Home made 10 gauge brass

ssapach

ssapach

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So please bear with me and try not to be too critical if I can't remember all the details. It's been a week since I tried one of my homemade shells......just on the road for work so I thought I'd share some pics. Also, keep in mind I'm not a professional machinist and my tool of choice was built in 1917.

But I figured the black powder crowd might appreciate this. Also, I saw someone else posting about brass shotgun shells a while ago.

So, a few months ago I got my hands on a Winchester 1901 shotgun. Not knowing much about it at the time, I didn't realize I was going to be getting into reloading just to be able to use it. But I've started with unloading some shells off the shelf and reloading to suit my needs (with lead rather than steel) and then I realized that there are brass shells out there. Then I realized that nobody seems to want to ship shotgun shells into Canada....

I figured I'd test my skills and patience and try to make a few of my own. I mean, I have most of the tools and I have some free time every once in a while, so it costs me some material.

The one on the right was my 3rd try at making a shell. It has been fired, not sure if anyone can notice the bulge in it or not. The left one was the 4th, but I messed up some dimensions so it's not useable and would likely be worse if I tried fixing it. The one in the middle was the last one I made, also drilled using my fancy new air cooled drill bit shown at the end here.







Slight counter sink to help the primer to seat flush with the shell:



I was aiming for 2-3/4" as my max is 2-7/8" with my gun:



Primer in:



Powder in (this isn't real black powder, it's the "replacement" stuff)



Over powder card was actually just cut from some gasket paper. It's what I use for over shot cards as well, although I used thicker stuff for over the powder. I only ended up using one of the cork wads as well, with both the shell was barely long enough to hold everything and I wouldn't have been able to put an over shot card.



Some #6 lead:



And a little bit of all-purpose white glue to hold it all in place:



I've upgraded and gotten my hands on this drill bit. Carbide inserts do quite a fine job and leave a nice smooth wall, not to mention it has provisions for coolant. I don't have a coolant system or anything to catch it all, so I just used air. It's amazing the difference in drilling speed and surface finish with the air flow though, keeps the chips out nicely and helps keep things cool!



I'm open to constructive criticism here too. Just keep in mind I don't have intentions of making and selling these by the case anytime soon, I still have a job that requires my time. Mostly just experimenting in some free time.
 
excellent machining although I have to say that a clean workshop is a sign of a disturbed mind :>) :>) If you want to save some time, I suspect that Mystic Precision can bring in 10 guage brass shells for a very reasonable price. Also I use muzzle loading cushion wads in my black powder cartridges; they are a bit easier to use than the older dry fiber ones

cheers mooncoon
 
Any particular reason you are firing BP substitute out of the 1901? Just wondering if it is for something that requires it or you are worried about her not handling smokeless properly. Have you had issues with the recoil loosening up the shells when you use that method of loading?
 
Nice looking shells; well done! Yea, I too, noticed that nice clean shop area.
I'm presently playing with 14 ga brass shells........and lucked out at a recent gun show and found a dozen of them. Bought a pair of felt insoles at the Dollar store and punched out some felt wads, and used 2 drops of super glue to hold in the over shot card. Probably not real robust so I wouldn't want to carry them around in a pocket. Now to get out to the range and try them out.
Good luck with those 10 ga...
 
Cool! How many uses do you think you'll get out of such a brass case?

I wouldn't mind getting my hands on some brass 12 gauge.
 
Thanks for the input everyone!

As far as the 1901 in general, I load plastic hulls with smokeless (800X) for everything else. I'm only trying out black powder for fun at the moment.

I've only fired 1 brass shell so far, but the first couple plastics that I had reloaded I didn't have a roll crimper yet and only glued the over shot cards in place. A couple decided to spill their lead in the tube mag and jam up my gun. Now with the roll crimps, I don't have any issues. I supposed there may be some issues with the brass shells coming unglued, I just haven't had the tube mag loaded with them yet to find out. Although any of the write-ups or videos I have seen online for reloading brass shells, they tend to just use glue to hold it all in.

Perhaps someone can give me a little bit of input for making these brass shells. When I drill out the depth of the shell, I leave the head of the shell as thick as the primers (209A primers) so when the primer is seated flush to the outside, it is approximately flush inside as well. I'm not sure if this is correct, or if I should be going deeper? I noticed that the plastic shells have the plastic insert in the head of the shell, which is basically the thickness of the primer, so that's why I made my shells this way. But on the shell that I have already fired once, I noticed it bulged out a bit everywhere above the head of the shell. So it's nearly a 1/4" up from the outside face of the shell head before the bulge starts. I figured if I removed more material inside (or drilled the shells deeper) that they would fire-form more evenly. I'm mostly curious if this would have any serious effects on the primer, seeing as how it wouldn't be surrounded by as much material, or make the head want to separate from the shell walls if the material was cut too thin?

If that all makes sense to anyone......

As far as the shop cleanliness goes......it's not my shop, only where I fix my stuff and store my tools, so I have to try to keep it clean!

As far as not resizing after use, doesn't that depend on the gun you use them in? As in once they are fire formed to one chamber, they may or may not fit inside another? Or is that only really applicable to tighter tolerance rifle cartridges?
 
I think you need to support the primer for its whole length when using shotgun primers. Not doing so, I suspect will make it difficult to remove the fired primer. All of the original shells that I have seen used rifle primers rather than shotgun primers, perhaps because it required less brass. The modern brass shells use pistol primers and what is important is that pistol primers are 5 or 10 thou shorter than rifle primers. Using a rifle primer in such shells leaves it protruding slightly. The trade off of using rifle or pistol primers is that you might not get as good an ignition as you would with shotgun primers, if you are shooting smokeless powder

cheers mooncoon
 
mooncoon said:
I think you need to support the primer for its whole length when using shotgun primers. Not doing so, I suspect will make it difficult to remove the fired primer. All of the original shells that I have seen used rifle primers rather than shotgun primers, perhaps because it required less brass. The modern brass shells use pistol primers and what is important is that pistol primers are 5 or 10 thou shorter than rifle primers. Using a rifle primer in such shells leaves it protruding slightly. The trade off of using rifle or pistol primers is that you might not get as good an ignition as you would with shotgun primers, if you are shooting smokeless powder

cheers mooncoon
Click to expand...

This is good to know!

I might have to try out some rifle or pistol primers and see how much extra depth I can drill out. Come to think of it, I should have a few rifle primers at home.....

Upside of shotgun primers is that they are more readily available in just about every single store, but I haven't really been looking for or asking for rifle or pistol primers.
 
fyi - buffalo arms will ship brass shotshells to Canada no problem. I picked up 125 24 gauge ones to make up into 577Snider and 577/450 MH in the past couple months.

They do not list 10 gauge though....
 
Small update....I found a box of smaller primers.



209A shotshell primer and a 200 large rifle primer. The 209A is approx. 0.300" and the 200 is approx. 0.130".

It takes a #4 drill to drill a hole (0.209") to seat the primer into. These primers also don't have the larger lip that the shotshell primers have, and won't require any countersinking. I hope they will work just as well with smokeless or black powder....

This should allow me to remove more material from the head of the shell. But in order to do it nice and neat, I need to use a boring bar to eliminate the conical shape left from the spade drill. Not a huge deal, just that the extra step saved by not having to countersink the primer hole will just be turned into this step.

Work keeps getting in my way though :rolleyes:
 
Ha you had the same issue as I did, after the 3rd shot I had shells spilling their contents in the tube, Wish I had a roll crimp. Tried caulking, waterglass, both ended up failing after shot 3. Nice shells BTW.
 
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