Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters The worst brass EVER - thoughts?

My worst brass ever was Bertram. I bought two batches of darned expensive .25-20 Single Shot (not .25-20 WCF), which I used to make R2 Lovell cartridges, and a batch of .310 Cadet and it was all overly soft garbage. I'm not alone in that assessment but have also heard glowing reports so I guess you pays yer money and you takes yer chances.

I've been buying a lot of .223, 6.5x55, and .30-06 Lapua brass lately in an effort to standardize those calibers with good uniform brass. Luckily with a few hundred of each I got good consistent brass of a quality we've come to expect from Lapua. I couldn't be happier. (Well unless you sent over a blond Swedish masseuse I couldn't be happier.😃)

Bertram .43 Spanish, at almost 2 bucks a pop...dimensionally unusable in 3 different rifles.

Question about Hornady brass. I have some new bagged stuff that's real questionable with oblong off center flash holes, what I consider excessive body & neck thickness variations of the case, & from one bag primers were real hard to crush into the holes. I've since gotten some boxed Hornady brass, in yet another caliber, & it seems pretty nice. Is the boxed stuff their primo line & the bagged bulk stuff the leftovers? Does anybody have any insight into this for future purchases?

I'm glad to see that I'm not alone with poor Hornady brass. I bought 50 x 6.5 Creedmoor cases and half wouldn't fit in the shell holder to prime. The rims were too wide and I had to use my 6.5x55 shell holder. I might have expected that on an old fuddy duddy round like 7x57 that doesn't get made that often but with the popularity of the 6.5CM I thought Hornady would have better quality control with the amount they would be producing.

Like others posting, the worst brass I had ever had was Bertram. However, I had used a bit of Norma brass and the LAST batch of Norma was even worse than the worst lots of Bertram! I posted here many years ago in thread similar to this one. There was speculation at the time that Norma had outsourced their brass to a US manufacturer. Other than that I had gotten horrible lots from all the US manufacturers, some whose brass was always very good. It varies with all. It's a crap shoot. Best? RWS. I've not bought much of that but the two lots I did buy were almost as though they had been machined. Still have those and likely will not have to buy again. I was making a wildcat and the RUM cases work at a much less expensive alternative.

my experience exactly!

Some Greek mil-surp 5.56.
I tried to resize them, they came out belted!

Honest to god, belted.

Measured before firing, after firing and sized.
Everything was as expected.
Except, the brass was so soft, the die swedged a belt on the case.
Looked exactly like a miniature magnum.


I need to find some and stick a bullet in them.
It would make a good prop to start a BS story.
.223 Creedmore mag. Shoots flat to 600 yards, then it speeds up!

Worse than Remington? Wow! I try and stick to Norma and Lapua

I had some too soft S&B 6.5x55 brass some years back. So soft that the primer pockets were loose on the once fired factory ammo.

I had some too hard Winchester/Olin WSSM brass. So hard that you had to run them at maximum recommended pressures to get the brass ot expand and seal the chamber, otherwise you got smoked necks. Switching to Federal brass solved the problem.

I don't worry too much about "bad brass". I am currently trimming to length and neck thickness of some "once fired" brass I bought on line - PPE 308. I was a little surprised at the variation in length and the neck was too thick - a bullet would not fit even close in the neck of a fired case. But I have a lot of time and I don't mind these chores.

Many years ago, I used to check thickness consistency and throw out brass that had necks that were not dimensioned uniform because I reasoned that the brass body was not likely uniform either. But that was for targets.

But if I trim to length and ensure there is not too thick of necks, I'm happy.

What I'm too cheap to do is buy spendy brass as I don't think they are worth it for me.

For those of you that have to spend as little time as possible at the bench, I imagine that the expensive brass is well worth while.

I bought another couple bags of Winchester 7-08 brass a few months ago. All I checked was neck thickness and length, I culled about 5 of the 100 for neck thickness issues as I'm not set up to turn them.

The worst I have saw was some loaded .35 Rem loaded Winchester rounds that I bought just for the brass a few years ago. Out of 40 rounds I think 8 or 9 fired the first time I dropped the hammer on them. The primers weren't seated good and the rest of the rounds fired somewhere around the 3rd or 4th attempt. You could see some neck thickness issues just by looking, no need to actually check them. If it would have been easy to find brass or a caliber that I expected good accuracy from I would have pitched it all. The primer pockets had to be reamed to even get a primer to seat. While at it I trimmed them and deburred the flash holes. Not great so I just kept them for off hand practice rounds. I got 4 or 5 firings out of them and pitched them after scoring some once fired Rem brass.

