Effects of being under the minimum OAL

Stevebot-7

Stevebot-7

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So, I understand that with brass that has an OAL longer than the "trim" length you can potentially run into issues where the neck gets pinched in the lands and can cause excessive pressure.

However, what I don't have much of a grasp on is what happens if the brass is a bit shorter.

Specifically I'm forming some 300 Blackout from .223 Remington Winchester brass. One piece in particular had a gnarly edge, and by the time I was satisfied I had trimmed it down past where it's supposed to be. SAAMI says 1.368" to 1.348" and this one piece of brass ended up at around 1.325" or so.

What effects could come from shooting brass that short? Would it possibly have poor bullet retention? I'm not crimping this brass so I don't need to worry about that.

I know it's not a good idea to mess with safety recommendations, and that it's a 30 cent piece of brass, but I am curious what would happen.
 
Really nothing can happen. .023 less "grab", or bullet retention won't be noticeable at all. It will be fine, and will grow a little once fired.
 
When sizing 30-06 brass to 270 W. it ends up a good .100" shorter than the standard length of a 270.
Shooting them is normal in every way. No change of any kind can be observed and eventually they grow to "proper" length.
 
Hmm, okay. I wasn't sure if this was one of the cases where it could explode in my face.

I've got a Dewalt drill hooked up to my case trimmer, and that thing can chew through brass pretty quickly on full speed. ;) Still I'm being all paranoid and only end up trimming off 0.2" each time. Soon I shall have my first batch of brass done, and then we can start some load development.
 
It will effect straight wall rimless pistol brass as it seats on the case mouth. But bottle Necked or rimmed brass won't be an issue.
 
It wont crimp into the cannalure properly since there wont be brass at the cannalure if you are using your normal COAL. Other than that, as everyone else said, there wont be a noticeable difference when shooting.
 
Well, there's efficiency for you. I did 150 brass in the same amount of time it took me to do the first 50. I set the trimmer to about 1.360, that should give me some comfortable tolerance range. Got about 140 brass cleaned and
primed as well. Just need to get my scale set up and find where I left my bullets.
 
I would suggest that the life of the brass wimay be shortened. The brass now has further to flow unrestricted so you may get fewer firings. This is only a hypothesis, not born of experience. I hope you science the crap out of this and report back.
 
I've never experienced any trouble with shorter case lengths.

The only thing I've ever read about short cases causing trouble was that during the Boer War some cartridges were bought by the Boers from Germany (DWM) that had "short necks" and apparently caused some burst barrels. Instead of the standard 7x57 mm cases they were 7x53 mm.
 
Hmm, only reason I can think of would be the short case caused poor bullet retention which may have resulted in a bullet getting caught in the lands and then the empty case extracted and another one rammed in behind it and discharged.
 
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