I am certainly no authority nor expert, but if it were me it would be at least sorted by year.
I would also be looking for signs of it coming from an auto fire situation.
My experiences with LC brass have been good.
It is usually a little thicker walled and therefore has less case volume so start low and watch for pressure.
I have used it for many years and will use it again if I find it.
Hope that helps and maybe the smarter members will chime in.
Regards, FM
After going through the "sorting of LC brass by year" stage, I bought 100 Lapua cases and found that they had too low of a capacity for what I was aiming for (MK 262) at the time. I had been achieving MK 262 velocities (2850 in my understanding) with assorted LC brass with 26.2gn Varget. That is at the extreme high edge and I was getting all kinds of pressure signs. I bought 100 Lapua cases ($68 at the time) and found that 26.2 gn of Varget did not even fit in a Lapua case. I gradually gravitated to accuracy loading and forgot about MK262. The extreme loading was worrying me as I was getting blown and cratered primers, losing the writing on the headstamp, and even some slight bulging of the case above the head.
I purchased 1000 virgin LC11 cases and have not looked back. They require a lot of work to prepare. I trimmed the flashhole, normalized the primer pockets, trimmed to length, skimmed the necks (nowhere near even thickness. I cannot remember the numbers, but I only skimmed so that it was even for the majority of the circumference.) Chamfered and deburred the necks. After all that work, I'm not sure it was a good idea to scrimp on the cost of the raw case. I would probably put the same amount of work into a Lapua case, but I figure that I put about $1.35 of labor into each case, so why worry about saving $0.30 to $0.40/case on the front end. The Lapua will most likely last longer and the walls will probably be more consistent in thickness.
I am only on my third cycle of the 1000 LC11 cases and my first annealing, so I have not experienced any problems yet, nor have I decided on re-skimming the necks, or even checking on the need to do so. It makes sens to me that if the wall thickness is uneven, as the brass flows into the necks, thus resulting in the need to trim the case, that the necks will grow proportionally to the wall thicknessn necessitating re-skimming. That may be another place that the Lapua would save me time.
As for relative thickness of brass: the 1000 5.56 LC11 cases, after being fully prepped, range in weight between 90.9gn and 93.1gn with my Chargemaster scale. I have not resorted them since getting my Sartorius GD503 magnetic force restoration scale. The 100 .223 Lapua brass range between 96.3gn and 97.2gn. Now that I am annealing my LC11 brass every shot, I am hoping to get 10 more shootings out of them, which depending on how much I compete, should last me 5 years. Next time, I plan on biting the bullet and trying Lapua (over $700/1000 the last time I checked). I am happy with the performance of my LC11 brass, just curious as to whether a better case will provide results downrange. (I don't currently have enough Lapua brass with 100 to sort them into batches large enough to get consistent case volumes.)
