Funs with Lebel Brass!!!

[smellie]

I am posting this in Milsurp rather than anywhere else because I think it fits here best.

For many years, the only way we can shoot a lot of old rifle is buy a lathe and a ton of .348 Winchester brass, start machining. This has changed... if you want it to.

When the French designed the Lebel rifle and ammo, they were working on a very short schedule: 90 days max. They also needed ammo so they could test the rifle before adoption. They had no TIME to design a new cartridge, so they did the sane thing and necked-down the brass they were already making for the GRAS and the Marine KROPS. This accounts for the weird shape of the 8mm Lebel round.

NOW we can get Lebel brass, Boxer-primed: Trade-Ex has it in stock right now.

So let's play with it:

Load it as-is, you have Lebel or Berthier ammo.

Seat the bullet way out and it works fine in a Portuguese Kropatschek: 100% freed, fire, extract and eject in my rifles.

Open the neck, trim it and you have .41 Swiss Vetterli CF brass..... or Italian Vetterli CF brass.

Open it out full-length and you have short-case brass for your GRAS or, if your neighbours have noisy Zeppelins, you can use it in your Vickers Balloon Gun.

Open it out and trim, you have .50-70 USG.


Open and trim, you have .50-50 US Carbine.

Open and trim you have Norwegian Remington 12mm brass.

Open trim and load for .45-75WCF for you RNWMP guys.

Have fun!

 

[buffdog]

Brass conversions

Excellent advice, and sure to help those who need a few cases so that they can fire their oldies and goodies.

That was part of an interesting discussion we had on Friday afternoon.

And thanks for the coffee, too.

 

[Claven2]

I'm loving it - my old .348 Winchester converted brass was finally wearing out so I ordered a whole bunch of this new Privi stuff. Fantastic. I might have to shoot the next EOHC milsurp match with a Berthier

 

[donor]

In order to make this brass work in M14 modified Gras I had to put rim of it to belt sander and make a bevel to closely match it to beveled recess on the bolt.





With original rim bolt wasn't closing at all and with just small bevel firing pin wasn't reaching primer at all.

After modification everything works just fine.

BTW-8mm KAR Lee mould from Midsouth casts really great .328 flat point projectiles.

I didn't test it on the range yet ,but it might be a good choice for long 8mm barrels like Lebels and Berthiers usually have.

 

[Pblatzz]

8mm lebel is one of my favorites to reload for. The 8x63 Swedish bullets worked well too.

 

[Talquin]

And the order from trade ex for brass is complete. Let's see what I can do with it.

 

[RMM]

Maybe this should be put into the reloading section to?

 

[smellie]

Just to make a slight apology here; neither of my Krops have the original boltheads, and rimmed rounds headspace on the rim. The man above is right: some rifles will NEED a beltsander taken to the rims (quicker than a file, anyway).

Nice thing is that most of the cartridges we can convert this brass to, are black-powder rounds. When you are working with 12k Max pressures, it's not as touchy as working with 66k working pressures, 80k Proof pressures. Just a whole bunch less nervous-making.

BTW, for the guys loading for BP rounds, likely your best powder will be the old standby, SR-4759. You can use it at 38%-of-Black and get smokeless shooting, low pressures and darned decent accuracy. MUCH better than compressed Black any old time (Brits had a LOT of problems with the .303 when it was using BP rounds)..... cheaper, too. Krop charge was 70 grains of Black with a 247-grain slug.

Have fun!
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