I love these threads... and the post of the guys defending buying a fancy set up for hundreds of dollars to anneal brass...
My way, I just call Hillbilly Mechanics....
Got a free 7 gallon propane tank, because places won't fill it.. because it doesn't meet some regulation from somewhere...
hell I have no problem getting it filled in rural southern Oregon... which has been exactly twice in 14 years... and it wasn't exactly needing it..
propane prices were down so I threw in another 5 to 10 bucks of propane...
I was given a "Tree" to attach to it, by one of the Scouts in the Troop that was quitting... about 14 years ago also...
the milk crate it sets in was also free....
however the one big expense was the $6 I spent on a plumbers torch to put at the top of the " tree".....
I had multiple needle nose pliers I could apply to the job of holding the brass....within the flame.
Then I went over to walmart and blew another dollar buying a little galvinized decorative bucket, that I drop the warm brass in...
That is my system... I don't " quench it " in water... I just let it air cool...
Hold a 223 case upside down in the flame and count to 6.... or a 243 to 338/06 in the flame and count to 8... then drop it in the Walmart Decorative Bucket....
I use to anneal every 4th shot but have been doing it every reload for several years now....
it must be working OK tho.... brass life being 40 to 60 reloads is not really unusual, unless using real crappy name brand range pick up brass...
such as some of this crap made in the Phillipines... I only get about 15 to 20 reloads out of those.. like Win USA head stamp....
but since the brass was just range pick up stuff, I can live with that....
Originally I did try and just work to see how far I could push brass...
Took 10 rounds of Remington 223 brass, left on the ground courtesy of Oregon State Police...
55 grain FMJ bullets, ( $35 a thousand in those days).... 12.5 grains of Blue Dot ( so 500 rounds out of a pound of powder).. and this was under Bush, so primers were cheap... like $15 a thousand...The Blue Dot powder for the experiment ran like $12 a pound in those days...
Loaded those 10 pieces of brass, 100 times... annealed every 4th time.... neck sized until needed the shoulder bumped back, which was every 8th or 9th time on average...brass looked like crap due to over annealing.... but on a whim, I've reloaded them again here and there ( having saved them), so they are on their 115th to 120th reloads up to this point in time....still with 12.5 grains of Blue Dot....
and they will still hit a 300 yd gong with out much fan fare....
As Hank Williams Jr summed life up: Country Boys Can Survive.....
HillBilly Mechanics are working out just fine....and minus the propane, which goes a LONG WAY in this type of set up... I've used less than $20 worth of propane for ALL of my ANNEALING over the last 15 years....and I have $7.00 tied up into the rest of the set up....
Even the old needle nose pliers I have used all this time, to anneal 10s of thousands of pieces of brass, is surviving just fine also...beat those pliers are from the 60s.. if not before...
