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ОглавлениеChapter Two
BRASS
WHICH BRASS?
Brass is brass, right? Not at all. There are some brands of brass that will not only make your life miserable, but complicated. And, some treatments the manufacturers subject brass to will make you cry. The big one is crimped primer pockets. Basically, once the primer has been seated in the manufacturing process, the manufacturer stamps around the rim of the pocket, kicking up a ledge that locks the primer in place. Your decapping die will probably press the primer out (but not always) but when you go to seat the next primer, things will come to a crashing halt. Sometimes the decapping pin will press it out, but the old primer is “speared” onto the decapping pin, and gets pulled back to the case. Things get stuck, you get out of sequence, and it takes a minute or two to disassemble the press, solve the problem and get back to work.
Once the primer is out, you can swage or cut the crimp. In the early days, I’d read of writers who suggested that a common pocketknife could be used to cut the crimp. They were sadists, or were not dealing in any kind of volume whatsoever. When I was really into volume loading, some friends and I built a contraption that locked a case deburring tool into a power drill, and affixed a shield over it. The whole thing was basically an electrical motor in a box, and you worked it by sitting down in a comfy chair, nestling the gizmo in your lap, and pressing the primer pockets of deprimed cases against it. You used the nose end of the cutter to power-ream crimps off at the rate of 30-40 a minute. But, the thing was so loud, at several thousand rpm, that you had to wear eye and hearing protection. The Dillon 1050 press has a station for swaging crimped primer pockets, but if you don’t load on one, you don’t have this option. (We did it because we couldn’t wrestle whatever brass it was into the 1050, I forget which. Probably .308.) For most of you, sorting the crimped brass out to be batch-processed later is the only option.
Brass cleaning can be quick and automated. The Hornady power cleaner makes them shiny.
The Hornady Sonic Cleaner allows you to set time and temperature.
Does mixing brands matter? Sometimes. If you are loading right to the limit, yes. In that instance you want all your brass to be the same. If you desire the absolute highest accuracy, you’d be well-served to use just one batch of one brand, and that would be the one your gun tells you it prefers. If you are loading to the maximum safe pressure, yes, you want to be using all the same brass.
If you are not doing any of those, then whatever you pick up, find at your gun club, shoot and save, will be useful. Now, there will be “brass” you won’t want. All the steel and aluminum stuff , toss in the trash. If you are scrounging up a motherlode of empties at the gun club (and your club allows it), look at the headstamps as you start grabbing. If it doesn’t look familiar, turn the cases around and look inside. If it is Berdan-primed, ditch it. Boxer-primed brass has a central flash hole, and your decapping pin will punch the old primers out. Berdan-primed brass has two or three holes, off -center, and cannot be reloaded. Well, at least not with the common tools you’ll be able to acquire. Given the price of scrap brass on the metals market, it might be worth picking it up anyway, but not for reloading.
Other than specialized needs, you don’t have to do much sorting. One that I do sort is the Remington (or R–P headstamped) brass out of my .38 and .357 bins. One of my re-The Hornady Ultrasonic cleaner buzzes through dirty brass. volvers uses full-moon clips (yes, in .38/.357) but it only works with Remington brass. The other brass doesn’t have enough of an undercut in front of the rim to accept the moonclip. So, R-P for the ICORE guns, and everything else for all the others.
The Hornady Ultrasonic cleaner buzzes through dirty brass.
Once your brass is clean, you should store it in a way that will keep it clean. Closed, clear plastic boxes work well.
Other than that, you can easily find out what the “crap-du-jour” brass of your caliber is by doing a quick internet search. The list changes regularly, and anything I put down here will be out of date by the time you read it.
CLEAN & INSPECT
Cleaning is pretty easy. Unless you’ve stumbled on the mother lode that has been out there in the rain and snow too long and turned chocolate color as a result, you just have to clean brass in a tumbler. If it is muddy or really sandy, you might want to do a bit of dry “sacking.” Use a mesh sack and slosh the brass around in the sack, letting the dirt and mud bits fall out. Or, rinse muddy/sandy brass in hot water. Dry in the sun, and you’re ready to tumble.
Tumbling: Two hours is about right. Two weeks is longer than needed.
Tumbling is easy. Take your brass cleaner and wipe the bowl clean. Windex and paper towels will do. Then fill the bowl halfway or so with the cleaning media of your choice. I’ve always been a fan of ground corncobs. Some like ground walnut hulls for a finer and faster “cut,” and some advocate rice. Halfway full, then cover the surface with brass. Dump a capful or two of polishing solution on top of the brass and turn it on.
