Another possible symptom of factories failing to anneal brass is lousy accuracy.
Charlie had never annealed any before, simply buying new brass and then after firing it once to save time, then selling the fired brass at local guns shows. I described a simple method, and he called back the next day, saying the rifle was now shooting groups WELL under an inch with the same load....
As time has progressed, I've taken to annealing more and more and my groups have gotten smaller and smaller. New brass? Anneal. Fresh once-fired? Anneal. I didn't do it for accuracy sake. It just seemed like a good starting place. Annealing does a lot to wipe out past sins.
It probably also goes a long way to making the brass more likely to take on the dimensions of the rifle in which it is shot. What I mean is this: I figured out a long time ago to keep the brass separated by lot and dedicate a lot of brass to one rifle. I'm not THAT big of a reloader, so for me that is quite workable and handy to do. When you anneal, you are softening the brass in several key dimensions that are crucial to the fit in the chamber. It also (please correct me if I'm wrong) reduces the springiness of the brass-- its desire to return to its original shape. As a result, if you fire it in a rifle after annealing, it is more likely to take on the dimensions of the rifle in which it is being fired and therefore will have an easier time conforming to those dimensions on the next loading.
This goes back to another thing I learned at the Solder Factory. I had the VP of manufacturing tell me one day, "If you fart favoring you left cheek when you run this stuff today, you better be ready to fart off your left cheek every time you run it from here on out." That was his KY Hillbilly way of saying consistency was the key to everything. We'd frequently cast a lot of some alloy, and then somewhere in the process something would be done differently. We'd end up with 20,000 lbs of finished product that wouldn't pass QC. I got sent in to ferret out the cause of one of these snafus. I traced it back to a guy who didn't know how to tell time. His work instruction called for so many hours of annealing, then 10 minutes in a water quench bath, 15 minutes in the acid, 10 minutes in the alkali, and 10 minutes in the water rinse. He was prone to going by feel and his times varied by 20-200%. I suggested a stopwatch be added. They decided to fire the schmuck instead. He'd been warned about this before. My old VP's words still stick with me in regards to reloading, although I haven't quite gotten to the point of marking "L, R, or C" in my loading notes (left cheek, right cheek, or center).
