5.56 & 223 Brass Tests - Part 1

alright welcome back guys I've got a little brass test planned here for two 23/5 five six and the reason we started this was in the last five five six test videos we were testing the 70 grain Hornady gmx bullet and it did not shoot well and I was using some pmc 223 brass and I questioned whether that might be the cause of the crappy groups and you guys questioned it as well so what I want to do today I've pulled out my my stockpile of brass and tried to find tried to identify some different head stamps to test with and as you can see I've got ten and this wasn't even close to all of them like I could do this with 15 different head stamps if we wanted to and we may get to that eventually but let me show you what I want to do first just kind of test the waters of this because there are a lot of variables in play and one thing I want to warn you about in the beginning is you know I'm gonna test one load in all of these pieces all of these types of brass I've got fought a well let's talk about the brass we're gonna test so we've got five different head stamps then I want to test here in today's video and so the first is PMC 223 which is what we shot before the next is some some federal 2013 head stamped 556 we've got some good old wolf 223 we've got some norma 223 which you know kind of represents the higher in Norma's very good brass so this is you know premium brass and also some Hornady 223 which is also pretty darn good brass so we've got a couple cheap ones we've got a couple expensive ones and I would put the federal you know five five six somewhere solidly in the middle of pretty good brass but maybe not up to you nor or Hornady which and that's certainly all debatable so I've got 10 pieces of each of those head stamps and what I want to do is pick a load and just load all 50 of these pieces and then go out and shoot some groups with two different guns and just see if we see anything drastic to be totally honest with you I don't expect a whole lot of difference but we're looking for a big change so the first test gun is going to be my own my own Colt le 69 20 16 inch barrel one in seven twists that'll be our first test gun the second gun is this guy this is a Palmetto state armory kit that we upgraded with with a Medwick Midwest industries rail this is my nephew's 556 AR so this will be our second test gun this guy'll had this three to nine loop hold mark AR scope on it and mine will have one of the vortexes are actually the same vortex that we've shot on it before so each brass five shot group in each gun and we'll just see if anything materializes there are a lot of variables that play you know in play here that can screw this up different cases have different case capacities so you really need to work up load separately with different brass you know just like changing bullets you want to start you're going to start over and work up your load again changing brass is kind of the same way if you're really going for that precision so the load I'm going to choose is 23 grains of AR comp load it out to two point two six zero which is full magazine length and the bullet we're going to shoot is the 69 grain sierra matchking i know that both of these guns like this bullet they've both shot this bullet well and at least my gun I know it likes AR comp and I think we've shot some of that in my nephews gun but I'm not I can't remember for sure so we'll see but I'll just warn you we may get to a brass that shoots well in one gun and doesn't in the other that's certainly possible we may get to brass that shoots bad in both guns but with a little lower development that brass wood would be fine so a lot of variables at play but I figured we just kick things off here with this first video shoot 50 shots and just see what happens if we need to get more complicated with it we can do that if we need to test Moorhead stamps we've got those on hand so I don't know where this is going but we've got to start somewhere and that's what I want to do today so this is mostly 223 brass the the federal is 556 I've got a lot more 556 brass to test later yeah I just kind of had to pick a couple the Normans and the hornet e's were really the only high-end brass I guess you could call it that I had on hand so those were the only two so that was those were two twenty threes and then so yeah whatever but those are the five we're going to going to use the PMC the federal and the wolf all have crimped primers so the PMC I've already sized and primed and everything these guys these guys are ready for powder and bullets the other two I'll be removing the crimp on those with the RCBS military crimp remover and then the Hornady in the norman don't have crimps or nothing to worry about there so that's kind of first step here I need to run through some brass prep I want to trim them if they need trimmed I'm just kind of going to give them the full treatment here as far as brass prep goes and then we should be on the range shooting here in a couple minutes because that's what's that's what's interesting about this video so I've just about skipped over all of the reloading on here on this video which isn't like me right I normally subject you to every excruciating detail whether you want it or not but today I'm running a little bit short on time and I absolutely have got to get these shot today so all these cases of course were resized with my reading small base resizing die no issues whatsoever there I trimmed them all and every single one of them except there were two of the Wolfe cases that did not get trimmed or you know no no material got taken off and I measured them and they were just a couple thousand short of trim lengths so that's good so the vast majority of these are exactly the same length I remove the military crimps on the ones that needed it I Jam fur dandy bird the case mouth on all of them and yeah so they all got the same the same treatment with the exception of the PMC's they were all resized today with the exact same die in the exact same setting they were all trimmed with the exact same trimmer on the exact same settings we are using