Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Full Length vs Neck Sizing

If you get less runout using a collet die, that means either your FL die is defective or your technique is wrong. Usually, it is a problem in the way which you set it up. There is absolutely no advantage to neck-sizing and many disadvantages.

your very right but some will not understand , many watched the video but some did not listen to what the one bench shooter said about his findings on pressure problems with neck sized brass that he himself tested in his indoor tunnel pressure testing. i learned this pressure problem with neck sizing brass 30 years ago from engineers and my uncle from Federal Cartridge ammo factory . my all time favorite cartridge dies to use and buy are Whidden bushing dies but these dies are expensive and work excellent , other wise i have many Redding dies ,some Wilson .lower grade dies like RCBS and the rest i really don`t care to use much anymore. neck sizing dies i would never use again you could ruin a favorite rifle or an eye ,finger ,hand or someone else`s health could be hurt and that`s just not with it to me .

Yessir. With threaded dies, a 50 cent rubber washer/'O' ring, a quality flat shell holder and a loosey-goosey sloppy press will fix a lot of problems. -Al

they might wanna also use bacon grease for their neck die brass lube too.

Proper set up and technique trumps all no matter what equipment you use.

Isn’t most runout caused by brass thickness being uneven?

A little experience involving 'set up' that happened last Summer:

A member was having case separations with his Howa Mini Oryx in 6.5 Grendel. He brings 10 cases over to show me....8 were cracked mid way down the case and the other 2 were paper thin with obvious thinning. He tells me that the chamber has "....too much headspace." and he's going to return it. I asked him how much he was pushing the shoulder back and he stammered around before finally saying "Two thousandths".

I had my comparator along since I was setting up dies so I knocked the primers out of the two cases that hadn't separated (yet) and checked them with the comparator. Both were identical.

He had some of his unfired reloads so I checked them next.

His reloads had the shoulders pushed back .022 from what the fired cases measured.

A little 'set up' issue...... -Al

Might also mention that Chapter 27 of "The Big Book of Gun Gack III,"[i][/i] "Rifle Die Design," discusses how various dies differ, how they can be adjusted (including some of the tricks noted here, such as using soft washers), and the advantages of some versus others.

Should also point out that this does NOT resolve the supposed conflict between neck and full-length sizing--but might help a few folks, especially if they already own the book but haven't read the chapter lately.

I tried to stay in the middle ground in my earlier post but this just proves some people just don't get it and it's a waste of time trying to explain

NO, many other factors involved

Yep! But uniform brass makes things easier...mostly by eliminating one variable.

True. Or a couple of variables.

After FL sizing for many years I tried neck sizing to see what advantages it might hold. I experienced problems I never encountered while FL sizing and did not see any improvement in accuracy. So I have returned to FL sizing, this is just my experience and may not be typical of what others experience.

Let me clean up a couple of things.

First off, I'm not going to stand on the Pillar of TrVth and pronounce that adding collet dies to the mix improved my groups. I believe they did, but I also know that I've done a bunch of other things over the past 10 years to improve groups and nothing was done in isolation. Something worked. My groups are better, and I have the astute gentlemen of this august forum to thank for giving me guidance.

Second, I've been reading about FL vs. Neck Sizing for decades. I FL'd for about 20 years before adding my first collet die, and it was based on advice from Herr Mule Deer. I still have my face. I suspect John still has his. Never in all my years of studying the subject, did I hear of anyone come straight out and say that if I neck-sized, I was going to blow up the gun. Were this the case, Lee and the other die makers would have been sued out of business long before I got into reloading.

Neck Sizing was discussed at length in the first book I ever had on reloading. It was the ABCs of Reloading. I had that book a good decade before I dove in. The book is written by C. Rodney James.



Yes, those are hooks. Mister James blew his hands off playing with explosives when he was 15. He finally got the message and turned towards the light. His book lit the way to my 20+ years of safe, fun reloading. I doubt Mister James would have included neck sizing if it were as dangerous as some declare.

Bottom line: If John says neck sizing is cool ( and safe) I'm going for it. Thank you all for the kind advice.

So true! It takes a lot of work to make bad brass shoot. Starting with quality brass (Lapua, etc.) is one of the best investments a hand loader can make.

As an example, I have a Browning B78 that's chambered for a wildcat called the 6MM Jet. Basically, it's a .065 short 243 AI that uses the rimmed 307W as the parent brass. Now, the best 307W brass ever made isn't exactly high quality, uniform stuff. It takes a lot of work to make it shoot and last. Culling losses prior to any work being done run close to 50%. But after inside boring the necks to make them round and straight, outside turning to make them perfect, some unconventional work on the primer pockets/flash holes, serious stress relieving prior to f-forming and very controlled sizing, they shoot well with good case life.

Would have been a lot easier to just reach in a box of Lapua 243 cases and go from there!

Brass is full length sized each firing. The 5 cases used for sighters and foulers have been fired over 20 times each with stout loads....primer pockets are still tight.

Good shootin'. -Al

307W (lt) f-formed 6MM Jet (c) standard 243 AI (rt)

Mule Deer , give us a truthful answer please = do you prefer to full length resize brass or neck size brass for hunting big game animals ? thank you , Pete53

I would like to hear more about this, please. What unconventional work on the primer pockets and flash holes did you do? What is "stress relieving" of brass prior to fire forming?

Also, what culling process did you go through prior to any of this work that gave you a 50 percent cull rate?

Thanks.

Truthful. That’s rich coming from you:

My brass is always appointed to a specific rifle. I do not mix brass or use in multiple rifles. For factory rifles I neck size and shoot them until the get a little snug. I want the brass to fit the chamber. They are then run through a body die to bump the shoulder and annealed at that point. I have one rifle that is a wildcat (25 BR AI) that has a custom die for it. See no need to work brass unnecessarily.
I use only Forster and Redding dies for all of my factory chamberings.

GreggH

Good topic and one thst gets beaten to death. My range friends (1 K) shooters said they FL size each and every time. Said they want the brass to be sitting in the chamber the same way. Funny, because I NK size till I can't and can shoot almost as well (without a custom rifle). I do see their point though.