Precision Rifle Reloading: Headspace, Full-length Sizing, & Shoulder Bump

hey guys Sam from pound precision today's video is going to be all about full length sizing and getting the perfect shoulder bump on a fire case now this video is going to be kind of the video version of my article that I wrote for panel precision comm called full length sizing for reliable precision so if you're into looking at text in pictures and charts and diagrams be sure to go check that out I'll put the link right here in the video description now today's video I'm doing the lead into it right now but a lot of this footage was shot last fall where I started the project I just never finished it now we have a new rifle this is Jake's new competition rifle chambered in 260 Remington last year's video sections I have to do with his old 260 Remington so I'll warn you right up front that a lot of the numbers you're gonna see might not make sense so I'm gonna keep most of the new stuff out of it and we'll just focus on that old stuff as long as I'm talking about that the the numbers and we'll go over the dimensions and things like that our relative numbers they're not absolute numbers all we're looking for is a comparative number so we're trying to change you know one dimension to another dimension so a function and the rifle other than that everything is the same okay so what is full length resizing so full length resizing is taking a fire case like this one and reducing the dimensions on it so that it will chamber in this chamber again fit into the chamber with zero effort we don't want any resistance whatsoever now I can take this piece of brass this is just a fired piece of brass at a Jake's rifle it's clean but now we haven't done anything to it and I can put it in the chamber and I can close the bolt on it so it will function it will go in there but the problem is is if you get anything in there at all with it dust dirt chunk of grass a little bit of carbon some water you know just humidity and moisture in the air you could run into problems so what we do is we set it back we set the solder change the dimension make a little bit shorter and we reduce the sizes so the diameters at the web and at the shoulder down here just to give us a little bit of insurance now you have to size the case you have to do something because the neck is no longer the correct dimension to hold a bullet so you have to run this into some kind of a die and squeeze that neck down to hold a bullet so rather than doing a next size only I choose to do a full length resize now when I show you some of the numbers on Jake's rifle here you'll see that that you know it's not it's not that big of a deal it requires you to move the brass very little to buy yourself a lot of insurance so we'll go back to Jake's dimensions now on his new rifle but until then I'm going to lead you right into talking about Sammy and how it how it relates to this whole resizing business okay every cartridge that you could buy commercially or buy components for or buy a rifle off the rack for or whatever is going to have some standardized dimensions you're going to have a minimum minimum and a maximum spec and those are set and and stored by Sammy which is sporting arms and ammunition manufacturers Institute and what that does is it allows you know Remington to chamber up a rifle and sell it on the shelf for a 260 Remington it allows Lapua to make 260 Remington brass it lets Hornady make its own 260 Remington loaded ammunition and it lets reading make a set of sizing dice for 260 Remington and in theory all of them should work together and they should also they should all function within those specifications for the cartridge so the way it relates to this whole project is that when you buy a piece of brass brand-new brass it's going to be the smallest dimension that it'll ever be so you know when they made this piece of brass it should come in at the minimum end of the spec for a 260 Remington chamber size now when they make a chamber reamer they want you know especially an outfit like Remington or savage or Winchester whoever they want to ensure that no matter where you get your ammunition or your brass that it will fit into the chamber and function so the the chamber is going to be a little bit bigger it's going to be towards the maximum size of that the overall dimension of the cartridge and they do have different specs for chambers than they do for ammunition and brass and things like that but they're designed to work together safely in the middle of all that we have a sizing die so if you reload you want to be able to size the case to go back into that chamber hold a bullet and fire again so the sizing die is going to be size is going to be produced just a little bit smaller then the chamber is designed to work with so you'll have the the smallest one will be the new piece of brass the biggest one will be the chamber and the sizing guys going to be in between that's pretty much it let's go over some terms and definitions so that we're all on the same page the first thing we'll talk about is headspace now we aren't setting our headspace here with a sizing die or a piece of brass headspace is something that's already been set when whoever chambered the barrel set the headspace so what it is it's the the distance between the head of the bolt where it contacts the head of the case and the forward leading edge inside the chamber of the barrel that's your headspace it's set there's nothing you can do about changing headspace other than go back in and cut it differently with a reamer so you know one key when guys start talking about headspace I think they get confused thinking that the cartridge is setting the headspace it isn't what we're going to do is we're going to make that piece of brass work within the confines of our headspace so when we start talking about headspace as it relates to full-length sizing and especially shoulder bump what we