brass "quality" and performance

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normanrd

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Hey all,

I am getting ready to rig up a 22-250 that I have had sitting in the box for a while and was wondering about brass. I am wondering if anyone can tell me how much better a "premium" quality brass will perform versus a "generic" quality brass, and I am talking accuracy wise.

Say we take a lot of Lapua brass and a lot of Winchester brass and sort by them weight, de-burr the flash holes and uniform the primer pockets, and then load them to exactly the same conditions. How much better, in MOA, would you expect the "premium" brass to perform? I am interested to see if anyone has any empirical data regarding this kind of thing.

Norm
 
I would expect the Lapua brass to be 'nicer', more consistent and clean flash holes, but I doubt, apples to apples, after case prep there would be any difference in accuracy.
 
I read a comparative test somewhere recently-in the test rifle, Lapua did not perform as well as standard brass offerings when evaluating precision. That was one study with one test rifle.

I use Federal in one of my chamberings-gun shoots one ragged hole at 100m and <1/2 MOA out to 200 and 300m. I have never weighed until recently but found a 4 gr range in Federal when I tried this excercise. Then I tried another caliber with W/W and similarly found a 4 gr range. I'm sure Lapua has a tighter weight tolerance and could produce better precision but I'll stick with what works.
 
Well yes there will be a difference in accuracy. Lapua will have a more consistent neck an case volume both relate to better accuracy. The real question is are you a good enough shooter and/or is the gun and optics good enough to offer a difference? The other big difference is generally Lapua brass tends to last longer sometimes as much as twice as many reloads. All and all in that caliber for the average shooter I don't expect you will see very much difference in accuracy. I mostly use hornady or ww super brass. I tend to stay away from federal only because
The primers open up pretty quick so you don't get that many loads out of them IMO.
 
If you weight sort a large enough lot of Lapua you will find a difference of about 4 gr. Of the 1700-1800 .308 Lapua cases I have, they run from 170 gr to 174 gr. With Lapua you do not have to de-burr the flash holes.

Of all these Lapua cases that I have, I have culled less than 50 because the primer pockets are a little on the loose side. (fired once more for practice only then dumped) I have also culled 1 case because of a split neck. These cases are on their 4th barrel.

Accuracy wise between primium brass and cheap brass you won't find a difference. During the last World Long Range Championship (Palma Match) the Brit team won the match using Berdan primed brass, I believe Canada and the US teams were both using Lapua brass.
 
I use Lapua brass (along with Norma and PPU) in M91 MN and cast loads.
Even with Iron sights I see a world of difference in consistency and I don"t sort brass by weight.As long as it's same lot and manufacturer I can do rest of case prep and I'm good to go.
 
Right on Guys, Thanks for your thoughts. Kinda mirrored what I felt, but you never know, someone might have come out with a morsel of information that rocks the world! Pretty much comes down to consistency, and if you jump through the hoops to have consistent cases and loads then you should be good to go (average shooter anyway).

thanks for your input,

Norm
 
I reload for my 22-250's. I find that the accuracy is great on my weatherby rifle and on my custom target rifle, no matter which brass I use. Winchester brass I find is the most forgiving (as resizing goes) and federal seems to harden faster. I would expect you will get 3 good reloads per piece of brass before the neck of the 22-250 gets pretty hard.
I find that choosing the right bullet is the biggest accuracy gain.
 
In many instances my best accuracy and consistency are with the pressures red-lined. Lapua and Norma can shrug off hot loads that would cream the primer pockets of lesser cases the first time out.
 
Dogleg said:
In many instances my best accuracy and consistency are with the pressures red-lined. Lapua and Norma can shrug off hot loads that would cream the primer pockets of lesser cases the first time out.
Click to expand...

This is a fantastic point! I load a lot of Weatherby cartridges, and find that anything other than Weatherby brass (norma) gets "creamed" by the red line pressures that these cartridges seem to need to be at to perform the best.

again, great point!

Norm
 
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