I was reading a post about annealing and the vast differences shooters take regarding the subject. Some don't anneal, some anneal every 2nd or 3rd round, some burn their brass with torch heads, some use Tempilaq which by only shows you get your brass to a certain temperature, some use an AMP annealer, so I wanted to research the subject more and get to the bottom of it.
We purchased what we think is the best Annealer on the market today. We shall see.
So if you go on the amp annealing website, you will see there are different temperature settings for each brand and lot of brass. Each brand of brass uses a slightly different ratio of copper to tin, which means a different temperature setting for the different compositions. An example would be in .243 Winchester, Federal Brass gets a setting of 59, Winchester brass gets a setting of 67 and Lapua Brass gets a setting of 93. Settings vary with neck thickness of your brass and also from lot to lot within a manufacturer.
I have a turn table type annealer with multiple torch heads that is a pain to setup for different types of calibers. It's not easy to use but I had some decent results with it.
I think what we are going to see in this upcoming test is that there is no way a shooter can return the neck hardness to factory spec using torch head annealers. Brass requires different temperatures to anneal and all tempilaq does is tell you for example you reached 750 degrees but what if Lapua brass requires 1200 degrees. (Just an example)
Temperature isn't the only consideration for proper annealing as the duration of exposure to a said temperature is very important.
We are going to start with 6 groups and all new Hornady brass. We will use a Ruger Precision Rifle in .243 winchester and will record extreme spread and standard deviation with a Magneto Chronograph for every group fired. Each group will have 5 shots and here is a list of the groups we will shoot, then it will continue with 5 shots each using different methods.
Group Annealing
1. 5 shots new brass, AMP, AMP, AMP, AMP
2. 5 shots new , no, AMP, no, no
3. 5 shots new , torch head, torch, torch, torch
4. 5 shots new , no, no, AMP, no
5. 5 shots new , no, no, no, no
6. 5 shots new , torch head Tempilaq, TH Temp, TH Temp, Th Temp
Group one will get the Amp Annealer after every firing
Group two will get the Amp Annealer after every 2 firings
Group three will get the torch head annealer after every firing
Group four will get the Amp Annealer after every 3 firings
Group five will get no annealing all the way through the test
Group six will get the torch head annealer with tempilaq after each firing
It will be interesting to see the results. My personal thoughts are we will see rising velocities in the brass that's not annealed with high extreme spreads.
I think the 2nd and 3rd firing guys are going to see erratic extreme spreads and velocity but not as bad as not annealing at all.
I think the torch head annealers will work but not as good as the AMP and I don't think Tempilaq is going to do much at all.
Just my thoughts, that's why we're testing
We will hopefully get most of this done in the next 2 days.
