Case Failure on Nickel Plated Cases 40 S&W

[yukondave]

I have been reloading 40S&W with a Dillion 650. I am using a SIG 229 40S&W. I am reloading SPEER Nickel Plated Cases.

Load Data

Wolf Small Pistol Primer

3.5gr Titegroup

180gr Montana Gold FMJ

1.135 OAL

Nice shooting round but after reloading 500 rounds of Brass 4 times, I got 6 rounds that are showing case failure. Any ideas why the cases are starting to fail? That is about 1.2% failure rate, is that normal for plated brass? Is this a sign of another problem?

[L-10_shooter]

Are they Winchester headstamp? I have noticed (by me and a few fellow shooters) that the win nickle headstamps dont last very long. Even with minor loading. I would think the brass alloy used (or heat from nickle plating) gets brittle fast. Where is Guy Neil when you need him?

[Jack T]

That's about what I get with nickel, maybe more, sometimes less, the neck will start to crack from fatigue. That is actually a pretty light load you are shooting, so there is no over pressure involved. I use an extremely light flare for bullet seating so that is not a factor. It is brittle so it won't stand too many cycles of resizing/fire forming without showing signs of fatigue.

Edited December 8, 2009 by Jack T

[A63111]

My pistolsmith tells me that nickel is harder, that in part would account for not liking to be work hardened by the expanding and contracting of shooting and reloading. He also says that it is not good for overall barrel life due to their hardness (puts an extra strain on the barrel vs. brass).

I have reloaded many Speer cases many times without issue, not not the nickel plated.

[Hammar]

Nickel plated is more brittle than brass and usually cannot be re-loaded as many times as brass. That being said, you should be able to get more than 4 loads out of them especially with that load data you provided. Are they all from the same lot? Did you buy them new, or were they loaded prior to your use?

[JimmyZip]

I have seen others have this same problem and so I reload these once only. (I get them free after the Sheriff Dept. practices with their subguns.) I do notice that I lose some of the nickel off of these when I run them through the U die. They go into the practice group and never get reloaded again.

JZ

[G-ManBart]

My pistolsmith tells me......He also says that it is not good for overall barrel life due to their hardness (puts an extra strain on the barrel vs. brass).

I'd be very worried if a gunsmith ever told me that

The amount of strain put on the chamber varies with the pressure of the cartridge, not the case material type. Further, since the nickel cases are smoother they should cause less wear, not more, because they'll have less friction while being extracted. It's certainly possible to wear out a pistol barrel, but it happens in the rifling and more in the lead/throat area, not the actual chamber.

For the OP, I think those Speer cases are a bit on the thin side to start with. I've shot many thousands of them because Speer was our issued duty ammo for several years. When you drop one they sound thin and tiny compared to normal brass or other nickel plated brass. For that reason I never reloaded them, so I don't know about their case life, but when I've gotten split cases with normal brass (I use mostly Win headstamp) it doesn't normally have a split that's quite that long and it always takes over ten cycles to make them split....never counted exactly, but you normally can't even read the headstamp when it happens. R,

[MarkCO]

In my experience, that is fairly common, and Speer is the worst for this. Nickel plated will not wear your barrel more, but the plating results in a more brittle material which is then more prone to work hardening. The more flare and crimp, the faster they will fail. I use mixed brass from a police range and get about 20% nickel. I load these once for lost brass matches.

[jmorris]

Nickel plated brass is slicker to reload and looks pretty but always splits before the non plated brass.

[yukondave]

At this time after firing these 500 Speer Nickel Plated Brass 4 times that I am experiencing a 1.2% case failure rate. In other words, 98.8% of the time after reusing brass 4 times, Nickel Plated Brass works.

So does non-plated brass or other brands of brass have a lower failure rate than 1.2%?

I am not alarmed by the rate but wondering if non-plated brass allows me to reload 10 times without failure or is 1.2% expected from all brass, plated and non-plated?

Edited December 9, 2009 by yukondave

[DougCarden]

The Nickel cases work really well for matches where you dont get your brass back......

Regards,

DougC

[Harmon]

i dont load them because they are harder to load(resize) than regular brass and they also have a primer drawback problem allowing the decapping pin to pull the spent primer back into the primer pocket. this is specific to speer brass, none others.

as far as cracking, in the past i have loaded in excess of 15000 of these in my quest to make Master until the nickle coating was worn off and never ever had one split

i really like regular ole brass...in particular remington for some reason...it loads better than winchester.

