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Old 01-05-2017, 17:51   #21
Quietus
Asset
 
Join Date: Jun 2010
Location: Wyoming
Posts: 16
So far nobody has touched on "what equipment to make."

If you plan to recover and reuse your rifle brass, you will want to avoid overworking it during resizing. Dedicating particular brass to a particular rifle is a helpful thing to some. 7.62 NATO chambers and .308 chambers will yield different size cases when the case is extracted. A one-size-fits-all approach will cause earlier case separation failures in those cases fired from a M14/M1A-type, or even more grossly, an Ishy 2A1, than those cases fired from your nicely-built .308 bolt rifle.

You want to use a cartridge headspace gauge in order to set the resizing die to make the brass small enough that it chambers in whatever rifle you want it to. A Hornady gauge was mentioned by greentick. I use Wilson gauges. They tell, by visual and by feel, overall length, shoulder setback, and will tell you of a goober in bullet seating. This gauge is used more than once during the process, last time used is the assurance that finished round that you're putting to storage, will fit any chamber you want it to.

The gauge is a cylindrical machined slug, hand-held, that you insert cases into. Its steps front and back are go/no-go lengths for what protrudes of the brass. Lore, is that an educated fingertip can detect a .001" shortness or proudness. I can't vouch for that.

Bottom line on using a case headspace gauge, is that it can help you avoid over-resizing your cases, which will help you avoid case failure from overstretching the case. Example: So what if my fingertip says that shoulder-to-boltface is a tad long, it's to be fired in a long chamber, and my die setting preserved the life of the case.

Cases are going to fail due to repeated resizing. So the tool that you want to make, is what could be called an interior-of-case rake. Case head separations happen maybe a quarter inch or less above the rim. The rake that you use to find case weakness before it goes bad, is made out of common tie-wire.

Cut a five inch piece of wire. Sharpen one end real nice and remove any burrs. With pliers, turn the sharpened end back 90 degrees. Make the length of that turn short, a quarter inch, it must go down the case neck. To finish, twirl a loop on the other end so you can hang it in a place handy on your bench.

To use, this rake is extension of your mind. When resizing rifle brass, material gets sucked from the area just in front of the rim. Your rake and its sharp point goes down there and feels for a lesser amount of brass. When the rake finds an irregularity, don't ponder, just pitch that case.

greentick also mentioned buying a bullet puller for your ooppses, and gave a choice between kinetic and collet types. I prefer collet to kinetic. They are less work for a few rounds, and are the only rational choice if you need to pull a few hundred. My brand is C&H, bought the first collet in '88 and my latest from them last year.

People here may remember Paragon, from a generation ago. I bought a K of .303 British from them, MEN 84 headstamp (sort of a curious thing that the West Germans would be ressurecting .303 ball ammo during that timeframe, no? No it really wasn't curious.). It was pretty hot for my Enfields. Real hard bolt lift. I pulled about 800 bullets and reloaded them back with 10% less powder. A collet-type bullet puller is your friend for big fubars.
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