If you get the proportions just right, the contents will swirl in the bowl and you can see them surfacing and submerging as they rotate about the bowl axis. Too much brass, or too much brass and media, and they just sit there, vibrating up and down. Too much doesn’t clean as quickly. How long? It depends. Clean media, with relatively clean brass, will be clean in an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Grubby brass and heavily-used media can take two hours or more. Once you have the proportions figured out for your tumbler and caliber, just bolt the lid on, start and let it run for the time needed.
Vibratory cleaners come in various sized bowls. Buy the biggest your wallet and bench can take.
A timer to turn it off after a certain time period is a nice addition. Otherwise, you can end up like a friend of mine. He went on vacation, having started a brass tumbler the night before and forgetting about it. Sometime in the two weeks he was gone, the tumbler vibrated itself off the table, crashed to the floor and thrashed itself to pieces. Two hours is about right. Two weeks is longer than needed.
Next, you have to get the brass out. One trick I learned is to take the screen that came with your tumbler, place it over the opened tumbler, then invert and plop the whole thing onto a clean and empty five-gallon bucket. A quick shake or three, and the brass is separated from the media.
Set it down, lift the tumbler and put it on the bench. Take the screen with brass and set it aside. Now, spray the inside of the bowl with Windex, wipe it clean, let it dry, pour your media back in, add more brass, and turn it on again. Pour your clean brass onto a cookie sheet (not the one your wife/girlfriend/whoever uses to bake cookies) and inspect. What are you looking for? Obvious “not the same” brass. Once you get tuned in to a given caliber, anything that looks different will jump out at you. Some are easy, like the stray 9mm mixed in with the .45s. Others are a lot harder, like .380 brass in with 9mm, or 40 and .45. The better job you do here, the fewer situations where the wrong empty goes up into your sizing die, possibly wedging things to a complete halt.
Pick up a double handful, shake it in your hands, and toss into storage bins. Why not just pour it in? Because that way you can’t listen. Each caliber of brass will have a distinct frequency of “clink” or “chirp” to it. A cracked case will have a different, higher-pitch chirp. When you hear that, split the double handful, one to each hand, and shake each separately. One will chirp higher than the other. (Unless, of course, there were two cracked cases, and you have one in each hand.) Dump the non-chirping handful into the storage bin. Divide the other handful and repeat. Do this until you have winnowed out the cracked case, toss it into the scrap bucket and continue.
Why do this? Because it is faster than visually inspecting each one as you go to load it.
What bins to use? I’ve found that plastic storage bins, commonly found at big-box stores, work just fine. The size meant to store shoes will hold a useful amount of brass (and loaded ammo, once it gets that far in the process). Bigger bins will hold more, but there gets to be a limit of how much brass you want to have in a bin. Once you get more than a handful of them, label the bins so you don’t have to pop each of them open to find out what is inside.
An afternoon spent sorting, cleaning, inspecting and storing brass can leave you with a couple of thousand empties in bins, ready to reload. A weekend, if you have that much brass, can have enough brass on the shelves to load for many months.
CARTRIDGE CLASSES
Not all cartridges are made the same. They differ almost as much as the people who load and shoot them. We can divide them into several classes and sub-divide them again.
High-pressure/Low-pressure
The first sort we have to make is between high-pressure cartridges and low-pressure cartridges. The top one in pressure today is the newest of the lot (big surprise there, eh?): the .327 Federal Magnum. It has a pressure ceiling of 45,000 psi, more than the .44 Magnum, .38 Super or the 9mm+P. Of course, helping it do so safely is its size. In any revolver, it is going to have very thick cylinder walls, and the small case head means less surface area for the case to thrust against the breech. Despite being a “mere” .32, the .327 can match the performance of a 9mm+P load. Definitely not your grandmother’s mild .32 pistol for home defense.
If properly loaded, the level of brass and media has an actual wave shape inside the tumbler.
At the other extreme is the .45 Colt, all 14,000 psi of it, less even than the .38 S&W. (Not to be confused with the .38 S&W Special, please.) That it operates at such a low pressure should come as no surprise, since it was designed at the very dawn of big-bore centerfire handgun cartridges. What is surprising to some is how much horsepower you can get out of it, if you’re willing to put up with the recoil. It is possible to get a 250 grain hard-cast bullet up to almost 1,000 fps, and still be well under the pressure limit.
In-between we have all manner of cartridges, with .38 Special and .38 Special+P at 17K and 20K psi respectively, but both just behind the lowly .380, at 21K. Curiously, there is a band, and a gap. The band is cartridges with pressures from 15K to 21K or so. Then, we have a very few in the gap between 21k and 35K.
