Throw away rifle brass

[rnbra-shooter]

Am I to understand that you guys aren't trimming every time you reload? Isn't uniform case length vital to achieve maximum accuracy?

I only trim when needed. With carefully adjusted dies, I'm able to full-length size at least five times (and often ten) before the case has stretched to the point of needing trimming.

As far as I have been able to tell, variations in case length don't affect accuracy at the level that my rifles shoot (about 0.6 MOA at 300y, about 0.7 MOA at 600y, about 1.0 MOA at 1000). *Very* serious F-Class competitors, who have higher accuracy requirements, might find that uniform case length helps them a little bit to achieve uniform neck tension (though there other bigger factors affecting neck tension).

In practice, keeping your brass in the same box over its lifetime and doing the same thing to each piece of brass (shooting it until all are empty, then loading all of them), will keep the brass in a given box pretty consistent from piece to piece.

 

[tjhaile]

I set my dial caliper to the maximum length and if a case doesn't pass through after resizing, I trim it. I only scrap cases when they are visibly defective; cracked necks, incipient case head separations, etc. If you can't find anything wrong with the case, it should last another firing.

 

[smellie]

The freakin' clowns that were rippppping your brass need to be reported to the rangemaster and banned.

I shot with a club for some time and we had drips running about twisting knobs on sights (everybody else's sights, that is) before a match. They were very politely informed that they need not come back. Ever.

Works.

 

[kombayotch]

I prefer to use brass that is no longer shootable for setting up things like: dies, trimmer, neck turner, annealer, etc... before sending them to the recycler. I avoid using my good cases for stuff like that whenever I can. Old cases always seem to come in handy...

Necks don't crack if you anneal them every few firings, so I usually end up retiring cases when the primer pockets are loose or when they show signs of head separation. I made a tool similar to the RCBS tool for probing for head separation:

Its much quicker and more reliable than visual inspection or hand probing. You just slide the case along it. If the needed jumps, there is a gap starting to form. If there is no gap, the needle just increments in a smooth manner as the wall gets thicker.

If the gap is very shallow, I may use the cases once more for subsonics, hunting loads, or some application where the cases usually get lost or damaged.

The last batch of 308 brass I retired were Hornady cases that had been severely abused (over-sized, over-pressured), and I still got 17 firings out of them.