Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors 22 HP case swelling

Hey guys, a newby here. I was looking for a little help. I have a 22 HP that I started shooting a little this fall thinking I would take it deer hunting. I bought some S&B ammo to shoot and some reloaded ammo from a company in Wisconsin that used S&B brass. The accuracy was pretty poor to say the least. I started looking over the cases and found that they are all swelled about a 1/4” up from the head of the case. I reached out to a local gunsmith and he said it is a common problem and has to do with the European ammunition and brass. Anyone else have any experience with this? Thanks for the comments in advance.

Without seeing the gun, I'll guess your gunsmith was right. Aside from the chambers in our guns tending toward the upper end of size tolerance (especially if the chamber was cut with a new reamer before being sharpened a couple times to where it was minimum sized), Euro ammo tends to be a couple thousandths smaller in head diameter than domestic .22HP stuff (one theory that I buy into is that it's from a simple translation of English into Metric). If the tolerances in your situation have stacked up against you, bingo, unsightly bulges. More of a concern to someone who wants to reload the brass than someone who just tosses it in the trash. Bear in mind also that S&B ammo is loaded a little hot.

Welcome, by the way!

Thanks for the info, is there anything a guy can do to remedy the case swelling or just have to find some domestic brass?

I think Gary uses 25-35 brass to make his. Since my local range lets people scrounge the brass buckets, when I got my HP, I picked up all the 30-30 brass the week before deer season opened. We formed 60 or 80 cases, forget which. We were losing a lot of cases till we found that if you take the expander ball out of the dies till the last pass with the HP die, everything worked well. Once we got the procedure down we formed and loaded 60 cases with no losses.

As for accuracy, the long 70 gr bullets matched with the slow brl twist doesn't help, either. I assume you plan to reload?

The small amount of S&B I've shot seemed to be brittle or had high pressure and many showed the bright ring around the lower case that leads to head separation.