CCI number 41 primers they're all from the same package of primers so tried to minimal minimize the variables here so I'm really interested to see what happens I think the most likely outcome is that we don't see squat as far as differences they all shoot within the margin of error I would say today they're the biggest the biggest difference between working through working between these different types of brass and qualities of brass you know Norma is by far the most expensive and best brass out of this lot and they have got the most amazing primer pockets you see the primer into a really really good piece of brass it's both very tight and very smooth at the same time which is a it's a weird it's a weird thing to explain but the primer is going so tight but they just glide right in very smoothly so all right I'm almost done and then by God we are headed to the range and we will see how these guys do there we are let's go do this thing all right so it it's time to get started with our brass tests so I've got two lines on the target there so all the cult groups you're going to be on the top all of the Palmetto gun groups are going to be on the bottom we are going to get started with the PMC and just work our way work our way forward from there I have shot shot some some ciders through both guns so they're both kind of warmed up ready to go I'm you know I'm warmed up so no excuses here at the beginning so starting off with PMC let's see how they shoot I do have the my caldwell front chronograph out front here so we should be able to get velocity see if there's any velocity differences between all of these brasses between all this brass here we go one thing I forgot to mention is that the range is 70 yards as you'll be able to hear in the background the range is packed today lots of people shooting gun season actually gun deer season starts tomorrow so I'm lucky too I'm lucky to have gotten this 70-yard range but I think it's good enough for my purposes all right let's see how the Palmetto State Armory gun shoots very windy today trying to wait it out as best I can it calms down every once in a while okay back to the cult and our first headstamp or our second headstamp here is federal thirteen five five six okay Federals with the PSA I can't believe I screwed this up but that was actually Hornady brass yeah frickin now my target labels are all wrong but crap alright so the second target is Hornady and then next here we're going to go on to federal so everything's gonna slide to the right one and then Hornet he's gonna go from the end back to number two what a mess alright here's our Colt with federal all right the palmetto barrel okay moving on the wolf with the cult okay wolf with the PSA hey finally a decent group with the with the Palmetto gun I think I think a lot of it's my fault and some of this group tightening up is my fault didn't getting used to this optic it's been quite a while since I've shot this object it seems to have a bit of parallax error and getting a good consistent cheek weld seems to really really matter yep alright last up is Norma okay Norma with the Palmetto okay my first reaction is I don't really see anything that freaks me out interesting that normal was the highest velocity so tell you what let's pack up get home I might try to measure case capacity out of these guys now yeah so let's get back to the bench all right before we get into looking at our results I wanted to take some case capacity measurements of our fired brass and the way I like to do it is you take the empty case and you weigh it and record the weight of your empty case then you fill it full of water and this is a little bit tricky you know getting it getting them equally full because you know the surface tension of the water you can yeah whatever but I fill it full of water and record that and then you just you know record or just you know calculate the difference and that gives you your case capacity of water so that's what I'm doing unfortunately I'm an idiot and I didn't keep the brass separate from which gun it came from so some of these are going to be fired from one gun and some from the other which is going to skew things a little bit but I'm hoping it won't be too much so let me finish taking these measurements and doing the filling out my little spreadsheet and doing the calculations and then we'll see what we can make of the results so I have made a complete and total mess out of this target but that's fine that's how my brain works let's look at a couple things really quick in the blue or the group sizes I don't feel like I did my nephew's gun justice I was kind of fighting that strop a little bit and I'll tell you already this needs a whole lot more testing before I'm ready to come to any serious conclusions and so I'll probably be borrowing his gun again and we'll probably throw one of my vortex scopes on it just so I'm more comfortable you know more familiar with it and maybe takes a little bit less for me to get consistent with it but it didn't shoot bad right the first group had some horizontal stringing kind of weird stuff going on but the others they were a little over an inch there was one under an inch so not terrible my cult shot very well the worst group was the first one at 0.9 eight inches and the best was the federal group at zero point four eight inches so for 70 yards that's very good the other thing to keep in mind this is the load this is a load of work basically worked up in my cult so I know it shoots well I know my gun likes this powder and this gun I'm not so sure about so we may need to bring some other powders into this testing or yeah I don't know so just I feel like we're barely scratching the surface here the next thing I want to draw your attention to is the green here the green circled numbers we've got so Norma which is number one I numbered them by case capacity you know from my from my water test one doesn't mean it's best it I just you know I gave it number one because it had the smallest case capacity it was the heaviest brass and the smallest case capacity so it had the highest velocity as well in both guns