Reloading 223

[David Sinko]

I scavenge every single piece of brass I can find and my big issue is OAL. I find that every single case must be measured after it has been resized. If even one slips by that is too long it will lock the gun up tight. This is very aggravating and time consuming. Once fired Federal tends to be uniformly short. Some don't like to reload Federal brass but I have never had any problems with it.

Dave Sinko

[Tom D.]

Hmmm..not sure what case length has to do with OAL but if case length is the problem, an easy fix is to trim 10 thou short which should be good for a couple of firings. As to OAL, you will go nuts measuring this if you are loading SMK unless you run the bullets thru a meplat uniformer.

[sargenv]

I have a Dillon trimmer, and the way I've done it is that I decap on 1, size on 2, trim on 4, then after running all my brass through, I tumble all the lube off, and then they get the primer pocker swaged and then I sort by brand and they go into storage. I've broken several decapping pins, broke 3 of the RCBS decap rod assemblies, and bent one of the Dillon decap rod assemblies. I stopped at about 7000 pieces and am now selling the last 5500 or so pieces of unprocessed brass in one of the other threads here.. The good thing is I now have about 3k pieces of ready to load, and another 4k pieces, give or take, to swage. I do all these while working from home waiting for tech support calls. I kind of wosh I had a 1050, but really, I'll onlyhave to do this once for the next several years since I'm not shooting that much 223 right now.. All this brass has been sitting in my garage for a while, I finally got the will (and the 223 conversion for my 650) to finally get it over with.