Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Custom Rifles & Wildcats Fire Form in Garage

Much thanks to Keith for the idea of how to fire form brass in the garage. I recently moved to a new place that has some outbuildings, and I can experiment with things such as this!

Stuffed a foam bed topper (and some more foam pieces laying around) into an old trash can, taped up some holes in the bottom, except for one big enough for the barrel.



Filled a form/trim/FL sized 7 Mashburn case with 17ish grains Red Dot, pistol primer, case filled with grits, and stuffed the mouth with toilet paper. The grits was a couple dollars cheaper than Cream of Wheat. I don't eat either.



Stuck the rifle barrel into the hole in the trash can, pulled the trigger. Sound is about as loud as popping a balloon, so really no big deal. I FF'd the first case with safety glasses and earmuffs, and the rest without.

Thanks Keith!

You are very welcome, glad it worked out for you!

I prefer House of Autry Corn meal! Hee Hee!

That’s great stuff! Glad it worked Joel.

Hate to see grits go to waste like that but good info.

Was doing the same thing, fireforming some .22-250AI brass in the garage one day.... I’ll tell you this, one of those grits loads will clobber the schitt out of a mouse at 15’.

When i was doing that, 15 year ago, I recall that 10 grains of any pistol powder covered with cream of wheat will form a should on any rifle cartridge. It might not be a square Ackley shoulder, but a good enough shoulder for full accuracy and full power on the next shot. I put Ivory soap in the case mouth when I could not fire straight up.

In 2018 I was using Nosler 280AI brass that is already formed.

I built a 4" pvc pipe system to do mine. End reduced to a bushing just slightly larger than the barrel. 90 degree bend and turned to 3", and went into a trash can with some water in it to catch the dust.
Did them in the basement. Needed ventilation obviously. Still did set off a carbon monoxide detector.
Easy to form Ackley cases to 99% with a sharp shoulder. Just have to increase the charge till you get there.
But, now with the Nosler brass available, I don't fireform.

I have used a heavy dose of Bullseye with a wax plug for years. I do it outside as too much smoke in my shop. My BIL used to do the container thing until for some reason unburned powder caught fire. He goes outside now.

What the hell else do you do with Grits? Please don't tell me you eat that crap!

Grits.......... They're not just for breakfast anymore.

Hear Hear!!

Never had Shrimp & Grits before? Or fried with maple syrup or Cheese grits? Must be a Yankee.

My wife eats my helping of grits. Must be because I'm an Okie.

For sure I'm a Yankee. I've been all over the US and after living in the south, I'll never choose to live south of I-80. Too danged hot down there. And I don't seem to get along with fire ants and mosquitos as well as Southerners. Friendly people, good food, great tea, beautiful ladies with fascinating accents, just not for me!

I love me some Shrimp and Grits

Shrimp and Cheese grits, Southern cooking at it's finest

Love grits, plain, or cheese, shrimp, or about any other way you want to fix them. It's just ground up corn.
Never was an oat mill fan, could eat it, but would take grits any day.
NEVER had shrimp and oat mill...........

True fire forming story.
The formula I have used is a charge of Unique of 20% by weight of a max charge. So using a 280 AI, 60 of 4831 is pretty much a max charge so use 12 gr of Unique with a PISTOL PRIMER. Increase a grain at a time until shoulders are formed.

So, I gave that formula to a couple of guys trying to form 510 Wells cases from 460 Wby brass. The 20% charges weren’t fully expanding the 460 cases so they decided to use something heavier than cream of wheat so as to create more pressure.

Sure enough they perfectly formed the 60 cases they had. Upon cleaning the barrel they noticed it was kind of grey and gritty. They called me to ask if fire forming would hurt the barrel. I said I had never heard of any damage being caused by the method. Upon further questioning I found out that the heavier material they selected was, for real, SAND mixed in with the COW.

Now Johnny B knew one of these characters who just loved lots of zeros on his chronograph. His way of developing a max load was to add powder until he blew a primer and then back off 1/2 a grain.

When i was forming .22-250 Remington into the Ackley Improved version, all I did was call the Hornady Custom Shop, then Pac-Nor Barrels to get a chamber reamer drawing (they used a JGS Precision Reamer) then sent two fireformed cases along. They made up a hydraulic case forming die, a solid case holder, and I ordered a two die reloading set matched up for the chamber. It wasn't cheap, both die sets together ran around $300.00 if I recall.

To form the cases, one neck sizes the case, seats a fired primer, lubes the case lightly, fills the case with water (I added a few drops of liquid soap to the water to break the surface tension), runs it in the forming die with the press handle (I used an old RCBS Rockchucker) over center, inserts the forming piston in the die down into the case neck, and whacks the piston with a big soft hammer. The case comes out 99.9% formed to the chamber's dimension, with just a slight radius at the body-shoulder junction, which irons out at the first firing becoming very sharp as one would expect. The brass, was drained of water, blown out with compressed air, deprimed, loaded and used to shoot ground squirrels. I soon learned that some brass worked better than others, with Lapua being almost unusable, didn't form well and after firing some would oddly distort and never rechamber again (my friend also has a similar problem with Lapua ,223 Remington brass, never did figure what the problem was). While Winchester brass formed perfectly, never caused any problems, and shot groups fresh out of the forming die, just under 0.5" with a Barnes 50 grain Varmint Grenade, and Benchmark powder. Even Privi brass worked fine. Now I'm set for life with a bunch of .22-250 Ackley brass, no noise, no worries, and only has to be done once with free water. Unfortunately, I soon gave up the .22-250 Ackley in favor of the .204 Ruger, .223 Remington, .243 WSSM, and the 6mm BR Norma, and put all my Ackley Improved cartridges in mothballs, but it was a learning experience. The squirrels never seemed to mind.