really want to say is that we're going to set back the shoulder we're going to set back the case and we're going to shorten it back up so that it has clearance within our headspace dimensions of our chamber okay then when we talk about full length sizing a lot of guys like to separate full length sizing from the shoulder bump you can't really do that once you take a piece of brass has been fired in the chamber and put it into a sizing die that has a slightly smaller dimension then that chamber you're going to be moving some brass so this brass as it goes into the die is actually going to start along gaining you know because it has to go somewhere and it's not just compressing into itself so it long gates a little bit and I think a lot of people have problems with the brass because of this they don't get all the way to the bump so if you were to put this into your die and set it up with no bump and all you'd have to do really is get the the forward leading edge here the shoulder all the way into where it's sizing a little bit you actually end up with a longer case than when you start it when you're measuring at the data line on the shoulder so it physically will not go back into your gun at that point so what you have to do is you have to get that piece of brass all the way into your die enough that the shoulder is contacting the shoulder inside the die and once that happens then you can start to get a shoulder bump and a complete sizing all the way back to the web and one of the biggest concerns that comes up from guys who don't know if they want a full-length size or if they want a next size only or if you don't know anything at all which you can't do you have to do something to fire the case again well the biggest concerns is case heads separation everybody thinks they're going to have a case head separation if you full-length size your brass I can tell you from a long long long time of experience that case head separations are not the normal thing and they shouldn't happen when you're using stuff that works right and using a process that works right so if you have a chamber that's headspace correctly within the spec you know Sammy spec for the cartridge you're working on if you buy a piece of brass or use a loaded cartridge that has a piece of brass that is manufactured correctly to work within the chamber you're messing with and you set back your shoulders just enough to give yourself good easy feeding into the chamber you'll never have a case head separation it's not a normal thing I have fired pieces of brass up over 20 times before setting the shoulder back on them mm every single time full length sizing the entire case and I've never had occasion of separation I've never even seen a case head separation so you know it's not a normal thing full length sizing by itself done correctly will not cause case head separation so if you're you want to think about the dimensions we're working with here to give you a better idea I'm going to take this dollar bill and I'm going to measure the thickness of it with my caliper so we've got four and a half thousands so point zero zero four five is a thickness of a dollar bill we're going to push the shoulder back we're going to compress this case down to thousands so less than half the thickness of a dollar bill so just put in perspective we're not really working the brass all that much alright guys so if you look at these three cases I just basically just sectioned these with a like a grinding disc this morning just to kind of show you what they look like inside now the the three numbers of the three things at the top there those are dimensional thicknesses so that's the thickness of the brass as measured with a ball mic right here at the neck so it's the thickness of the brass you can see Remington is 13,000 s alpha is 14 and a half and lapooh is 15 now that's just the that's the basically the biggest part of the dimension I could find they all have a little bit of variations in thicknesses but that's measured in the 10,000 so I'm not really worried too much about it if you look at that obviously the look Lapua brass is the thickest the Remington is the thinnest so we start talking about dye dimensions and dyes and how they work that'll come into play but the biggest thing I want to show you now is to follow up with the case head separation thing and if you look at all of these cases here you can see the thicknesses how they run up and they get a little bit thicker up here by the web then you have a real thick head on them and then they thin out down here in the neck shoulder area that's how a case should look that sound case is supposed to be it gets a little bit thicker towards top and a little bit thinner towards the bottom now the stuff at the top is supposed to stay hard and not change at all the stuff at the bottom is supposed to say relatively pliable so you know guys talking about annealing that's what you're trying to do you're trying to keep this lower end of the case somewhat pliable so that it has all the properties that we need in a brass case to hold the bullet release the bullet seal the chamber and resize it so we can use it again but if you look at all these cases they've all been fired multiple times in full length size so that piece of Remington brass was fired eight times and my savage lrp and pushback you know 2,000 to 3,000 every single time in that chamber and it's still finding C there's no thinning on the brass at all the second one in line is an alpha that was fired I think three or four times in my 260 comp Highfill and push back mm every time the Lapua brass or the Lapua case on the end is one that I had my comp rifle and that one was fired seven times so you know I don't have any any 20 times fired pieces of brass that have cross-section but I suspect there will look just like that okay let's go over a couple of the tools that I'm going to use here if you don't want to use these tools then