Extreme Reloading: 5.56 Brass (ep. 01)

you know whenever I start reloading with taste prep I keep very careful records and this is a little checklist that I utilize from my case preparation starts off with the date that I'm actually doing it the cartridge that I'm prepping and the quantity of those cases now this happens to be the Norma brass that I'm using to reload for this five five six two two three and notice this is 2:23 ammo is not really five five six so my little question that I asked people a lot is hey you know if we're reloading a two to three case and the recipe calls for calls at two to three or something like that we reload it with a certain charge certain bullet combined overall length and so on so forth and then we take a five five six case and we'd load it identically same powder charge same bullet same combined overall length is there really any difference between those two the answer is yes because we're using a five five six case in the second example that load is actually loaded as a five five six and we can expect higher pressures out of that load in contrast for in comparison to a two to three and that simply because the brass of the five five six case is thicker therefore the chamber the burning chamber who everyone call inside this case is smaller in a five five six relative to a two two three so if you're pushing your loads and get in kind of hot two to three and then you just kind of arbitrarily start using five five six brass you could be asking for trouble and so that's something we should just be aware of anyway this is two to three and my first thing apart from opening up my journal if you want to call it that is to wipe these things down and do a quick inspection of them what I'm doing this for number one obviously is it to inspect them and secondly is I want to get any grit off of them this is once fired stuff this is factory MO I just shot this the other day a couple days ago and actually all these rounds all this brass is from the exact same lot this not sure it should be very consistent stuff and so I want to wipe the grit off these things so I don't end up running grit up into my dies which could obviously scratch the inside of the die which will have permanent repercussions from that point on on any subsequent reloading that you do so be a little bit careful with that make sure these are all clean and again this is a nice chance to take a look at them you know if I have some dings in my brass there's a little bit of a ding right there you know in this body right over here I don't worry about those things too much I will worry about those things a little bit more as I'm trying to craft better and more consistent brass I'll worry about those things now if I have dings on the shoulder dings on the mouth or on the neck I should say I don't like that I will toss them out you know this brass is so easy to get I can be pretty darn particular about what I end up keeping and that's kind of a good rule of thumb especially if you're trying to produce some nice consistent high quality ammunition now this sort of thing you know a little bit of a dent right there in the mouth not to worry about that at all the resizing will completely take care of that couple seconds is really all it takes to just check for any case head or potential called incipient case head separation something just like this will work perfectly to discern that and detect it doesn't take about a second or two just literally a couple seconds per case now for those folks who use progressive presses I still think you should be doing this the progressive press is not going to do that for you but you can do it before you end up sending those things into those progressive presses like Tohono D Lock and Load I don't anticipate or expect to find anything this is just once fired brass good Norma brass but I'm still checking okay next step I'm gonna use this Hornady one-shot case loop this is a different case loop than what they used to self I can't get that they don't sell that stuff anymore I thought that was pretty good stuff but this is a aerosol based case loop I'm gonna go ahead use this pretty well I just I hit them from different angles I don't want to go too heavy on it you can dimple you can dimple though some necks if you do that which piece is ruined thing I'm also using Horn of these dies for this thing I'm using these things for years the good things good guys nothing wrong with our CVS either then you get some really nice I mean like reading make some fantastic competition dies when you're putting this in here you got to make sure that you you screw the die down completely if you just leave it just a little bit back backed off you're not gonna get a consistent sizing on this thing and that goes for all the dies I mean bullets eating and so on so ever make sure that you're you're tight that you screw these things in all the way of course we need our shell holder pop that into place get that primer cup ready and by this time you know minute or so as I was talking through this the pieces will be dried just a little bit we want to let them dry just a touch it's a nice feeling lubricant on it there we go you know a lot of these going in I can see that the mouth is a little bit out of round coming out they look just great there you go a little bit out of round and coming out looks great another thing I wanted to mention on resizing is that for these semi-automatic really any semi-automatic