brass life...

[texasgunhand]

How do you know when brass is nearing its service life? Is it just when the primers get loose and fit sloppy? Just wondering how many times you can reload good once fired brass.

[markm]

Life depends on primer pocket tightness for me. Case separation is almost unheard of for me. Number of firings depends on the brass kind and how hot you load the ammo.

[Onyx Z]

Life depends on primer pocket tightness for me. Case separation is almost unheard of for me. Number of firings depends on the brass kind and how hot you load the ammo.

Same here. I've never had a case separation, just primer pockets losing tightness. I've gone through ~10 loads with 223 Lapua brass. I haven't got that far with LC yet.

[TomMcC]

Usually a loose primer pocket or a split in the neck.

[NWcityguy2]

Since I rarely load to 5.56 pressures, I will have 10 split necks for every primer pocket that wears out. I collect so much 223 brass that I don't even track how many reloadings I get out of it. I've never had a split case head.

[markm]

Since I rarely load to 5.56 pressures, I will have 10 split necks for every primer pocket that wears out.

Wow that seems high. I'd suspect that your die is working your necks pretty hard. Are you running an expander ball in your sizer??

[mattieb]

Is the die that comes with the lee 223 set a full length sizer?

[.46caliber]

On load 5 we start getting split necks. We run the upper end of .223 charges for our plinking rounds. PMC, FC and PPU brass mostly.

RCBS full length sizer and we run the expander ball.

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[NWcityguy2]

Hmmm.. never tried a Lee FL sizer, but I do like the LEE dies that I am running. We run mostly .223 pressure loads. (most 556 pressure is loaded in new brass for defense) And I've seen like 10 or so neck splits in the last 5 years.

I'll get at least that many split case necks with every 1000 round run of ammo I make. But still, it's free and will probably stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Is the die that comes with the lee 223 set a full length sizer?

Lee makes both a full length resizer and a collet resizer, which sizes only the neck. For any semi-auto you'll want the full length resizer.

The difference is very obvious. http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h2...CF3277copy.jpg

[markm]

On load 5 we start getting split necks. We run the upper end of .223 charges for our plinking rounds. PMC, FC and PPU brass mostly.

Interesting. Like NWcityguy2, I don't track my 223 brass, and it's all mixed together. I may just be wearing out the primer pockets before they're splitting.

The one thing I do that's probably unique... is size without the expander ball in the die, and then hit the necks with a RCBS neck expander die to open them back up after sizing... on the down stroke of the press. That may or may not have something to do with why I see almost no splits.