CONVERTING 308 MILITARY BRASS INTO 243 (CASE CONVERSION)

way back when here I'm just going through a bunch of brass from the summer shooting activities and a bunch of boxes and bags and a lot of it I shot a lot of it I picked up off the ground and some of it was given to me now one of the things that come across with some 308 brass I do not shoot 308 I don't really care for it much now I was gonna give the brass away but I was sitting here thinking what can I do with the brass besides give it away put it to good use I thought well I'll try to convert it over to 243 brass so that's what I'm doing now and I'm gonna go ahead and walk you through the process okay I'm gonna Lube these up with my imperial sizing wax made by reading I'm glad I found out about sizing wax I used to just use the sprays and the Hornady one shot and the RCBS spray but this is much slicker and it works better for case conversion it's harder to use takes a little bit longer with the others you can just spray in a bucket and swish it around you're good to go but with case conversion they need to be fairly slick so first I'm gonna Lube my cases and I'm gonna put a generous amount it doesn't take much but for case conversion I'm gonna go ahead and give it a generous amount now I normally don't recommend lubing the neck of any case because sometimes you'll bend it or dent it if you put too much Lube on it but since we're converting it and the neck is actually the part being reformed I recommend quite a bit of Lube on the entire case normally I would just recommend looming the body of the case and this is hide Lube um I just run him through my fingers and normally I would do four or five cases before I ran my fingers through the sizing wax again but given the fact that these need to be very slick for the conversion I just went ahead and did it every time okay I don't recommend just forcing it in I recommend working it in slow pull it out watch it as you do it go up until you feel some resistance back up until you feel some resistance back up you can see that the neck is starting to reform you don't want to force that one you don't want to get it stuck in here be a bear to get it out and - if you go too hard or too fast instead of reforming this neck you're just gonna crush it down into the case and that's what you don't want to do so you just take your time reform it you'll eventually get it now it's starting to look like a 243 case and that's hit on that one we'll go ahead and finish all five for you here again I'm working it slow trying not to crush the neck down I only know this because I crushed a couple of the other ones that I made now if I was using a RCBS rock chuck or press or something it would probably be a little bit easier conversion but with this this Lee press won't take as much force or it you have to press harder to get the same amount of force that you would have to to get on in our CBS I'm going to go back through deep rhyming if you'll notice I have the decapping pin out so I'll deep rhyme them in the next step and the reason being is because I find that the reforming of the neck is an easier process when the decapping pins out it may also be an easier process if I were to anneal these cases first but these were old military brass so they're pretty hefty thick whereas okay let's go on to the D priming okay because this is old military brass the there's a chance the primer pockets are crimped and they are I don't know if you can see it but I'm gonna go slow so I don't bend my decapping pin I have checked to make sure all this military brass was boxer primed about 50/50 of what I found here was Berdan primed versus boxer prime all right now they're all d capped and resized and let's go through now and clean up the necks on them okay I've got my Frankfort arsenal case prep station set up and we'll go ahead and tidy up the conversion first we'll trim it now here's one thing they're a little they're slightly shorter than what they recommend they're coming in at about 20.7 the book recommends to 0.35 be the trim length but I think once you shoot him once they'll stretch a little bit and they should be right in the range I wouldn't hesitate to shoot him at this length so there's nothing there to trim this is set up for 243 just going to go ahead and clean it up then throw in the tumbler but this being nice thick military brass should make some beautiful long-lasting 2:43 cases should be able there it should work really really well you know I don't shoot really and this isn't you know I could just go buy a 243 off the shelf and it's not expensive or I could go buy soon you know 243 cases but this is about being self-sufficient I've got a bunch of 243 cases sitting here but why throw this away or recycle it when I can convert it and make something I already have work all right well that was a pretty easy conversion now that was the first time I've ever converted a 308 over to 243 like I said this was military brass it should be great brass lasts a long time before this these were the first three that I've ever converted of this particular cartridge this is an actual 243 cartridge that I was using for a reference as far as this 308 brass goes I could have just thrown this away throwing in the scrap bucket giving it away but I figure be self-sufficient why throw away or give away something I can convert into something that I can use I don't shoot the 2 for the 308 much and I don't really care for it but my son does shoot the 243 youth rifle so that's why I converted this now I've got some good solid cases that should last quite a long time as far as these necks go they look factory you can't even tell that we converted them over so these are pretty good pretty good conversion and like I said they should last a long time thanks for watching

Channel: Wayback When

Views: 11,306

Rating: 4.8778625 out of 5

Keywords: 243 winchester, 308, military brass, case converion

Id: SebiEM1aCQ8

Length: 9min 2sec (542 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 18 2016