Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters How many reloads on brass?

Really glad to get the reaffirming. I Lee neck size and have reloaded each case several times and never saw a problem - but it is glad to hear others with the same.

Remington 280 is asking about simple annealing process instructions or videos. I didn't want to step on his request with a new post so I am restating.

not all different brand brass is the same no way no how, are you worried about accuracy or just want to here your rifle go bang ? i have used alot of different brand brass most brands are fine but Lapua is by far the best brass made and easiest to get consistent groups with a good rifle. i feel maybe 6 -10 times with brass i have made very consistent and weighed to be close to perfect. now for regular brass if you just candle anneal brass ,trim and inspect your brass " each empty cartridge " maybe 10 - 15 times if you feel you need too ? i throw `em after a 6-8 times on regular brass i always buy brass by 500 or 1,0000 ,have even had friends that don`t reload give me their once fired brass,when i go to the range i always check the garbage cans ,sometimes there are some hidden treasures of once fired brass with the empty box too in those garbage cans . if you have a favorite rifle or rifles and these rifles shoot well why try and get a few more reloadings on used brass ,brass is cheap throw that old crap away and get new brass before you damage your rifles . good luck and safe shooting,Pete53

I've always kept meticulous records on reloaded brass. I anneal every 4 reloads. I tend to load on the "hot" side. I can safely and definitively state, "IT VARIES!"

Belted brass I can't get over 12-13 reloads before I start getting separation signs, but normally at 10 I'm very cautious. Other cartridges, non-belted, I've gone as much as low 20's on reloads before the primer pockets expand. However, I have one batch of old military '06 brass with just over 40 reloads. They could be used in a pinch but the primer pockets are getting to where you can almost seat the primers with your fingers.

Great thread really enjoyed reading it !

quote > Dan oz ; It should be self-evident that when the fired case comes out of the chamber it must be able to fit back in, and indeed have some clearance, so if it won't chamber easily after you reloaded it, unless it is significantly out of round, it must be due to something you did to it in the reloading process.

This ^^^^ has driven me crazy at times hopefully the Redding body dies will help my brass and me out .

Anneal often; every 1-3 firings. Bump shoulder .001" to .002". Use bushing dies or have your full length die's neck honed out so it gives a appropriate amount of neck tension; no more.

28x firings on my 1st batch of 6.5x47 brass.

Could have kept shooting them but the cases base would not size down enough to make extraction a little sticky. Chambering was fine. It was just the bolt lift was a little stiff and these were in my PRS match rifle so that was a no-no.

Alan

I worked at The Solder Factory for a decade. During that time I got face-to-face with the effects of annealing on an industrial scale. This wasn't brass, but it was close, and the basic rules were the same either way.

We would cast billets of raw alloy from its components out of a funnel-shaped device with a water jacket around the mouth of the funnel. The cooling was very rapid. The billets, even though they were meant to be soft enough to eventually be coiled as wire were usually brittle when they came out of the process. If you dropped one of these billets, it would shatter like china. After several weeks of aging, they would be pliable enough to extrude.

The extrusion process required that you heat the billet to a temperature of about 800 F and then throw it into the maw of the press. THink of an 80 ton Play Doh Fun Factory set to the Spaghetti setting. A dozen or so wires came out and these would be spooled. After cooling and setting, the allow was again too brittle, and so it would have to be annealed-- heated and quenched before it was drawn out and spooled into the finished product. If something went wrong in the process, the wire might become brittle again, and needed to be annealed all over again.

The reason I write all this, is that once you've seen annealing on that scale, it's easy to see why brass needs to be annealed. Work it too much-- it gets brittle. Heat it and then cool it slowly-- it gets brittle. After I had shot my first batch of brass enough to get neck splits, it was obvious to me what had gone wrong.

Shaman, sounds like you think annealing then dropping in water is a good idea.

shaman,

Brass is different than lead. Annealing a case neck and then allowing it to air-cool works fine.

The old advice about standing cases neck-up in water was mainly prevent the case-heads from being annealed, because the advice usually involved heating the necks "red hot," which is far more than needed, and in fact tends to make them too soft. The final part of the sequence was tipping the cases over into the water, supposedly to finish the annealing process. But it's not necessary. You can just let the cases stand in the water until they cool.

