OR I had a bullet that was undersized. The bullet measured out to the correct dimensions, but I discovered that I could still seat the bullet with finger pressure. This case was SO BAD that I could actually seat the bullet with my fingers after full-length sizing and NOT flaring! The slight (and I do mean SLIGHT) amount of boat-tail on the bottom of the bullet was enough to get it started -- the weak/thin brass did the rest. Needless to say, this case made it straight to the trash can...
The headstamp of this terrible case, you ask? RP
For those that don't know/do care, I prep my brass on a Lee 1000 progressive press and do the final stages (powder/bullet seating/crimp) on my classic turret press. I was in the process of doing the final stages on quite a bit of 38 Special brass. When I seated the bullet on one particular piece of brass, something just didn't feel right. I'm not sure exactly how to describe it other than it felt that the pressure needed to seat the bullet was way too light. Each caliber/bullet combination has a certain feel when seating the bullet/crimping, etc, and when something changes, I like to take a look and see what might have been going on.
I stopped immediately and gave this round the ol' squeeze test -- and sure enough, the bullet slid further in to the case with finger pressure alone. Not good!
I wasn't sure what had happened yet, so I pulled the round apart and re-sized the case and re-flared. My theory was that somehow, this one ended up with too much flare OR I had a bullet that was undersized. The bullet measured out to the correct dimensions, but I discovered that I could still seat the bullet with finger pressure. This case was SO BAD that I could actually seat the bullet with my fingers after full-length sizing and NOT flaring! The slight (and I do mean SLIGHT) amount of boat-tail on the bottom of the bullet was enough to get it started -- the weak/thin brass did the rest. Needless to say, this case made it straight to the trash can...
The headstamp of this terrible case, you ask? RP