Is my brass worn out or did I screw up my necks?

I have recently turned the necks down to .010 thickness on 10x fired lake city brass loaded and shot it fine. I neck sized it and when I was seating the bullets I noticed that there was no resistance and could easily pull the bullets out of the case :o. So did I turn the necks to thin or is my brass just worn out? ??? This is my first attempt at turning necks so I was kinda guessing as to what thickness to make the neck. I also did 250 virgin pieces of LC brass to the same neck thickness I am really hoping I did not ruin it.

Generally we don't "guess" when it comes to reloading bro. 0.010" is pretty thin but should hold a bullet. Your necks aren't going to last long though since they will be expanding and contracting so much during firing/sizing now.

With removing that much material more than likely your sizing die will not be able to size the neck down small enough to give good neck tension. As a trial and error step you could try removing your expander ball and see if the necks will then grip a bullet. That way the expander ball isn't opening the neck back up.

Yep, a little on the thin side, but not horrible. You would be better served, with 10 firings on that brass, to anneal the necks and do a "light" cleanup of the outside of the brass necks if you so choose.

Kevin

What happened is the neck material is too thin for your sizing die/bushing you need to have a bushing die, and appropriate size bushing to re-size the neck to have tension on it. What you need to do is measure your loaded rounds and find the appropirate bushing, my guess is that at .010 your loaded rounds will measure .244 so you would need a .242 or smaller bushing. A .010 neck tension is not too thin for some ocasions, for instance a 262 neck 6 PPC the necks are cut from .0093 to .0098, and as Jack Neary says (NBRSA hall of fame short range BR shooter.) "go thin to win." You sizing die/bushing is more than likely for a .014 neck thinkness with would need a .250 bushing, now you can see why .006 undersize would not put tension on the round.

The problem I see with this is why did you cut the neck in the first place? Unless you'r setting up for a tight necked chamber, anything more than a light clean up is worthless. If your are shooting these in a standard chamber the brass will not last long, as it will be overworked. Lets say that the chamber is set up to have clearence for the thickest brass on the market say .016 thick, and they will add some generous clearence so lets say their chamber is big enough for .016 brass and they wanted .003 clearence with would give you a chamber speck of .259, and your loaded round is .244 that brass is streaching up to .015 each firing, and then is being sized down .017 each firing, it is basicly like working a pop tabe back in forth, eventualy it will break.

If you anneal the brass it will get a bit thicker, so that might help. If you take care of you brass it will last a very long time, I have brass that has been fired 25+ times. Usualy when I get rid of brass is when it gets "clicky" it has been fired so much, and resized that when you open the bolt after firing it has a slight restance at the top, (In the primary extraction phase.) causing additional force to open the bolt. Then I chuck it, I find it usualy takes about 25+ firings to get to around there, the brass still shoots fine and could probley go a lot longer, but I dont like the anoyance.

That was a good chunk of brass to take off the neck. When forming 22 BR brass from 6mm BR I usually have to neck turn but even then only to about .012. Much lower and it is easy to damage the necks. Once my common brass gets close to wearing out, I'll segregate it and load it one more time for plinking or to leave at the range.

I did it because I thought it would help improve the accuracy a little bit, when starting the project I thought it was a good idea to do it. The barrel is still a factory savage barrel. I only have a Redding neck sizing die so I cant change bushings in it. Well I wish I would have done a bit more research before I did did all that. Thanks everybody for the information.

If not fitting brass to a tight chamber, all you want to remove is enough to take the high spots off. when your done it will look like all you did is 1/4 to 1/2 the surface area.

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Originally Posted by Blue Avenger

If not fitting brass to a tight chamber, all you want to remove is enough to take the high spots off. when your done it will look like all you did is 1/4 to 1/2 the surface area.

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Well I definitely took off more than that, I cleaned up 100% of the surface area of my necks. I thought that when I was only taking a small portion off material off the neck that I wasn't getting it good enough and needed to take more off.

We have all tried that!

Tarleton, check out ammosmith's videos on YouTube. He gives pretty fair tutorial on how to do it. It is a multi segment tutorial. I think three videos maybe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZBykXq1sSQ

Thanks Trent for the video. Well I pulled the expander ball out and ran my brass through the sizing die again. There is enough neck tension to hold the bullet, some more than others but I was told by my boss that that could be caused from my annealing being inconsistent, I was also told that I don't have to size them just punch the primer out and seat the bullet as long as they are boat tails not flat based bullets. I am not sure if that will work but I will try it and see.

With your necks being so thin there is no way you will be able to not resize the brass. The bullets will just fall into the cases. This is actually normal for regular brass being fired in a regular chamber. Some benchresters can get away with not resizing with their tight chambers but I don't think that practice is very common.

I turned the necks on a batch of 6.5 Creedmooor brass last season. I found a lot of pin hole gas leaks (splits or pre-splits). I had reloaded them about 5 times. I don't think I saw any improvement with accuracy. So to me I think it was a waste of time. The Hornady brass was already fairly consistent. So unless you have a tight chamber as someone else mentioned. Why screw up a good product? Also. The little lip that it leaves on the cases looks hokey. I like the transforming radius a lot better. It has to be stronger. But to each his own.