The big deal is to avoid heating the case heads enough to anneal them.

I just let my girlfriend give my brass "The Look" and presto, annealed brass.

I use a propane torch over a pie pan of water in a darkened room or outside at dusk.

I heat the neck just enough to show the merest hint of color and then drop them into the water. Most of it is just feel-- I'm heating the case until I can feel it get hot between my fingers. If I let it heat enough to burn me, I've probably ruined the case. I also count. The first couple of cases heat up at a count to ten. The next case, I get ready to drop after nine. With the way I heat and the way I count, 11 is usually too much.

After I'm all done, I shake out the brass and put it back on a dry pie pan and bake it in a toaster oven at 300 for 20 minutes-- just enough to evaporate remaining moisture. Alternatively, if the cases are dirty, I'll throw them in corn cob and let them run through the cleaner. The cob removes whatever moisture that remains.

Lead? I don't know how lead got into the discussion. At the solder factory, I was working with alloys of copper, tin, antimony, and silver. We made filler metals for solder, brazing, and welding. While the alloys I made were different than brass (no zinc) the general methods and reasons for annealing were the same. If you wanted to make something more brittle, you beat on it or heated it and let it cool slowly. If you wanted to make something more pliable, you heated it just enough and quenched it quickly.

General reasons for annealing - yes, but the methods you describe apply to the alloys you were working with, not cartridge brass. You cannot make cartridge brass harder or brittle by heating and cooling slowly - it doesn't work that way. Different metal types have different requirements for annealing; you really can't assume that something like solder reacts the same way as cartridge brass.

Also, it's important to recognize that when we talk about "annealing" cartridge brass, we're not fully annealing it, we're only drawing back the hardness to a certain point - we're really tempering the brass rather than annealing. When we hear of brass that's "ruined" from getting too hot, usually it just means that brass was fully annealed (unless the heat was really excessive), making it too soft for our reloading needs.

I'm not saying that I'm using the same techniques as when I worked at the solder factory. All I'm saying is that the experience at the solder factory taught me that annealing is an important part of the whole picture. I guess, more to the point, it taught me that working these copper-based alloys tend to make them brittle.

Also, I call it the solder factory. Actually it was a "filler metals" business. Most of what I am describing has to do with the brazing wire side of the business. Most of that was about taking copper, doping it with something like tin and antimony, and making wire out of that. It was amazing to see simple wire go from a ductile form (much like picture wire), go through a straightener and a few forming dies and come out so brittle it would break into pieces if you dropped it on the floor.

I don't know why I'm getting such pushback; all I'm saying is annealing your brass is a good thing.

The sizing and firing process is definite the culprit, I have cases that have 12 fairly hot loads thru them that have not been annealed, no loose primers in them. I also have rimmed brass that has only ever been fireformed and never sized again, that has 200+ rounds on it. Early on in learning about reloading, I had brass that would start a separation ring after about 5-6 loads, could just feel it starting with a paperclip, some changes to the sizing setup took that up to 10+, with belted cases. Lately, I've been using a bushing/bump die for those I can get it for. and a separate neck expander for those that I can't get the bushing die for. No idea what that will change, or not change for me. Trying to do bare minimum brass work on them anyway. Need to give that a year or two to see the results. I have a pile of brass that I could anneal and use again, but, haven't felt the need to do it, yet.

I thought it was pretty clear from both MD and myself - the pushback is against your claim that slow cooling results in hardened or brittle brass - it doesn't. With cartridge brass it doesn't make any difference whether you air cool or water quench the brass after annealing.

If its anything but Federal I get a really long life.... 30+ from PPU and R-P.... slightly less from Hornady and 10-15 with Winchester. I have noticed brass seems to last way longer with 17,23 and R26 and not nearly as long with H4350. Must have a massively different pressure curve.