there's nothing I can do for you because if you can't measure what we're talking about you can't really apply it I highly recommend that you get a pair of calipers I prefer electronic calipers simply because they're easy to 0 with a comparator on them and then work with the real number that you're messing with a dial caliper will work you know a manual caliper but you're gonna have to do a little bit of math because you can't zero it with the comparator in place these are meant to Toyo's this is just six inch model I've had this 12 years I guess and if had zero problems with it it reached down to ten thousandths for most of what we're going to be doing you only need to get to one thousandths resolution which is the third decimal place over ten thousandths we'll use it but it's not that critical the other thing we're going to be using a lot is a comparator so this is the comparator insert the stainless piece this is from Sinclair it goes into a comparator body and then it clamps onto the jaw of my caliper so now I can measure between this point and that point that's all I have to do is turn it on and zero it so now this is the new zero from here to here to the forward edge of that so as I move out it's maintaining that zero and coming back so those are the two biggest tools that I use for setting up dies okay so what the comparator does for us is it allows us to measure the the case at a specific point instead of just measuring in to end so what we're looking for is the dimension between the head and somewhere right in the face of that shoulder where the angle starts to come down so these comparators are are shaped with the same shoulder angle as the case you're working with so a 260 a comparator for a 260 this is a size 20 from Sinclair for 260 will probably work for 243 and I believe the dimension on the inside is big enough around to use it for a 308 so anything that has the same shoulder dimension or angle of my sixty is probably going to fit in that comparator so it's not a big deal to have you know I mean if you can make the comparator work for you consistently for a bunch of different cartridges then have a derp but you know I prefer to have a comparator for every shoulder angle that I'm working on but anyway that just fits in there and now we can measure from that shoulder to the head of the case and come up with our number so we have one point five six nine five and I remember I was talking about the the thousands versus ten thousands what we're really concerned about is the third one over from the decimal point so that nine what I want to end up doing is making that a seven after I run this piece of brass through my full length sizing die but that's how we measure it right there we know it came out of the the chamber fired at one point five six nine five when I get done running it through my sizing guide I want that dimension to be one point five six seven five and what that does is it gives me mm of clearance within my headspace of my rifle so might this headspace on this chamber is a little bit different than my 260 comp rifle was this is the barrel that my son is using to compete with this year their bull sized into 60 Remington I could put his size case into my chamber but I can't put my size case into his chamber because my headspace on my rifle is longer than the headspace on this rifle but with this tool I know exactly what I have and I can set up the die to get myself exactly mm of shoulder bump which is enough to get good reliable function out of any chamber a lot of guys asked do you need a special dye to make special Kansai ammo well you know the kinds of ammo that I use and the kinds of rifles that I shoot you probably don't need anything special whatsoever I've used a lot of different dyes over the years but for the entire time I've been shooting precision rifles and long range stuff I've been using reading dyes and that doesn't mean that the other manufacturers don't make dyes that you can use it just means that I haven't been using them for no particular reason other than I know exactly what I'm getting when I get a reading dye so the biggest thing I would look for in a dye is that number one it needs to size your your piece of brass to the correct dimensions I haven't had any problems with any dyes from any manufacturers doing that I think most of the problems that guys have come from the chamber of the rifle not being the correct dimension or them not understanding the relationship between the dye in the chamber nor how to measure it so you know as far as whatever dye you want to use that try whatever you have and see what you end up with the biggest thing I would recommend is if it finishes kind of rough and your dye polish it you know make it nice and shiny and smooth so that you get less resistance when you're pushing the case up into it now these two dyes are the two dives that I use the most of the two dyes the one that I use 90% of the time at least is the dye right here on the right and that is a reading type s full-length bushing die and what they did with this dye is they you know they have the blank which is that body and they cut it to eight to sixty Remington body and shoulder size but only left a shelf inside that's oversized so that'll hold this bushing so this bushing you know you can buy whatever size you want they come in 1,000 increments so whatever size neck you want you just order a bushing for it now I've got videos on how to decide which bushing you want so when I can get into that too heavy this one is just a standard reading full length sizing die and that one is just cut to a you know the the minimum chamber size for minimum sizing dies size for a 260 Remington and they made the neck small enough the dimensions small enough so that it will work with Remington brass and Lapua brass so you can see it if you if you make it work for Remington brass then it's going to size the puah brass much much more than it needs to be