Brass is an alloy and it behaves differently from many other metal alloys. Brass work hardens and loses its softness and ability to deform. For a knife you would wish the alloy to be hard and to be resistant to being bent. Just the opposite is true for a brass cartridge. When you run it through a sizing die you wish it to bend and deform and take the shape of the die. If it is work hardened it will be springy and when it comes out of the die it will spring back to the shape it was in before you resized it. All your time cleaning it up has been wasted because it is not resized. Then it will not want to hold a bullet in the neck nor will it chamber well.
In order for a black gun to function well, the brass must be considerable less than chamber size. This is exactly the opposite of a single shot rifle designed for extreme accuracy. So it is of extreme importance to the black gun to avoid a piece of brass that is tight and does not slide into the chamber easily. It is also important to have enough neck tension that the bullets do not jar back into the case and decrease case capacity and increase pressures or the opposite of actually starting to come out of the case and becoming too long to feed properly. The only way you can get neck tension on the bullet is for the sizing die to actually deform the fired case back to the prefired size. If the case is work hardened it will spring back to being too excessively big after it comes out of the sizing die and will not hold the bullet very tightly. There is an option of crimping the bullets but in the end this options will fail because the case is too large to chamber well and the neck will split.
For most rifles, work hardening happens after about four or five firings and reloadings. Another sign that you are negligent and derelict in your annealing duties is that your case necks have gotten so work hardened that they are splitting. This is a sign that you believe noise will compensate for intelligence. Without annealing, case necks will split at about 8-10 firings.
So here is a set of videos on how to anneal brass. The key here is a dull red color in a dimly lit room. Bright cherry red color means you are off your ADD meds and should not have been on this forum in the first place. If you get to thinking about other things such as whether your wife knows about your new girlfriend while annealing and let one get too hot as I do in the video just say “Aw Sh1t” and dump it in the tub with rest of them and go on.
Unlike knives ---- quenching is of no importance. It just means you have to use less bandaids when you pick up hot pieces of brass. Quenching does nothing for brass. You can air cool it if you wish. It also gives you a lot to do to try to get it dry again
Now then if your next door neighbor is a jarhead and has been outshooting you at the range then show him how to anneal brass except have him anneal the case head. Annealing the case head will cause case head separations which are always fun in a black gun. You should have your video camera handy so you can record the jarhead swearing while bleeding profusely from the face and hands.
Now you should also think about the 27 banana clips you have buried in the PVC tubing in your back yard for the last seven years and wonder how those compressed springs are going to work when Osama and 123 extremist terrorist attack your home. Life is just full of things to worry about.
Here are the three videos
http://s112.photobucket.com/albums/n...0312082212.flv
http://s112.photobucket.com/albums/n...0312104425.flv
http://s112.photobucket.com/albums/n...3121054372.flv