Harmon

[waxman]

Does anyone believe there is a problem with shooting brass till this happens? This year I used all of my non-match brass, Amerc, SB, FC, and brass with extractor marks just for home range practice brass. I kept reloading this brass until it developed a split like this , then threw it in my junk brass pile for recycling. Do you think this is a bad practice?

[Boats]

I don't like splits and weed them out when loading, however have never had a problem due to a splitting case. I do find Nickle splits worse than brass. .38 Spl always use nickel for lost brass matches.

Boats

[Craig-2008]

I have allways found nickel cases to split after only a few times being reloaded, in all calibers.

[lucasb67]

hi dear shooter friends, I'm italian, my name is luca and I'm for the first time here

it is normal that nickel plated brass splits after few reloading times, they are better to extract, but its hardness and thickness reduce its life ... if you want to reload them many times look at naked brass tipe, like GFL, Starline, R-P, Federal, Winchester, speer ... all good brass alloy, very resistent

[SCV]

I will echo what some of the others have said! Nickel is harder and more brittle... I no long buy Nickel but will reload it if its free or I find it at the range.... The reason being my expierence with after 2 reloads , I started to find split cases..

I have some regular brass I have reloaded 5 or 6 times..... The only good thing about nickle is it looks cool and is easer to find in the grass

Edited January 9, 2010 by SCV

[juan]

Waxman I dont think its bad

this is exactly what i do

find my splits using case guage

[kevin c]

I usually lose my brass before I'm able to shoot it more than 3 or 4 times, so "case life" is not too much an issue for me. I do find that I get case mouth splits much more often with nickel cases than with regular yellow brass, but haven't had any case failures (case head separations) that I can attibute to the brass (granted that I've shot almost exclusively minor PF loads in Production these past three years).

It's really hard to tell, since I don't check each case after it ejects to see if it has split, but I don't think the accuracy of the shot suffers much from a case mouth split, at least so much as it matters at ranges and targets for our type of shooting.

I do like the nickelled cases - I find they resize easier, are slicker in the magazine, are easier to find after shooting, and just plain have more bling .

[lucasb67]

kevin, if you can, try to clean the yellow brasses by tumbling them with lyman green and polish, then also the reloading operations are easy like the nickel ones

Edited January 21, 2010 by lucasb67

[corvette74]

My pistolsmith tells me......He also says that it is not good for overall barrel life due to their hardness (puts an extra strain on the barrel vs. brass).

I'd be very worried if a gunsmith ever told me that

The amount of strain put on the chamber varies with the pressure of the cartridge, not the case material type. Further, since the nickel cases are smoother they should cause less wear, not more, because they'll have less friction while being extracted. It's certainly possible to wear out a pistol barrel, but it happens in the rifling and more in the lead/throat area, not the actual chamber.

For the OP, I think those Speer cases are a bit on the thin side to start with. I've shot many thousands of them because Speer was our issued duty ammo for several years. When you drop one they sound thin and tiny compared to normal brass or other nickel plated brass. For that reason I never reloaded them, so I don't know about their case life, but when I've gotten split cases with normal brass (I use mostly Win headstamp) it doesn't normally have a split that's quite that long and it always takes over ten cycles to make them split....never counted exactly, but you normally can't even read the headstamp when it happens. R,

[corvette74]

Responding to the above quote....

I suspect what the gunsmith meant is that the nickel plated cases, being more brittle, don't have the same eslaticity that plain brass has. As we know, when a round is fired the case wall is pressed against the chamber wall by internal gas pressure. This has the side benefit of holding the round in the chamber for a few microseconds, which seals the chamber against leakage and takes some load off the recoil control mechanism and other internal components. Once the bullet is out of the barrel and gas pressure abates, the case pulls away from the chamber wall as it contracts back to something closer to it's original diameter (not completely, but enough to extract easily). This is why brass is the most common material used for cases. This being the case, the chamber part of the barrel will in fact show more wear over time with nickel plated cases, since they exert more friction on the chamber wall during extraction. The same is true for steel case anmmo, like Wolf and other mil-spec ammo. For our shooting needs though, the barrel will probably wear out from a lot of rounds going downrange long before we would see enough chamber wear to affect velocity or accuracy. If you had a match chamber though, you might notice a difference over time.