rifle you want to full-length resize every time don't do neck sizing only that's gonna give you some jams now give you some problems it's a little bit different than when we're crafting rounds for bolt actions or something like that we can oftentimes do neck sizing only but that's not the case when we load for semi-auto mom I'll go ahead and finish up these 37 the rest of these 37 then I'm doing and we'll be right back okay we're now gonna check for what I call what's called case head expansion CH II and what we're looking for is this spot right here and we need it to be less than or equal to 375 so that's smaller than that and that's good I check all of them and then I'm record in the journal at the maximum size that I measured for this bunch of brass is in this case at 374 and as long as you keep the Brass sorted that measurement can be tested for later on to see if this brass is expanding over time once it gets close to that or hits that 375 you got to start tossing the brass that's what I do I throw that brass away it's stretching a bit too much and that part of the case is not really intended to stretch and that if you keep loading those things it'll stretch larger and larger and larger and that's when you're gonna get that case head separations and that's not a good thing so you'll want to get rid of that brass and it's a great way to track it so they are all less than or equal to 0.37 four of an inch next we're going to do a length test I use this this is a Lyman case length gauge it's called easy case length gate and all we have to do is with the find the 223 Remington that's right there and make sure that our cases are less than on this length now I'm expecting that some of these things are gonna be a bit long these are good these are going really nice so far ideally they'll be exactly you'll feel almost like scraping that's perfect nothing wrong with that at all and if they're all like that heck that just means that we've got some very consistent case lengths if they're long you get some long it's alright we have trimmers and we can trim those what we don't want is anything too long and if they're too short that kind of makes you start wondering what the heck is going on you don't see that too often I do see it sometimes normally it's the factory brass was just short is what I'm seeing and that happens I've seen it on five five six and two two three oh they all made it no trimming necessary so let's lucky day for me you know oftentimes when I'm crafting and normally when I'm crafting precision ammunition I'm gonna turn the next to uniform those things but that's not what we're making here we're not looking for a high precision ammunition we're making looking for some good ammunition number one reliability number two we want to see if we can beat factory ammunition for some precision and accuracy but I'm not going to be turning next my next step then I'm a cross off neck turning I'm not gonna do it my next step then is to wipe these back down I'm wiping them down because I want to remove that lubricant from them at this point I leave the lube the case lube on them all the way through the trimming stage and since I don't have to trim skipping that step and so on I can wipe them down at this point we're gonna move over to the case prep station after this and do primer pockets chamfer deeper and the other thing we got to do is we're going to talk about how to remove military crimp from these cases now this isn't like lake city or military surplus type of ammo that has a crimped primer but we're gonna talk about how to do that nonetheless so your folks are familiar with that process with a nice attachment for the RCBS case prep tool that does that just beautifully for you this is our RCBS cakes prep station now I've got a set up of five different stages the first is this little brush here that's going to clean the primer pockets you know pretty well then I have my this is the crimp removing stage and I'm gonna run this in so you can see how that works if for me it's just a good habit to get into when I'm doing five five six and two two three if that case happens to have a crimp on the primer this will get rid of it I don't have to sort them first of all this one might have it on this one does this one doesn't whatever I always run this and then we're gonna we're gonna uniform the primer pockets themselves it's another fast step and it does pay dividends if we can get very uniform and consistent ignition of that primer into the the powder charge I know that that pays dividends I do that with all my cases at all times and then we're going to deburr and chamfer deeper and chamfer I know a person might argue and say you don't have to do that because you didn't trim them but that's but this is again a very quick stage and again I think that improves the bullet seating the consistency of my bullet seating and I think it pays a little bit of dividends for us as well so let's go ahead and get started it's real quick steps here there you go and we're gonna run these things into a we're going to run these things into a cleaning afterwards so this doesn't have to be perfect at that state that's looking very nice the deeper wasn't a chance when actually I know I'm gonna go back just like this and then I run it right through there get anything out of the neck of that piece so I don't end up pushing brass down the bore when I'm fire [Applause] if that bath if that pass to remove a military