Boosting performance: If you want a magnum, go get a magnum.
The gap cartridges are the 25 ACP (which I do not cover in this book, it is just too much bother even for me to load), the .38 ACP and the Ruger-only loads of the .45 Colt.
Then, at 35K, we have a slew of cartridges that run from there to 37.5K, and finally, our big one, the .454 Casull at 50K.
Revolver/pistol
The obvious sort, revolver vs. pistol cartridges, is not as clear-cut as you’d think. The 9mm and .45 ACP, along with the .38 Super, have all been chambered in revolvers. And, the .38 Special and .357 Magnum have been chambered in pistols, the Special for Bullseye shooting, half a century ago, and the .357 In the Coonan, from the mid-1990s and again today. The .32 S&W Long is a special case, due to its having been for a long time the centerfire international competition cartridge. The bureaucrats who run the Olympics seem intent on getting gunpowder out of “sport” and they are pushing towards an all-airgun format. But for a long time, .32 wadcutter guns were the norm for international centerfire competition.
While some cartridges are more commonly seen with jacketed bullets only, they can all be loaded with lead bullets, so we really can’t sort them that way. We can, however, sort according to how accommodating they are to length and bullet shape.
A revolver can take a loaded round up to the length of the cylinder, and of any shape. We used to load 230 grain wadcutter bullets in .38 or .357 cases, for bowling pin shooting. (No, that is not a typo – 230 grains.) We loaded them as long as possible, using whatever crimp groove allowed the assembly to stay under cylinder length. Pistols, on the other hand, since they have to rudely shove the cartridge up a feed ramp of some kind, are a lot less forgiving of bullet shape and length. It has to be within a range (which can vary from pistol model to model) and the shape allowed depends on the pistol design and skill of your gunsmith. That many gunsmiths were able to get the 1911 to feed bullets that otherwise were thought un-feedable is a testament more to their skills than anything.
One temptation in the field of reloading is to make a cartridge do something it wasn’t intended to do. I still recall a reloading article of some 35 years ago, using 4756 to boost performance of the .38 Special. Now, the Special can be a softy, delivering average performance, but the intent was to make it a pocket magnum. Then, as now, my take is simple: you want a magnum, go get a magnum. Don’t try to grossly exceed the performance of a cartridge just because you can. You will end up paying for it, somehow, if only in decreased service life of your firearm.
Ease of reloading
There is one more division, and that is ease of reloading. Some cartridges are easier to reload than others. A pair of really easy ones to load are the .45 ACP and the .38 Special. The .45 is so short, the cases do not wobble much on your shell plate or shell holder. As a result, you can work your press pretty quickly, knowing the cases won’t catch on the edge of a die and crumple from the impact. The Special wobbles a bit, but not a lot, and both of them run at such low pressures that resizing is a dream.
144 loadings later, he finally noticed a tiny crack in the case mouth.
On the other end, we have cartridges like the .32 Auto, which is so small just holding things is tough. Between placing teensy cases onto the shellplate or shell holder and perching tiny bullets on top of case mouths, the .32 is an effort. Another .32, the .327, is so long that wobble is in effect magnified as you lift the ram, and you have to have a smooth and steady hand to get speed loading it.
One that might not seem tough but can pose problems is the 9mm Parabellum. In the hottest loads, the case is so filled with powder that any untoward vibration spills some. The problem isn’t in lost velocity due to spilled powder, but the mess and subsequent binding of the press when it builds up enough.
A different problem comes up with the .44 Magnum if you are reloading maximum loads on a progressive press. The cases can be so difficult to resize that you can’t help but jerk the press around, and you practically stand on the handle to get each resized. If you are going to load right to the redline in the .44 Magnum (and other, even more robust rounds, like the 454 Casull), you might consider a separate, single-stage press. Use the single-stage press, with the longest handle that will fit, as a sizing-only station. Long leverage, and no need to worry about seating bullets or dispensing powder, can make the task easier. Once sized, then you can feed the cases into your progressive reloader for smoother, more consistent loading.
Your loading speed can be quite dependant on the caliber you are loading and the performance you expect out of it. Don’t be thrown off by your buddies and their “I can load X number of rounds an hour.” They are probably exaggerating an estimate and haven’t a clue. What matters is that your ammo all works, safely, and performs in the manner you intend.
Why detail this? Simple:
BRASS LIFE
“How long will my brass last?” Good question. And as with so many questions in life, the answer starts out with, “It depends.” First off, is it brass with a reputation for fragility? The cowboy .38-40 and .44-40 cases are classic examples where a slight dent on the case mouth (in some production batches) can damage a case so much it won’t reload at all. So, treat them gently.
