Gonna Have A Hot Time Tonight

I loaded up about 42 or 43 rounds of Garand ammo last weekend.  Started out with 50 cases but 2 were Berdan primed and the rest split their necks when I sized them.  It was a mixed bag of "Once Fired" brass that I bought at a gun show a decade or more ago.  I didn't expect it to really be Just Once Fired but they were cheap so I figured I could use them for something someday.  I have about 100 more from the same pile and I think I'm going to anneal them before I do any more loading.  No sense in losing another 10% to split necks.

The Lovely Bride says the torch heats up the kitchen too much so I'm banished to the patio.  I haven't annealed anything in several years so I'm going to wait until its getting dark so I can see the brass start to give off the dull red color that says its done and still see well enough to see discoloration from the annealing get to the shoulder.

Apparently annealing has gotten a lot more complicated since I last did any.  I see now that you have to use special crayons that tell you how hot the metal is or you'll ruin your brass.  You have to use an expensive machine or at least a cordless drill to spin the cases too.   If you are any kind of reloader you'll have a setup that resembles this:

 I did ruin a few cases the first time I tried it but that was because I had read that you are supposed to heat the brass until the neck and shoulder are "cherry red" and I was inside with the lights on.  It never got cherry red.  I just burned all the zinc out of it before I saw any red at all. 

The next time I tried it, I made sure the room was dark.  Dull Red is more like it.  Like "I can barely tell that its red at all" red.  That brass sized like a dream and I used it for years. 

Having gotten the hang of it, I decided to try something different just to see how much difference annealing can really make.   If you have nothing better to do you can make 7.62x54R out of 45-70 brass.  You don't need special dies.  You just gotta anneal it first.   I honestly can't believe that there ever was a weekend in my life when I had nothing better to do than that but the cases are on the shelf so there it is.  My point being that its not that hard to anneal cases.   The more you read about it, the more intimidating it gets but, once you actually start annealing stuff, it just ain't that big a deal.

I don't have a fancy machine to help either.  I just use a piece of 1/4" threaded rod.  Stick the case on one end, hold it so the neck and shoulder are in the propane torch's flame and twirl until its annealed.  I forget how many seconds to twirl before plunking them in the pot of water but I'll figure it out again once I get started.  It ain't like I'm heat treating 1903 Springfield receivers by sight.  You can see how far down the case the brass gets annealed because the annealing discolors it as on this old Kynoch ammo.

Ok.  So I ain't Oleg Volk.  Look close and you'll see that the neck and shoulder are a slightly different color than the rest of the case.  The color changes maybe 1/4" below the shoulder.

I'm going to do the ones with split necks too.  Might be able to cut them to length and make a few 300 Savage cases.  Stranger things happen around here all the time.