Originally Posted by cra1948
Oh, one other little detail: I get my handgun brass in, usually, boxes of 500 from Starline. When I get a box of revolver brass I go through the entire batch and trim the case mouths. There are two reasons for this. First, they all need to be the same length to crimp consistently. Second, to get a good, consistent crimp, you need a square, sharp edge at the case mouth. Starline brass tends to be very uniform as far as length, but nothing formed by impact extrusion is going to have as uniformly square a surface with the sharp edges that a cut provides.

I use a Lee collet style factory crimp die on all the cartridges the OP mentions, and a few others. Case length and squareness of the "cut", and even the squareness of the entire case mouth is simply not an issue (all within reason of course). Very forgiving crimp method that eliminates a lot of time investment.


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