There is something to post #23. Shouldn't we be inspecting cases AT LEAST that thoroughly?
Yeah, but if you aren't accustomed to checking for something, you won't see it.
I went through something similar to this recently with 9mm. I'd accumulated some 60,000+ cases over the years. Started going through it finally when I found I couldn't buy ammo anymore - divided in to two lots of about 30k.
Separating out S&B steel cased was easy. Used a magnet.
Then I ran across another problem on the progressive, and looked up the headstamp. Found that I had a brand of European brass that had small flash holes, too small for my decapping die (boxer, but the flash hole was much smaller).
So I went through 30k rounds again. (Second time I went through them all).
Then I ran across another problem - tight primer pockets on another brand. So I went through all of the brass AGAIN (this is now the third time I went through 30k casings). I culled those AND this time I went through and pulled each unique headstamp out of the batch, so I could look the rest of them up.
Found out I had some Norinco crap brass mixed in, and some other undesirables (A MERC, etc). So I have to go back through the 30k lot AGAIN to pull those out. This is now the 4th time I've gone through the 30k batch.
And I'm STILL finding the occasional soft-chinese guppy belly, or AMERC brass with a flash hole off center, or a GECO headstamp with a small flash hole that sticks my press.
Moral of the story? After 4 times through the 30k rounds there's still brass I missed, and I was looking SPECIFICALLY for a certain headstamp. Probably something so minor as my brain telling my hand to throw a cull in the wrong bin. (As I found some W*W 9mm in the BAD bin, which tells me that very likely an equal amount of bad brass ended up in the GOOD bin.)
Just a little neuron misfiring to make my hand toss the brass the wrong direction. Or my eyes lying to me.
So I've got a bin full of 50,000 45 ACP brass I've collected over the years, 98% 1x, shot by me personally, the rest range pickups that I got when policing my brass.
Some have small pistol primers.
Find them. Oh, and don't miss any. Certainly your eyes will NEVER lie to you about the diameter of the hole you are seeing, going through 50K+ rounds.
NOW you see why I'm not happy about this crap?
They used one size primer for 100 years and for NO GOOD REASON (it ain't broke) they decide to CHANGE it?!
To hell with that. That's a bad engineering choice no matter what. There's one cardinal rule of ammunition standards. They are STANDARDS, meant to keep everything the same.