Brass Preparation And Management By John W. Lewis

Hi John,Thank you for the article i found some good ideas in there.Did you find that running your brass through the ring die affected the primer pocket of your brass? I have quite a few cases with primer pockets that is starting to feel loose and was wondering if the ring die might be the solution to tighten them up again?How do you keep track of how many times you have used your brass? in theory this should be easy, but i found that i keep mixing up my brass.I might get a new batch of brass and start by loading some for load development then i might want to load these same cases again (now that they're fireformed i should get better accuracy) then i might load a batch of 50 and only use 35 for competition etc etc. At the end of the day if i loaded a batch and they all came back fired it would be easy, somehow it just always ends up scrambled.The best method I saw thus far is one guy that uses a small file to notch the rim of each case every time it's loaded and that way it is easy to sort them and keep track of what it's been up to.Any sugestions??
 
Interesting article BUT so is the one in the new Handloader where a known accurate Cooper 22-250 (1/2 MOA) Was tried with different brands of brass, with and w/o fancy prep, even mixing brands! The result was "no result". Remington factory brass "out of the box" shot the best although it had among the highest weight variation and neck thickness variation.
IMO, time spent sending bullets downrange that shoot 1/2 MOA groups will make you a better shooter than spending hours in brass prep to get .4 MOA groups.
Even a 1 MOA rifle will kill any big game within the ranges most of us actually do most of our hunting at.
I'd rather be wearing out a barrel than bending over the loading bench. To each his own.
 
While I do feel that Mr. Lewis goes a wee bit further than I care to with his brass prep, he does have at least one Nat'l record to go with it. I think a wee bit of luck was involved (he has admitted as much), but to paraphrase the saying, 'fortune favors the prepared'.

I'm curious... which issue (month/number) of Handloader was this article you mention in? I just found that they offer online subscriptions, and I'd like to find a back-issue if possible.
 
Found it in the June issue - it was a Cooper .223, not a .22-250 which was screwing up my search.

I'll give the guy credit, he put more work into it than most authors I see who claim 'no difference' between brand x, y or z, or method a, b and c. And I do agree with him to a degree... unless you are really bent on wringing the absolute mostest from your gun and loads, a lot of the twiddly stuff falls into the 'feel-good' category.

From a strictly technical perspective... the sample sizes are a bit small. Then again, time and money being finite, I can't entirely fault him there either. The problem is, that as close as the results are, you'd need a *lot* bigger sample size to say (with mathematical confidence) that there really is or isn't a difference, and that the overlap wasn't simply due to chance. The smaller the difference, the bigger the sample required generally speaking.

FWIW, I did a test (for a final paper in my intro statistics class) last year on case weight vs. case volume vs. muzzle velocity in a .308 Win, and *did* find a correlation between weight and muzzle velocity. Albeit a *slight* one, but still statistically significant nonetheless.

I do want to get back to that project and spend some time working with more aspects of the cases - weight and volume and runout specifically. Something I have wondered about is whether different parameters would have noticeably more or less effect in particular chamberings - say .223 Rem vs. 6mm BR vs. .308 Win vs. 6.5-284, etc. The tests start getting complicated, at that point ;)

I still say that I'm not going to tell Mr. Lewis that he's full of hot air, even if I don't subscribe to quite all that he does to his brass. We need more people willing to go out on a limb and say "This is how I do it" and weather the flak that follows.

Monte
 
Monte, In your response you mentioned :

FWIW, I did a test (for a final paper in my intro statistics class) last year on case weight vs. case volume vs. muzzle velocity in a .308 Win, and *did* find a correlation between weight and muzzle velocity. Albeit a *slight* one, but still statistically significant nonetheless.

Could you elaborate on what you feel best describes the variable 'weight' in your tests, please? Is it empty cartridge weight, projectile weight, or bullet weight or ?

thanks,
chuck...
 
Differences are normally slight yes but once that have used a rifle that repeatedly shoots ragged one hole or cloverleaf groups mentally there is no going back. You know if you miss one with that rifle its down to you not the rifle or cartridge.

As a matter of interest my new 20BR has some very tight clearances even in my book but it shot every load over 3 .5 gr (28.0-31.5x N150) spread into one .7 group at 100 yards. That rifle uses Lapua brass fully prepped and then some. These tight clearances mean extra time spent checking and measuring each case after tumbling but it shoots in the .2s and .3s just off a Shooting Bag. For my vermin shooting with it I am now tending to just drop my powder loads.

A
 
I did read Mr. Lewis's article recently. But something on a related subject. My .17 Rem (standard neck) recently began putting bullets out there that weren't reaching the 100 yard target. (Berger 30 grainers with 25 grains of Varget). I checked for case length and for a burr to no avail. Gave it a good scrubbing and then shot at the 25 yard backer to find the smudges of a bullet coming apart (velocity has always averaged 3930 at the muzzle). The only thing I could realistically think of was extreme velocity causing destruction due to rotational velocity.

Walt Berger questioned the brass. Then I got to thinking...I have loaded this brass many, many times and shot them relatively hot, never needing to trim. My experiences have been that this small brass just does not show brass wear. Began to suspect brass flow to the neck where it might be accumulating , the thickening causing a tight-neck condition.

So threw those cases away and reloaded with virgin brass. Presto! Problem solved!

This rifle/load combo has taken around 800 coyotes over the years and a bullet not even reaching the critter might be thought to be a miss. But checking things out on paper occasionally will save the anguish of a certain kill being lost. Montana Mike
 
Mr. Lewis,

Personally I thought you did an excellent job explaining in detail the why's, the how's of of turning the necks of brass cases. As a machinist, toolmaker, tool & cutter grinder in the machine shop trade. I also worked for 25 of my 46 years in a specialty shop as a working supervisor (I never stopped cutting metal for 46 years). I've cut to tolerances of plus or minus .00005" at times. that's 1/2 of 1/10,000". I've learned that when you're working to extreme accuracy such as needed in long range bench rest shooting, you never know for sure, how something seemingly insignificant can affect the end result.
Because of this, you can perfect factory brass beyond what the factory can do with a cost far less that what most people could afford, if the factory produced brass to the same consistency. With factory brass, you never know when you might have a case or two beyond factory tolerances. Even meticulous inspection sometimes misses less than perfect manufacturing. Normal inspection might check 1 out of a 100 cases, better inspection might check 1 of 10 cases, but there will always be some that get through without being checked.
Maybe if you're shooting woodchucks, a miss from time to time doesn't mean much. It easy to blame it on something else. But if you're shooting 1000 yard benchrest matches, one bad shot could cost you the match. Shooting woodchucks, you can easily chamber another round, no big deal. But shooting a match, you don't get to say, "Gimme another shot." If you have a flyer for any reason, you're stuck with it.

What you wrote was excellent.
 
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