When do you know it is time to retire brass?

[NamibHunter]

Very interesting approach Greg. I can see how that can work for cases in the 308 or 30-06 family.

Keeping a portion of the neck at chamber dimension i think has distinct advantages. Specifically concentricity. I use a LE Wilson hand die and an arbor press for neck sizing, so the neck looks the same after sizing, but the desired (slight) resizing of the body and the shoulder bump in your approach is missing from my neck sized brass. And neck sizing does not ensure constant internal case volume as the shoulders creep at different rates. Presumably from gripping the chamber differently and therefore stretching different amounts. Agree neck sizing is not at all equivalent.

You can of course remove the bushing from a Redding Type S die and get the same shoulder bump, but the body sizing will be much more pronounced.

I guess the alternative is to get a custom die ground from the reamer print or a fired case?

Read somewhere that the 30TC was the donor case for the 6.5CM. Will check the manual later on and see if the case dimensions are the same/similar. Not a common caliber though. Not sure how easy it will be to find a suitable die.

If i understand your post correctly, you have found a two step approach to do minimal case resizing, similar to what a custom die would do? Or one could be specially made to do that.

 

[NamibHunter]

I use a decaping rod and try to push the primer out by hand. If it stays put it’s gtg. Never had them leak.

OK guys, thanks for the good feedback.

I have decided to retire the brass anyway, even though i am pretty sure they probably would have lasted another 10 cycles. I think i cut the necks a bit too thin (0.011”) and perhaps the cutter went too deep into the shoulder, so the little hollow ring at the neck shoulder junction was thinning the brass down to 0.08”. Don’t want the neck to break off.

Perhaps i am overly cautious here, but there are four fully prepped batches of Lapua brass (0.012”) ready to use, and i got good value for money from this batch. Next time i will just do a skim cut, keeping the necks closer to 0.014”. No need to overwork the brass. And thin necks in a SAAMI chamber has no benefit, only disadvantages.

Case closed me thinks.