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Posted: 9/9/2010 4:26:47 PM EDT
| I have a lot of .270 Win Remington brass which just completed eight cycles. Loads have been towards the warm end. Neck sized except full length resized for the first and the fifth firings. Trimmed to length at the fifth as well. Necks look fine and they pass the paper clip test. Primer pockets still tight. .270 brass is plentiful here, but this looks to me good to go. Where is the prudent place to stop? Thanks in advance. |
| You are most likely going to have a neck split which is no big deal. If you haven't been overworking the brass (which I doubt you have been if you have 8 firings) you shouldn't have to worry about incipient head case seperation which is a big deal. Since they all passed the paper clip test, I'd load them up another time or two then toss them all. |
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Generally the neck and shoulder will split or the body will separate, or the primer pockets give out. Won't hurt the gun, but a case separation is a pain in the neck.
You might consider annealing those cases (neck and shoulders). Then keep shooting them until they are done. That might be 30 reloads. |
I had a .17 fireball split I opened the bolt and the brass was split in two . It didn't shoot any different. Looking at my brass the other one started to split but stayed together. The contraption below is how I removed the top of the case. I think there were six reloads including once fired as a .223 case.
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I would respectfully disagree that case head separations (CHS) are a big deal. I find that they are a product of the gun, either it has CHS as a common failure mode, or it doesn't. I only have one rifle, a Savage 99, that suffers CHS, and I have had maybe half a dozen cases fail this way in that gun. It was completely uneventful each time, and I never realized there was a problem until I saw the case. I have never had a CHS in any rifle other than the Savage.
The only case failures that are a big deal are case head failures, which don't seem to be caused by use, but rather defective cases. I have never seen one of those. |
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