Kudos to Nosler for meeting their brass weight tolerance spec

[Michael Courtney]

Those who follow our publications may have noticed that we're not slow to criticize companies like Nosler for failing to meet their ballistic coefficient specs or companies like Berger whose bullets don't always meet their weight specs.

When I read in the March American Rifleman that Nosler claims a +/- 1/2 grain weight specification on their brass, I couldn't resist checking that against our spreadsheet records. The Air Force kindly provided use of a precision scale, and we were in the habit of weighing new brass and bullets for several years, including Nosler brass in cartridges where Lapua brass was unavailable.

It turns out that the Nosler brass we measured was true to their spec of +/- 1/2 grain in both .25-06 Rem and .300 Win Mag with extreme spreads of 0.94 and 0.99 grains, respectively. From the distribution of weights, it is also clear that they are weight sorting as they claim, because the distribution is relatively flat and does not have the "tails" that unsorted manufacturing distributions tend to have.

For comparison, our measurements in R-P brass tend to have extreme spreads of 3-4 grains; whereas, Lapua brass tends to come in with extreme spreads of 1-2 grains.

 

[Lefty7mmstw]

cool, I'll keep that in mind next time I'm shopping for "good" brass. I do like nosler's pills too, even if they aren't quite as streamlined as they project. They do a good job on the terminal performance side of the game for me.

 

[Timber338]

I've come up with the same results with the Nosler Brass I've used. 300 win, 325wsm, 300 wsm and 338 RUM. all within +/-.5 grains. I have also measured the neck thickness (each individual brass in several locations around the neck) and the max variation of any single brass was .001", while the majority of any single brass is usually only .0005". The average neck thickness for the several batches of 300 win and 325 wsm that I have loaded for is right at .014", and I really like the consistent neck tension this gives me using Redding bushing resizing dies. Overall I am very happy with Nosler brass and willing to pay the extra money for all the time it saves me sorting other brands.

 

[brentc]

They are within the specs for each individual box, but if you compare two different boxes together you'll find the discrepancies. It gets annoying when you need to buy more than 50 pieces of brass at one time.

 

[dig]

Great news. Been having a bear if a time with 25-06 brassand I am only tho wing out if of 10%. Will give the Nosler a shot. Thanks for post.