so wolf and federal were tied tell you what let me pull that up really quick yeah wolf and federal both held 30.6 grains of water Hornady held 30.7 grains of water and the PMC's held 30.9 so 30.9 30.7 30 point six and thirty point two so that doesn't sound like a lot but that's a pretty big jump to Norma so Norma was by far the heaviest brass and it had by far the smallest case capacity and but to give you an idea of how small of an amount we're talking about here on my scale and the the syringe I was using one drop of water was about seven tenths of a grain so all of these were basically within one drop of water as far as capacity goes but we saw that it was significant in velocities because so the purple here are velocities and standard deviations so the highest with the Colt was 2795 and the slowest was the PMC at 27:33 so my gun followed it exactly so the fastest was the Norma and then it went down to the slowest was PMC which has the largest case capacity not that you know I'm not trying to say that matters I'm just explaining the results we got and the velocities we got and just saying that yep it makes sense you know the case capacity measurements correlate to velocity very clearly same thing on my nephew's gun except for federal which for some reason it was the slowest but if we move federal to the slowest then the rest kind of followed so one two and then the the third was the Hornady the fourth was the pmc and then the federal was just bringing up the rear I think that was probably an anomaly and if we shop more we would probably see that see them gradually work back into their natural placement as far as case capacity and velocity goes so that's a pretty significant velocity change I think you know from well 27:33 with mine 2721 with his up to 27 95 and 2782 so 60 feet per second was the result of one drop of waters difference in case capacity the other thing I wrote down here is the green below the names what these are are the standard deviation of the case weight and the standard deviation of the case capacity so for pmc 0.84 was the standard deviation in case weight in point two two was the standard deviation in case capacity the the the ones that are surprising normal was by far the best 0.23 grains of case weight standard deviation and point one six grains of water weight deviation so expensive brass it was the the heaviest weight and it was and it was pretty significant I didn't write it down on here because you know kind of ran out of space here on the sheet but Norma averaged as far as weight goes 102 grains one hundred and two point three the lightest the lightest was actually federal at ninety five point five grains so about seven grains of weight difference in brass but the next so like say normal was 102 the next heaviest was Wolfe at 98 point two so even it was three grains lighter than Norma so Norma big heavy beefy brass very good you know weight consistency and very good consistency with the amount of water that it holds so I hope that made something like a bit of sense like I said this is a mess so what do we take away from all of those crazy numbers I just rattled off at this point I'm not sure that we can take away much very small sample size very very very small sample size but I feel like this is uh well most importantly I would say none of them were terrible right none of these shot a freaking 4 inch group or something crazy so I think already we could say all of these brass were fine fur for normal ammo you know like most of us are loading right so the lead what initiated this were the poor groups I saw with the 70 grain Hornady gmx bullets what this tells me is that it probably wasn't PMC brass it probably wasn't the PMC brass fault I don't see anything here with PMC brass that makes me worried all that much I mean but having said that it did shoot the worst group in both guns so not by a lot the second worst in my gun was Norma so I think the sample sizes may be too small but I definitely want to want to keep testing one that I'm a little bit surprised about is wolf the the average case weight deviation was very small it was very consistent as far as the amount of water it held so from this you know very small sample size here wolf is pretty impressive it was you know pretty impressive brass so far so and I'm in the same note Hornady was a little bit disappointing 0.88 grains of standard deviation on the the case weight capacity was pretty good but the case weights were a little bit all over the place so I think that covers it I don't know I don't know how worthwhile this video is I don't know if it answers any questions it probably brings up more questions than it answers but I think it's a good start into a topic that I want to explore as I said we've got more we've got Moorhead stamps to test I can get a hold of even more and I want to continue this because I find it fascinating and cheep-cheep 2 to 3 brass or cheap 5 5 6 brass is laying around the range everywhere so you know if I pick up a bunch of Wolfe brass it'd be nice to know whether what I can expect from it when compared to two others so one that I definitely want to test is Lake City I've got a lot of Lake City that's mainly what I shoot is Lake City and I've had good luck with it so wanna test Lake City want to test a bunch of others so I'm just going to kind of throw this video out there and you know see what you guys have to say see if you can you know if there are major flaws in my process or in my thinking here if there are tests you'd like to see between brass that might help illustrate these differences let me know you know if you're if you're paying 60 or 70 dollars a hundred for for Lapua brass and you think it's worth it tell me why and I will try to justify your purchase so I think that it certainly doesn't cover it but that gets us started so I will see you guys next time lots more to come you

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 37,002

Rating: 4.9175911 out of 5

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Id: 21gb9zctmsE

Length: 29min 32sec (1772 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 13 2016