sized and the way they control the neck diameter on a full-length sizing die is through the use of this expander right here so this round button on the end of that stem when you pull it when you push the case up into the die it's gonna size the neck way down and then when you pull it back out of the die this button or an expander is going to open that neck up to the dimension that they set for that case so generally speaking you're going to end up with one to one-and-a-half thousandths smaller diameter than the bullet on the inside of the neck if you use the expander now on a bushing die you can use the expander or not use the expander you can set your your neck dimension just by using the bushing and I've done that for years when my start sizing I'll tell you what I'm doing differently now simply because of the environment that I'm shooting in but you can either run the expander or not run the expander with the bushing die with a standard folding sizing die you have to have the expander in place unless you send your die off and have it honed to the same dimension as the diameter of your neck on your brass that you want but you know I don't know anybody that does that but it's an option get whatever die you want as long as it works it works I don't think this part of the process is going to make too much of a difference as far as precision accuracy or reliability goes okay before we move into the segment that shows me actually sizing brass I thought I'd just touch on the subject again of keeping everything clean and well lubricated if you do that this whole thing becomes easier so keep the brass clean before it goes into the dye make sure your dye is clean polish the inside dimension or inside surface of the dye if you want to I know I have been and it's made a big difference in the amount of effort it takes to run a case through the dye as well as polishing that expander button now that I've gone back to using an expander button in my dye now you can use whatever you want to lubricate you can use whatever you want to clean the brass I don't care I still use the same stuff that I've been using for almost 20 years so I have that that information is on the website in the my tool list there's an article about what I use for sparse tools and my step-by-step guide how I reload how I do everything it's all out there to look at but anyway keep everything clean keep everything well lubricated and all this will work much better [Music] okay our brass is clean our dye is clean I've lived my cases I use Hornady one shot it works really well it's easy to do big batches like this the next thing we'll talk about is we'll get back to the headspace thing so an analogy that I'm going to use here when you look at these parts is the shell holder if you just imagine that the shell holder is like the bolt face and our rifle so this is the end that the case is supported by in the head so that was in the rifle that would be your bolt face and as you chamber this you're going to be running that into the chamber your rifle and we'll just call the die the chamber so if you remember when we're talking about Sammy specs and everything the die is designed to be a little bit smaller than a chamber for any given cartridge so what it allows you to do is to to take a little bit of measurement off this case size it down a little bit so that it'll slip easily into our rifles chamber when we go to fire it so what we're gonna do is we're gonna screw this into the press and put our shell holder in place and then our case is going to go there and we're just gonna move the RAM up into the die until we get to the right measurement that gives us a shoulder bump and you remember we have to make contact the case has to make contact with the shoulder inside the die to get that shoulder set back and even if you go for a zero bump in other words you don't want any additional clearance in there you still have to get to that point to offset the amount of growth from the case getting squeezed into that die so it's going to elongate just a little bit as that case gets squeezed down inside the die it's going to move forward a little bit and you still need to come all the way to that shoulder and at least kiss it so that your your case will get back into your rifle so you want to end up with at least a zero shoulder bump after you go through a full length sizing guide now I recommend getting at least two thousandths of bump now all those cases that I showed you they had all been sized mm for our many firings you aren't gonna hurt anything and on top of that yarn could hurt accuracy if you guys watch my video see my Instagram all that stuff all those pictures of the groups and all of us shooting at long range all that stuff this is exactly how I've done it forever so you know I get pretty good accuracy out of it so there's no reason why you shouldn't either all right so let's just move on we've got our bolt face right there this is our chamber and with any luck at all nothing changed here because now I'm in a hurry and get this grass done for Jake's rifle so I what I like to do is I start off when I'm setting up a die I'll start off I'll run it down so this I won't have a case in I'll run the the RAM up and I'll just screw that die down until it touches it that's my starting point and then I'll back it off if I don't know what my chamber dimensions are I don't know anything at all about this rifle or this die I'll back it off about 1/8 of a turn and I'll just finger tighten my Locker ring in place and then I'm gonna take one case and I'm gonna run it up in there and I'm gonna measure my shoulder to see if I got any bump if I did get any bump I'm going to turn that down back to an eighth of a turn and I'm gonna run the case back in it again now between those two throws through the die I'm going to loop the case again because I want it to go into the die the same way it went in the first time and basically just keep doing