Other cases are indestructible, the .45 ACP being one of them. It is large and easy to handle. It is sturdy and operates at a low pressure. I have .45 ACP cases on hand that have been reloaded so many times that you can’t read the headstamp from the battering the ejector delivers on each shot.
Pressure also matters. The higher the pressure, the more the case is worked and the shorter its useful life. The match between chamber size and re-sizing die size also matters. If the chamber is too big, and the sizing die is at the bottom end of the allowable specs, the case will be over-expanded and then sized down past the average. That works it even more, shortening its useful life.
In a test that is still relevant to this day, one of the writers of Guns & Ammo reloaded some .38 Special cases to see how long they’d last. It was the common target load of a 148 grain wadcutter and 2.7 grains of Bullseye, with the dies adjusted to work the case as little as possible while still providing proper ammo function. After a dozen loadings with no change, he gave up on the batch and simply loaded a single case over and over. 144 loadings later, he finally noticed a tiny crack in the case mouth.
The more careful you are to treat your brass gently, and the more you avoid brass-busting pressures, the longer your brass will last.
When you handle brass, get in the habit of “jingling” each handful. Learn the sound of good brass, and the sound of cracked brass.
To get the brass and media separated, get a five-gallon bucket and the screen that came with your tumbler.
Take the top off the tumbler, and put the screen on it.
Put the five-gallon bucket on the screen.
Turn the whole thing over, and shake or even turn on the tumbler. (Hold it in place, lest it vibrate off and break.)
If you stay within the proper limits, most cases will last a dozen loadings or more, which makes the per-shot cost of the brass cases, if you had to buy them to start with, just about nothing. And if you get brass free, or find it at the range, so much the better.
LUCKY HANDGUN LOADERS
In reloading handgun ammunition, you get a pass from some of the more onerous things that rifle reloaders have to do. Primary among them is trimming. I know rifle reloaders who keep brass sorted by batch, and who painstakingly measure the length of the fired brass and track it until they have to trim it to length.
Others just fire up a power trimmer and trim it all, every time. If the brass is still below maximum allowable length, then the trimmer doesn’t trim, but it gets a whack at every piece of brass, every time.
Unless you are loading the real high-pressure brutes, and loading them to the maximum performance they deliver, you do not trim. As I’ve said before, trimming handgun brass for the vast majority of reloaders is a colossal waste of time.
Take the tumbler off, and your brass is in the screen, media in the bucket, and ready for the next step.
Spray glass cleaner into the now-empty tumbler.
Use a new paper towel to wipe the tumbler.
The paper towel will come out green from brass, and black from lead. Toss it. Wash your hands.
You can use ground corn cobs or even rice as a tumbling medium. Lyman makes corn cobs with polishing goop already mixed in.
How much so? A long time ago I got curious about the headspacing of the .45 ACP in 1911 pistols. The maximum case length/ minimum chamber length of the .45 ACP is 0.898 inch. I had just bought my first digital readout dial caliper and I wanted to get the hang of it. So I sat down with a bin of .45 ACP brass and proceeded to measure until I got tired of it. Well, I got tired of it pretty quickly, as I could not find a single case so long as 0.890 inch long.
I then looked at the 1911s I had available to measure and decided I was not going to slip a feeler gauge between the back of the hood and the breechface to see how much extra there was. I’d just measure the depth of the chamber and call it good. The shortest one I measured was 0.905 inch deep. So, best-case, the .45 ACP had something like fifteen thousandths headspace going on in there, and in many instances more.
Your cases are 0.015 inch short and you’re going to trim them to a uniform length? What, are you crazy? Or so bored that you need to find more to do?
Also, you are not going to need to chamfer the case mouths (since you aren’t trimming them) as your belling stem will give you mouth flare.
When rifle reloaders shoot brass too much, the neck gets brittle and the case body can stretch. They have to keep an eye out for incipient cracking near the base, leading to case separation, and for neck cracks. Unless you are loading a bottlenecked case (.357 Sig and .38-40 shooters, take note), stretching isn’t a problem. Cases might crack, but when you jostle a handful of cases as part of your case prep you’ll hear it.
In all, we’re a lucky lot.
Jangled, cracked brass has a different sound than good brass. And each caliber has its own frequency. With a little practice you can sort out the cracked and mixed caliber brass.
If you see this 9mm brass, pitch it. There are batches and brands of brass that get bad reps for good reasons. Don’t be so cheap that you struggle with bad brass.
