Need help with 223 reload

Can't see the pic.

CC

Looking forward to the answer as it happens to me once in a great while too.

Do you crimp them?

Or did this happen while seating the bullet?

Looks to be a seating issue, it appears to seat bullet the same but just caved the shoulder. possible fatigued brass piece...

Either that brass one piece of brass is longer, so much so that it's making contact with the crimp feature inside the die,

or, some how some way the seating die got threaded down lower while seating,

or, a combination of the two.

although it's never happened to me, I suppose if a case mouth isn't reamed and chamfered enough, the bullet could hang up on the lip, thus shoving the shoulder down, instead of the bullet entering the mouth. But that one looks really very pronounced, such as what one might expect with an improperly adjusted seating die.

Another possible, is that if the seating die is adjusted down to the point that you only have a few thousandths of gap between the case mouth and the crimp shoulder in the die, then a piece of brass that's longer, or long enough to make hard contact with the crimp feature could certainly cause the shoulder to collapse like that.

I know those who are new to reloading initially think seating depth is adjusted by threading the die down deeper, but that is incorrect, seating depth is adjusted by threading the seating stem down, thus avoiding contact with the crimp shoulder in the die.

GS

I did this last week to a couple of .223 rounds. What I did was seated and crimped the bullet, then I realized I hadn't seated the bullet deep enough so I tried to turned the seated plug down a couple of turns and tried to seat the bullet deeper. The brass looked almost like this but not quite as bad. In other words, I tried to seat a bullet deeper that already had a tight crimp and it pushed the case neck down forming the shoulder almost like the one in your photo (not quite as bad, but bad enough that it wouldn't chamber in my Remington bolt gun, but the Mini 14 still ate it). Not sure if this is what happened to you or not, but if you are crimping the brass and it's not all trimmed to the same length, the same results can happen. Try seating the bullets with the crimp raised and see if it still happens. If you are using a separate crimp die then I haven't a clue what is causing it.

Chamfer & debur inside and outside the case mouth

And you too shall be successful loading .223.

The sharp square edge of your case mouth is glaringly obvious, even in the poor photo.

It's biting the bullet and causing the case shoulder to collapse from the extra pressure.

rc

Your photo was a bit unclear to me, but if your problem looks like I think it did and it's like the two on the right in the picture below, I can tell you exactly how you might have done it....I made this mistake seating 223 on a single stage press, and setting the case ATOP the shellholder as I seated the bullet. A moment of misattention....didn't realize what was wrong until I did the second later on in the same batch.

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I made this mistake seating 223 on a single stage press, and setting the case ATOP the shellholder as I seated the bullet.

Click to expand...

This seems most likely to me if you have run 600-700 previously without changing anything. Also possible that case was significantly longer than all the others, if you're crimping.

I made some .30-06 look like that. I have a dedicated tool head on my Dillon for sizing and decapping. Figured I would store my other not in use calibers (223 and 308) resizing dies in the empty holes. Started resizing my first -06 cases and found out that even though I had the stored dies unscrewed all the way up, as the cases indexed to the .223 die they would hit it and squish them. Ruined 4-5 before I caught it.