Ok fella's i need help or advice!! i need to buy some 308win. brass & am looking to buy in "bulk" as retirement is coming in a few months & i'm trying to stock up on reloading componets now. i have always reloaded commercial brass but what about "processeed military brass"?? other than reducing powder charges b/c of case difference in thickness what should i look for. found a company (APEX BRASS) that sells completely processed military brass for about half the cost of new brass. i have 2 308win. bolt rifles which should handle "MIL-SPEC" brass ok but i don't want to spend money on brass that i may not be able to use!! any comments from you guys that have used mil. brass before will be a "BIG" help to me. THANKS
I have a butt-load of mil-surp 5.56 brass that I have acquired mostly as loaded ammo (USA Ammo, Ultra-Max Ammo, Black Hills Ammo, etc.). That being said, the biggest pain in the butt has already been taken care of - - the Primer Pocket Crimp has been swaged out. If the mil-surp is once fired true military surplus, and the primer is still crimped firmly in the pocket, have fun.
Another problem is that some mil-surp brass has been fired in M-249's or M-240-B's and those have generous chambers. Generally, case neck life is short (four to six re-loads) before case neck cracks are common. Annealing will probably extend case life if done before you do any re-sizing for your rifles. You are already aware of the caution of reducing charges slightly for mil-surp brass, so you are already ahead of the curve...
Thanks DWB for the advice. this brass i found has been completely processed, cleaned, primer mil-crimp swagged, resized, trimmed, polished & supposely ready to reload.
Would be interesting to see what kind of case life you get out of those. If I run into another big lot of brass, I may have segregate into two seperate lots - - annealed and not annealed then document case life. If nothing else, it would be neat to see if I get significantly better case life (or any at all) from the annealed brass. Given the chamber dimensions on full-auto weapons, I can see where the neck goes through some serious work hardening after only one firing.
Be careful and make sure all you buy is from the same lot number, same place. I have LC68 Match aka Lake City Arsenal Match made in 1968 this is O6 brass I use for my 7/06 rifles. Be nice if you ran across some National Match for your .308
Do a search for Military Match brass.
I shot a lot of milsurp brass for 06 and .308 it holds up well for reloading and can be matched in.
I have shot .223 resized to .222 in competition, that was a lot of labor, resize, trim, chamfer the primer pockets, ream flash holes and deburr them.
I would buy a power station to take care of the trimming chamferring ect plus a power trimmer.
Thanks DWB, Thanks Swany, that's one of the problems i see. as most of the mil-surp brass is now sold by the "tons" there is virtually no way to get the same lot # or same place brass. when the brass is sold now it is usually a mix-match of this & that. i will search for some Mil. Match Brass but if i can't come up with anything i may have to "bite the bullet" & order a bunch of commercial brass. at least doing it this way i will know where i'm starting at.
I usually buy once-fired fully processed milsurp brass from Top Brass, it's fairly inexpensive and they do a pretty good job processing. I segregate the brass by headstamp, but that's it, and I usually get a mix of all sorts of stuff.
Here's the thing... If you are firing it in bolt action rifles you will probably be OK, especially if you just neck-size it after your first firing. If you full-length resize, you will probably wind up with case head separations (depending on how tight your chamber(s) are. ) I experienced a case head separation on the first firing in my M1a recently. M1a's are not known for being gentle on brass, but the first reload? As a rule of thumb, I reload my once-fired milsurp 4 times and scrap it.
After that case separation, now I check all of my brass prior to loading with a bent paperclip, running it down inside the case to check for a ridge indicating a pending case separation.
If you are looking to load for accuracy, I would probably just bite the bullet and start with some good commercial brass; if you are looking to load some general purpose rounds, I think you would be OK with milsurp.
For your .308 bolt guns, neck sizing should be fine after the initial firing. You might want to segregate the brass as to the rifle, if their chambers/headspace are different enough. Just be happy you're not dealing with a 50BMG bolt gun and milsurp brass. Trust me on that one.
They never really did show us how to properly set headspace on the M2... "Well, you just screw the barrel in till it stops and back it off 2 clicks. There! You're good..."
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