crimp you know even if that had a pretty good military crimp on that primer nothing I'll take it off just about that fat this is kind of interesting this case right here has gone through all the same preparations as the next one I'm going to show you but notice how this bottom of the primer pocket looks different from this one here do you notice how let's say shiny this one is what that means is that our primer pocket uniforming tool from the our CBS case head prep station made contact with the base of that primer pocket and it took off a little bit of brass thereby making it look so shiny this one does not have that same shiny appearance which means that the primer pocket uniforming tool did not make contact with the base of that primer pocket or the does let's call it the ceiling of that primer pocket now what does that mean does that mean that I did a bad job of prepping these cases no what that means is that this is a slightly deeper primer pocket compared to this one and no amount of work on my part would make this one look just like that one okay so if I was really loading these for a high precision I'd say I don't want to load this one and I'd maybe put in my blasting ammo type of type of cases but I would want this one because I know when it is compared to all the other ones and there are quite a few that look like yes and quite a few look like that but compared to all the others that look just like this I know I have more consistency if I keep it like this if all of my primer pockets look like this I don't really know are they all really deep prime air pockets consistently deep I doubt it so looking for precision if we're talking precision I look for this yeah we have it and isn't that pretty that's the normal brass that I've been working on and it's some of the brass that I'm gonna be using for this this first loading now just a little while ago they came on at the ultrasonic cleaner and I use that Hornady case cleaning solution works very very well as you can see so my next step here before I actually load them I'm gonna weigh them and sort them based on weight and I'm gonna choose the ten most consistent pieces of brass for this experiment now the rest of our experiment uses other brass for instance I have a bunch of Lake City head stamped brass and I'm just gonna grab ten of those I am gonna weigh them but I'm not gonna sort them based on weight I'm gonna weigh those things because I want to know I want to track the effect of case weight and case weight variability and what we're gonna see in muzzle velocities as well as looking at the accuracy or precision as well we also have federal champion head stamped brass now this is the stuff that you'd get from the American Eagle and those sort of those sort of ammunition and lastly I have literally and a sword and this is literally an assortment of different head stamped brass there can be some federal in here there can be some lake city that can be some Norma in here there's a bunch of different stuff in here PMC independence while that is federal iwi it's cetera etc here's what we're working with now you'll see the Norma brass recall that that has been weighed and sorted by the weight in fact the 10 that I selected were all within 1/10 of a grain of each other Lake City federal and the assorted brass were just randomly selected brass and to help track the effect of various case weights and corresponding case volumes I did weigh those and actually the Lake City is relatively consistent for just a random selection that I did notice how the assorted brass has the highest variability or in other words standard deviation that is to be expected and that also helps us to understand that different name brands of brass are actually made just a little bit different that there's consistency within certain brands of brass it's interesting that the Norma brass is the heaviest of all the brass and it was 2 to 3 Lake City is all 556 ammo and in theory it's supposed to be a heavier brass but that's not what really happened in this instance so what do you think what I'm expecting to have happen is that we'll get slightly higher velocities from the Norma brass and we should be getting better consistency from the Norma breasts in other words the standard deviation of the muzzle velocities should be lower as far as accuracy or rather precision is concerned if we have more consistent muzzle velocities that should translate into better accuracy downrange there's a lot of extra variables that come in however as you know all the way down to trigger squeeze and of course sight alignment etc etc now I'm gonna be loading 40 rounds these 40 cases right here I'm gonna be using CC is number 400 small rifle primers I'm gonna be using exactly 25.0 grains of varga now that's starting load and we're gonna start with this and work it up as we do different test cases in this season of extreme reloading and I'm gonna be using the 40 grain nosler varman ater bullets well that wraps it up for this episode make sure to watch for our next episode where we're gonna head out to the range and fire these 40 rounds along with ten rounds of factory ammo I'm excited to see how this all plays out thanks for watching

Channel: sdkweber

Views: 20,067

Rating: 4.654902 out of 5

Keywords: 5.56, .223, rifle, reloading, norma, lake city, federal, IWI, AR, AR-15, AR 15, brass, cases, cartridges

Id: nTr4By5K3_Y

Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 04 2018