Thanks for the replies. I originally posted this one month ago so I'll give some feedback as to what I ended up doing. First off, I started this with Nosler brass. I've used a lot of Nosler over the years but wasn't overly impressed with the lot that I had. I bought this lot of four boxes (100 cases) about five years ago but did not keep the receipt. I had to table this project but just recently picked it back up. I only opened one box of this brass and found the neck uniformity to be all over the place. Unfortunately I didn't keep notes on this but if I remember right I would have to say a lot of the case necks showed .003+ thickness variation. I only opened one box and after seeing this I put them right back in the box. I contacted Nosler and explained the situation and they were great. They had me ship all four boxes to them and although it took 2-3 weeks, they sent me four new boxes of STW brass of a new matching lot.
As this was all happening, I looked at other options and found an online vendor that had a pretty decent price on this Remington STW brass. That is the 100 pieces in my first post. I was fairly happy with the neck uniformity of this lot that I ended up ordering a second bag. I couldn't find lot numbers on either bag but after working through the second bag, it almost mirrored the first bag so really looked to be from the same run. Also, the online vendor only had 7 bags of this in stock at the time. Anyway, after going through all 202 (there was 101 per bag) pieces, squared up through FL die, de burred flash holes, uniformed primer pockets, trimmed to same length, chamfered, and weight sorted, here is what I ended up with:
171 pieces had a neck variation of .001-.002
31 were pulled right from the get go for being over .002 , I don't neck turn. Yet
22 pieces weighed between 249.8 and 250.8
66 pieces weighed between 251.0 and 253.0
30 pieces weighed between 253.5 and 255.5
40 pieces weighed between 256.0 and 258.0
i culled another 13 pieces that were at extremes for weight and just didn't fit anywhere. All of the 43 culled will be used to set up annealer etc. So in the end, I ended up keeping about 78% of the brass, but all together they vary by weight some 8 grains. I've been working with the 66 pieces of 251.0 to 253.0 group but mostly has been for barrel break in and just starting to do a little load development, so far nothing great has stood out. It was sort of nice though to work with this level of brass again, sort of back to basics. All the hours of prep we all use to do before we switched over to buying higher quality and much more expensive brass. Just for fun I weighed the brass shavings from the prep work, if anyone is interested, here is what I came up with.
From 100 pieces of this brass, I had 4.7 grains of brass shavings after de burring the flash holes. For uniforming depth on 100 primer pockets, I had 0.4 grains of brass shavings. The flash holes blew me away, I couldn't believe the pile of brass shavings on the bench, that's why I ended up weighing it. Both bags were about the same.
So in the end I'd have to say it was a crap load of work, but like I said it was sort of fun just to get back to basics. But, with the weight variation, I don't expect too great of results for long range work, but who knows, maybe it will end up surprising me. I haven't even opened the new boxes that Nosler sent but will probably dive into that real soon. Fingers crossed.