OK. I see now. You're right. I was working with other alloys. I fast-quench my brass mostly so the heating stops, and I relied on an article extent at the time (2006 or so) that said you should. However, let me just say that with copper /tin/antimony alloys it was important to freeze those materials in an amorphous state before it could form crystalline structures. We didn't have zinc, lead, or cadmium in any of our processes, because they were too poisonous.

Unnecessary? I honestly don't know. However, I trust you and MD. A fast quench also probably doesn't hurt. My apologies for the misunderstanding.


While we're on the subject: What do you all think about the annealing of virgin brass?

My thoughts on it are, again, from an industrial perspective. When I see clean brass now with no discoloration at the neck, my first thought is: "I should anneal these." My reasoning is that on an industrial scale, annealing is a costly procedure. You've got to put the material in an oven, heat it over time, cool it, and then get it back into the line. On a continuous assembly line, it would be running the brass through gas jets to heat it just enough. Either way, that's an expensive thing. If you're building the cartridge with a mind for one firing, that's just not going to be a cost-effective option. It's much better to just add an inspection for neck splits before packaging. So what a consumer has, when he opens the bag of brass is a bunch of material that's about as work-hardened as it is ever going to be. Once-fired factory ammo? Even worse-- it's been formed and then loaded and insulted once more by firing.

Most (but not all) brass factories polish it after final forming and annealing. Don't know of any that don't anneal the neck-shoulder area--except by accident.

OK. Glad I asked. What I was going on was the coloration. Some fresh brass has a margin of slight discoloration at the neck that I always took to be the effect of annealing. Most virgin brass does not. When I wasn't seeing that margin, I figured they were using an alloy that was sufficiently ductile to get through the manufacturing process without needing to be annealed.

StanV: I missed your post earlier. Let me be clear. MD and Yondering both say a quick quench after annealing is unnecessary. I yield to their greater experience and knowledge. Lord knows, I place existential trust in Yondering's advice on powder coating on a regular basis, and I wouldn't be here if I didn't trust Mule Deer. What I will say is this: I use a propane torch and my fingers to anneal. It's just really easy to drop into a pan of water, and that cools the case off quickly before the heat gets to the head. I've gone over a decade doing it that way, and it closely matches a method my friend used years ago-- except I think he used motor oil instead of water. While a fast quench is not necessary, I will also submit that it doesn't seem to hurt. I've been doing it since 2006 and I've yet to see ill effects.

I would also not suggest motor oil for a quench. Jerry was a retired marine armorer. He did a lot of over-the-top things. His idea of a good brass tumbler was a concrete mixer. His excess brass was stored in 30 and 55 gallon drums. I forget what he used to get the motor oil off the cases, but it was probably something you wouldn't want to use in a confined space. It was also probably lifted from someone else's inventory and returned to their recycle drum without their knowledge. Ditto for the motor oil itself.

No problemo. I don't quench for a different reason. I don't like having to wait for the brass to dry to begin loading.

I don't usually anneal new brass (as MD said it's usually done during production), but occasionally have needed to. I've mentioned here before about a recent batch of Lapua brass which clearly showed annealing marks, but cracked necks on a number of pieces on the first firing; those needed to be annealed again. The problem there is that it's not obvious if annealing is necessary until necks start to crack.

Agreed that water quenching after annealing doesn't hurt. I think the reason some have said to do it is to keep the heat from migrating to the case head; in my experience if that's a problem you've gotten the neck and shoulder way too hot anyway (or maybe when working with very short cases). Just looking at material hardness though, brass and copper aren't affected by a water quench so it's fine to do it either way.

When torch annealing I didn't bother to quench, but now that I'm using salt bath annealing, it makes sense to quench because the water rinses the salt off. After thorough rinsing I dry them in the oven at 225° F for about half an hour.

As another point of interest on that topic - another example of different but similar alloys behaving differently with quench is lead bullet alloys. The common lead, tin, and antimony (plus a trace of arsenic) alloys can be hardened by water quenching, but only after aging for several weeks. It remains soft right after quenching but ages harder over time as the crystaline structures grow. High carbon steels on the other hand harden immediately with quenching, as most of us know. Interesting stuff and you have to dig into phase diagrams to really understand what and why of each alloy.