I have no issues with Hornady brass......the worst brass I ever bought was stamped HERTER'S

Hornady brass for me. In 270 win to be specific. Very slightly different font to some of the head stamps and vastly different capacities. Real garbage...worse than than current Remington and Winchester which is saying a lot.

Haven't used much Remington, never seemed to be available in the chambering I needed when I was looking. I'd try it over the Hornady though.

I had this same problem with both 7mm-08 and .358 win Hornday brass. Wouldn't fit shell holders and some wouldn't chamber as the base/head/web was over sized, as well as the rim, which prevented it from being chambered deep enough for the bolt to close.

I've had fairly good luck with brass over the years but Winchester has been a problem more times than other brands..Recently and to my surprise I purchased two boxes of Lapua 6.5 x 55 brass with more than several that wouldn't fit the shell holder.

The worst I ever had was Sllier&Bellot from 6.5x55 factory ammo. This was 5 boxes of a 130 gr factory load I bought at a gun show. I'd bought the same factory load from this guy before and it was OK. I originally bought it for the brass as this was one of those spells in time when components of many sorts were hard to come by.

As is my custom I took it home, set up the chronograph and proceeded to fire a string. Things went south the first shot. The gun felt like it just went pop. Essentially no recoil. The chronograph said 2280 fps. I thought that was strange. It became stranger when I tried to extract the case. The bolt would not budge. I had to get a rubber mallet and pound a bit to get it loose. The primer was backed out, the flash hole enlarged, and looking at the case you would have thought it was a double pressure overload.

Not wanting to have anything do do with round two, I proceeded to pull the bullets, measure the charge, weigh the cases, and keep the components. The cases were pretty uniform. Nothing either from the scale or from the eye ball exam showed anyhing one would not expect from never fired primed brass. The bullets all weighed the same, and so did the powder charge. I have no idea what the brand was, but it looked like any of the short grained IMR stuff. I double checked the lot numbers from all the boxes, and they were identical. I pulled all five boxes. I had some older S&B brass with 129 Hornady bullets. I used some of that brass and worked up a load with that brass, the factory powder and bullets. The loaded workup acted like 4320 with regard to charge weight and velocity. Anyway I stopped at somewhere around 2700, which I think was to upper end for the load data I had. I did try one other round of the stuff with the known safe start load for the Hornady 129 in my Ruger 77 MK II to be mild. Same thing as the first factory round. Having have had enough, I scrapped the brass. I did take a pair of pliers and mashed the first case at the pressure ring. Compared to a couple of other cases of different brands, it required far less effort to squeeze. The only thing I can think of was a dangerously soft brass formulation.

Some time later my brother got a bunch of Norma brass which we will be good for as long as we can hunt.

At least a couple of other people on this thread have mentioned what good luck they've had with Hornady brass the past 3-4 years. My personal experience in the last 3-4 years is with .17 Hornady Hornet, ..243 Winchester, 6mm Creedmoor, .25-06, 6.5 Creedmoor, 6.5 PRC, 7mm-08, .275 Rigby, 7mm Remington Magnum, .30-06, .300 Weatherby, and probably a few others I can't recall offhand. It has all been very consistent in dimensions and weight, and has worked very well in the rifles I tried it in, all of which have been quite accurate--including at least half-a-dozen 6.5 Creedmoors ranging from $400 factory rifles to $3500 semi-custom models. It was also acquired in various ways, either from local store and at least 4-5 Internet sites, including the Campfire Classifeds. Some of it was purchased as loaded ammo from local stores, because I needed some for an article.

This seems to be a pretty fair sampling, but I do tend to buy more kinds of brass, more often, than the average hunting handloader.

Now Elvis, Quak and russm36 claim they've had really bad Hornady brass. So I'd like to ask them how recently they had those experiences.

My Hornady brass experience has been similar to yours. I’ve found it excellent. My only complaint has been shallow primer pockets in some of the cartridges.

I used to use both Lapua and Winchester and was having good results with both for years.
The last few years I stopped buying Winchester when the quality wasn't dependable anymore.

Now it's Lapua or Nosler and I'm trying some starline here and there to see how it goes. (so-far-so-good on the few starline brass I've picked up)