Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters 7mm08 brass opinions

I've used Hornady & Nosler brass for 7-08 and 7x57. The former had a few neck thickness issues, but has been otherwise quite good. The Nosler brass has had excellent neck uniformity, but has been unexpectedly soft.

FC

I don't know about the 7-08 brass, but I've been using quite a bit of Prvi in my 7x57, some of which has been loaded six or seven times. The weights are uniform, the primer pockets are still tight, and I haven't had a split neck yet (I use Mule Deer's candle method of annealing). Best of all, it is pretty cheap and plentiful.

Star line brass is top quality brass for a decent price . I have used it in my hand guns for years and having just bough a 7-08 for the wife and seeing midway had a sale on star line well it was a no brainer.

The Winchester brass came today, Tuesday, from Powder Valley. Not bad for ordering on Sunday. Opened one bag and it looks fine. It will need the usual neck sizing, inside neck chamfering and flash hole deburring. I won't need to load any of it for quite a while but it should work just fine.

This is not in reference to the 7mm-08 specifically. I have probably used more Winchester brass than any other brand over my handloading career. It was my go-to. I have had multiple bad experiences in the last few years with Winchester brass the is starting to have an effect on my opinion. A couple of bags of 22-250 brass had such deep creases in the neck shoulder junction that a couple were actually split already. They really looked awful and there is no way they ever should have gone out the door. Winchester was good about replacing them and the replacements looked better. 2 bags of 6.5x55 had some weird neck length issues: a couple from each bag that were way short and a couple that were significantly long. One was so long it was obvious just pulling it out of the bag, almost .250 too long. A few also had rim thickness issues that wouldn't allow them to slide into a shell holder. I ended up with about 95 usable brass out of 100 (after trimming the long ones and deciding to live with the short ones). I didn't contact Winchester about those but I will probably be buying fewer Winchester components in the future. I will say that Winchester has been good about replacing things when contacted but their QC seems to have slid considerably. There was also the primer issue that cost me a scarred bolt face. I ended up with 3 cases of replacement primers but I lost a little confidence in Winchester primer as well. I still have lots of older Winchester brass that have given me no problems.

Based on what I am hearing about Hornady lately I am likely to start looking to them for new brass when I need it. Similar in price to Win/Fed/Rem but looks to be closer to ready to load. The few I have used so far have been very nice.