that until you get your bump you don't have to do a new case every time you can use one piece of brass the entire time and then with the piece of brass what I'll do is once I'm sure that I like the bump with the first piece I'll take it out this is still every time I moved and I just finger tighten that lock ring I'll take another piece I'll run it up in there I'll make sure that that is tight and I'll lock down my lock ring with the piece of brass in place and basically what that does is it squares everything up to the RAM it squares the lock nut up to the top of the press with the case in it and everything and then when I'm done I'm going to check more just to make sure I'm still getting the same amount of bub and then I'm just going to run with it now this one this one I'm hoping is in the right place now remember I was telling you that by 260 comp rifle has a different headspace than Jake's 260 J's 260 is short headspace so we only put about one thousands to one that one and a half thousands worth of clearance between the go gauge and our bolt face so I won't ever do it again some guys do it so that you take a new piece of brass throw it the chamber and it's almost like a glove fit right off the bat and then you don't have to hardly move anything when you're you know sizing and doing all this stuff I don't like doing that it makes it hard to chamber that first round it makes it hard to size them after they come out some cases you have to get that case all the way into the dice so that you get some some sizing action on the web of the case so anyway this is short short very short headspace so what I have to do is run it all the way in and I'm actually caning over a lot of guys when they get to that point they think they're out of digest Minh not the case at all you're going to have some spring in that case quite a bit of spring as a matter of fact so if you hit that bottom don't stop just keep going and as the case goes up in there it's gonna push you'll actually feel the shoulder when it hits that die okay so let's go ahead and run this case up see what we get you'll actually feel it after time and gain a little bit of experience you'll feel the difference between just sizing a piece of brass and actually getting to that shoulder contact with the die and you'll feel it you know hit that shoulder in the die and start to compress okay so I've got mm now shoulder bump exactly which is exactly where I want it to be so basically my last setting on this with the lock ring tightened down like a described and I took it off I cleaned it whatever as long as it stays in this station this is a turret press so each one of these is going to have a little bit of difference a little bit of tolerances but if you leave them in the same place you'll generally be okay on your die set now if I needed more clearance in other words if this stayed one point five six eight five or one point five six nine five because I didn't hit the bump I would simply loosen that and I would turn this just a very slight amount and then locked out with my fingers again run a case up in it and check it because once you get to that contact point with the shoulder and the die it doesn't take very much to start pushing that back very tiny amounts so I mean just barely moving that die clockwise closer to the shell holder and you want to check it very often and you want to maintain the same amount of lubrication on your case the whole time all right so now that I know I'm good there let me run another one in okay remember I told you I was going to tell you something I'm just doing a little differently now I used to be a big proponent well I still have a big proponent of not using the expander in a bushing die because you don't need it however if you're shooting over a concrete apron especially if you're on elevated position like shooting off of a barricade or something and your brass is following three or four feet to the ground right onto the concrete you're gonna end up with a bunch of demodex so I used to just use this expander die this is just a sinclair expander die with a mandrel in it it is designed to punch out next so that you can neck turn them to get you know consistent neck thickness but it works really well just to clean up the interior size of a neck so if I had one dented case and I saw it I would just put a little bit of lubricant on the inside of it and run it up through this expander throw it in with the rest of the brass and then just running through my bushing die with no expander and that works just fine but I was finding that I was I was getting a bunch of brass that had been annexed so that was starting to get tedious and I caught myself not seeing them a couple of times so I made the decision to pull that expander out polish it up and leave it in the dye now I checked you know I I think I size 10 yeah size 10 with just a bushing and I size 10 with the expander polished and everything and then I loaded up all you know all 20 of those and then I tested the two different methods so one with expander one without the expander I tested the velocity and the accuracy and there was no difference between the two so this won't hurt anything if you keep everything lubed up now the bushing that's in place is a 292 bushing and running it back over that expander I'm maintaining my 292 necks so there isn't a whole lot being done other than straightening out the inside of that neck where it's been caved in a little bit at the mouth as I come back over that expander so now I'm just gonna do a few more here measurement now you remember I said that you I always make a little sticky note where I put all my dimensions all I did was I took the sticky note from the last one and stuck it over here and everything matches of course nothing has changed okay before I get too far down this road let's talk about Delta magnums real quick the big difference between a regular bolt bottlenecked cartridge like 260 and