Worth it to separate cases by headstamp?

brewer12345 said:

A few cases are military brass with crimped primers I cannot seem to remove. What do I do with this stuff? Is it usable?

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I have seldom had any difficulty decapping crimped USGI cases. Are we sure those are not Berdan primed?

Any road, I have three grades of ammo:
1. True target rifle loads in same lot number brass bought new and kept with the gun.
2. Target pistol loads and casual target rifle loads in sorted brass.
3. IDPA & USPSA pistol loads in mixed brass.

When beginning a load work up, I sort brass by headstamp. When I have determined a "perfect" load I will often go with mixed headstamp brass, especially for my handgun ammo. For my 308, I like to keep things as consistent as possible so I use a lot of 7.62x51 brass with similar date stamps, but my Garand will often use mixed brass.

As a machinist/mechanic, when I first encountered military primer crimps I immediately thought of a countersink. I had a half dozen tin my tool box and grabbed a 60 degree high speed steel 1/2" countersink, and have removed a few thousand crimps that way. Just 1/2 second with a countersink in a drill and the crimp is gone...https://www.mcmaster.com/#countersinks/=1ar8sxu

Not the brass but the idea in a BPCR publication fits.
It went through a process of load development with powder, bullet, lube, seating, etc. etc.
So then the author said, "What to do with leftover ammo from the previous batch? Well, it may not be quite as accurate as what you settled on later, but you probably need offhand practice anyhow."

I weigh all my brass including brass with the same head stamps as I have occasionally found as much as ten grains variance in the same brands. There was an old rule of thumb posted in the "American Rifleman" to reduce the charge by 12% of the difference in case weight.(0.12.X 10= 1.2)The heavier case takes the smaller charge as the case volume is smaller. De- prime and trim cases before weighing.

I only load 45 acp at the moment. I learned on my first batch to sort because some manufacturers use small primers and some use large.

It seems a good idea for consistency too if you are working up loads.

Guess it's already become a habit for me.

Duster340 said:

I sort my brass for rifle and pistol. Mainly because I'm anal about stuff LOL.

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Opening up a box and having mixed headstamps staring up at you is a serious buzz-kill...

For the most part I do not sort brass but most of my reloading is pistol calibers.

The cartridges I do sort are 38/357 that I intend to put on moonclips. Moonclips for that cartridge are extremely picky about what brass they will and will not work well with so I sort the one that will work with the moonclip I have and put them aside.

450 Bushmaster I also sort. I have found that the Remington Brass has slightly more case capacity than the Hornady brass so I sort it by head stamp. Helps keep the velocities more consistent.

Charlie98 said:

Opening up a box and having mixed headstamps staring up at you is a serious buzz-kill...

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LOL... !

I sort mine and keep them separated. There is some difference in case capacity, neck thickness and even brass quality. I load the odd stuff for rifles that are hard on the brass or when I think that I may not be able to recover it. On the crimped military brass, most any resizing or depriming die should be able to remove the primer. You will have to remove the crimp before seating a new primer. Basically, there are 2 ways to deal with the crimp. You can use various methods to cut it out or you can use a tool made to swage it. Both methods will work and both methods have their loyal followers.

I've come to the conclusion that weigh-sorting empty brass (of a given headstamp) is a worthless exercise. I believe that case volume consistency is more important and am working on a test.

Just recently, I weighed up 50 rounds of once-fired R-P .270 WIN cases, after being FL sized, trimmed to length, primer pockets uniformed, and necks outside turned for consistency. The lightest was 197.4gn, the heaviest was 202.9gn, for a 5.5gn spread. I then weighed all the cases after being overfilled with RL-22 and struck level and got the max powder capacity. The max difference was 1.7gn. Avg was 61.9 w/.373 Std. Dev. The most frequent charge wt. (mode) was 61.7gn. I ran a computer sort and picked 2 boxes of 20 rounds with average case capacities of 61.7 and 62.1gn. with 0.13 Std. Dev. per box.

20 are loaded to the exact same cartridge base-ogive length with the exact same powder weight. I intend to chrono groups of bullets that have been either: weigh sorted light/heavy, base-ogive sorted shorter/longer, or completely random wt & base-ogive. These will be 5-round groups each. Probably not statistically adequate, but that's what I'm giving it. I'll hopefully report back in a few weeks, since I've already had life interruptions to my range time 2 weekends running.

One benefit of sorting brass by headstamp; when you don't have anything else to do, or not enough time to set up your press, etc., sorting keeps you "in touch" with reloading. Often I have a good supply of reloads and several loads to test, so I don't want to reload and I'll just process brass. Once I wasn't reloading (forest fires and ran kept me off the "range" for 7 months and my stash built up) so I just tumbled and inspected about 400, 9mm cases, mebbe 200-300, 45 ACP, and possibly 300, 30-06 cases over a period of a week...

I defineitly do in both handgun and rifle. I learned my lesson where I had worked up a load with Hornady brass and some Winchester brass. I was doing fine with the Hornady based rounds. On the first Winchester based round my bolt locked up. Of course I pulled all of those. With handguns it is less critical for my loads other than an accuracy issue. They print different, but no pressure issues.

You asked "is it worth it?"

To me and MY rifle skill level and need? - No, it isn't worth it. To a 1000 yard benchrester? No doubt it's worth it. Is the investment in time, records keeping and brass management at the range worth it to you? No one but you can answer that one.

An easy way to find out if it will actually matter to you on a practical level is to load up some plinking and hunting rounds, let's say 10 each bullet of mixed brass and 10 each of single headstamp, and take them to the 150 yard range. The resulting groups should be an indication of how important to YOU the effort is.