a 300 Win Mag like a belted cartridge like this one is how they headspace so remember we talked about the headspace is the difference between where it's the the space the amount of clearance the space it takes up between the bolt face and whatever stops the forward motion of the case so on a bottle neck case what stops a forward motion of this case is right there a slope of that shoulder so as it goes in hits that chamber that's where it stops so our head spaces is the amount of you know the literally the the dimension from that head to where it stops now the belted Magnum the headspace is measured off the leading edge of the belt so from the bulk face to the front edge of that belt that's your headspace they're not head spaced off the shoulders when they start out fresh and new so what we're going to do with the belt of Magnum er what I do with the belted Magnum is you headspace it correctly select my 300 Win Mag that I one of my first projects on a lathe we we head space with three thousands of clearance on the go gauge so when I chamber a brand new piece of brass in there and fire it it fires and fills up the chamber and that shoulder makes contact in the shoulder of the chamber so now this brass this piece of brass has formed like a glove to my chamber well there's three thousands of clearance right here so when I fired it and it pushed out there it came back this way so now if I just put that back in the chamber the leading edge of that belt is no longer contacting the leading edge of the belt recess insight inside the chamber now it's actually supported from the case head to the shoulder so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to measure just like I just do these 260 cases with a comparator that matches that shoulder angle and I'm going to set my 300 Win Mag die up just a bump that shoulder to thousands and what that'll do essentially is it will give me 1,000 clearance behind the belt here and maintain my 2000s clearance across the belt here or across the case head here makes sense so now the next time we fire it and I push this into the chamber the plunger ejector the spring-loaded ejector is going to be pushing that case and where it's going to stop what's going to limit the forward motion is going to be the shoulder inside the chamber instead of the belt belt of magnums are no different than bottleneck cartridges as long as the rifle is headspace correctly you can set this up for to 1 to 2,000 spunk on the shoulder and instead of being on the belt as your head spacing index next time or where it stops going in the chamber now your shoulder is actually contacting just like a bottom that cartridge and as follow-up question would be how many firings can expect off of the belt of MAG before I get a case head separation I have no idea I fired a piece of gun works brass that I'm doing a review on 20 times out of my 300 Win many all on the span of a couple of days every single time I fired it I set it back to thousands just like I'm describing here and kept really good notes of how the dimensions either stay the same or changed as the brass work hardened well I was firing it I didn't have to Neal that piece of brass until the eleventh firing well at the end of 20 firings everything was still fine primer pockets tight case is still sizing back it still goes into my chamber the case head didn't separate and fall off and blow up everything was fine and that was with a hot load that was right at the edge pressure so you know I've had other belted magnums same thing with Winchester brass Hornady brass and Weatherby brass and I fired them you know eight to 12 times had never had a problem so it's not inherently different to run a belted Magnum through a die than what I just showed you here with my 260 brass alright I'll touch on whole case head separation thing again all I still maintain that it is not a normal thing and everything I've ever heard about it has always been anecdotal in other words is it it doesn't even happen to other people very much now one thing I can remember now that I think about it as a buddy of mine is developing a cartridge and he had somebody make a batch of brass for him to try in it he got two or three firings out of it and then had a violent case head separation inside the chamber so he took the other pieces of brass that had been fired the same amount of times and he shaved him down just like I showed you on that 260 brass and the the brass was so thin it actually looked like it was thinner up till towards the head that it did down by the shoulder that's not right so that was crappy brass the other times I've heard of case that separations have always been you know like I said before anecdotal so you see it on Facebook or you hear about a match but you don't ever really see it and you know most of the times that you do hear about it it's always crappy brass or if you ask the guy how much were you set in the shoulder back on that he doesn't even know so you know I'll tell you just from my experience and using I've used everything from the remington brass and the 260 i've used just in 260 I've used remington ADG alpha and Lapua brass just in 260 and i've never had a problem as far as belted magnums go which is where you get the most stretch that I've seen in a case and the first firing I've used Weatherby Winchester Remington gun works a DG I think that's it but there might have been more and I fired those you know the ones I remember I shot that gun works brass 20 times last fall I shot all of my Winchester brass leading up to that review all had nine firings on them when I rotated them out and started using gun works and it was that there was no failures zero failures I've used Hornady brass and 300 Weatherby I got 12 firings out that whether it be brass I don't remember I think that was in the 300 Weatherby obviously Remington was a seven Remington I've never had a case head separation ever gas guns bolt guns anything so anyway I'll give you a little demonstration of what the numbers might look like by showing you the dimension differences between new grass fire brass and size brass and Jake's rifle here okay guys this is pretty self-explanatory like I was telling you before none of the shoulder length which is the dimension from the case head out to that comparator those numbers don't look anything like what I showed you in the video and Jake's old barrel but keep in mind we were obviously running with a different barrel it was very short headspace and I was using a different comparator insert so all these things are comparative so make sure you're using the same tools and keeping really good notes on all the stuff but anyway this is a pretty good example the Alpha munitions brass has actually been the the longest brass have ever used in a 260 chamber so right off the bat it's not growing as much as some of the other brands that I've used so from a new piece of brass at one point five seven one it only grew by four thousands in the firing and then we only push the mm back so that you know that piece of brass is is pretty pampered it's not going to be moved very much now the overall length is just the overall length literally from the case head out to the mouth that's not really an accurate number on new I mean it is but I actually trimmed that to two point zero to zero before we fired it so the fire length is four and a half thousand shorter and that's because the brass moves and in you know forms into that chamber and then when we size it it pushes back out to point zero one ninth now the web diameter is the fattest part up by the rim of the case that is you know something that you definitely want to get a little sizing action on to make it easier to chamber especially when you've got water or dust or dirt you can see that it grew by two and a half thousand the new two fired and then we pushed it back one shoulder diameters down before the shoulder and the neck come together so that Junction down there the last big diameter of the case new was four or five three fired was four or five five five and then we pushed it back in the die to the original shoulder diameter that's another one that comes up bigger in the in the alpha brass than any of the other ones I've used so anyway I don't think that's a bad thing I think that's a good thing especially for case longevity so long life you know you're not really you I mean look at these numbers and if you remember that that dollar bill is four and a half thousand thick look at the dimensions on there you can see nothing's changing very much but it definitely makes a difference on how easy that that case will chamber if you have any kind of crap on it you know any kind of bad conditions basically neck OD you know we've gone over to picking neck bushings and everything there's a breakdown of it the new brass was obviously too tight for my liking so I ran it over an expander to bring it out to 292 and then we fired it got 297 on the fire case and then sized it back down to 92 with a 292 bushing and the factory expander in place so if you keep that all polished up nice and works pretty well and then down at the bottom that's a reading type s4 like bushing die it's the same one that I used in the video with just a little bit different setting on it in a different press and everything with a 292 bushing in it but anyway there's the breakdown of what a piece of brass goes through when it gets fired in Jake's 260 Remington and incised in that reading die alright guys that's about it that's not all I know about full length resizing if you want more in-depth information on it right recommend going to read that article it's much easier to sit down and write about this stuff and it is talk about it because I don't remember half the stuff that I might be telling you the whole point is to keep this simple there's no reason to overthink resizing your brass you want obviously you want it to be reliable you want that case to go right in the chamber like I showed so you can fire the cartridge and you don't want to give up in the actress over it and it's been my experience that y'all are gonna give up in the accuracy at all a good example of this group right here this was fired out of my new six five forty seven barrel that is size brass done exactly the same way I just showed you with Jake's 260 Jake has fired groups just like this out of this barrel it's you know I see guys all the time saying they're chasing that most accuracy by neck sizing their brass and what is up mode accuracy I mean if you can shoot a quarter minute in the autumn enough in a field gun laying down bipod and a rare bag I don't know what I'd be chasing so anyway this is the same process I use for everything for my extreme long range guns like my Canyon rifle and 338 edge right down to my Seco 300 Win Mag factory gun and 300 Win Mag so it works for all of them just keep in mind headspace what the the association is between your new brass your fire brass chamber and your sizing die invest in those measuring tools you can't do this without them you can't just follow the diet directions when you get the the die it comes in the box screw it down and then as long as the chambers and your rifle you're okay you have no idea how much you push that case back so just get the tools invest in the tools and you will completely understand this once you start measuring them anyway be sure to go check out that article if you need any other help reloading all of the the little details for the rest of my process is already on video I just wanted to keep this all about sizing so anyway check it out thanks for watching and we'll see you next time [Applause]

Channel: Panhandle Precision

Views: 254,663

Keywords: long range, hunting, precision rifle, reloading, full-length sizing, shoulder bump, headspace

Id: azv1dxKQNvA

Length: 45min 12sec (2712 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 06 2019