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243winxb
Member
Many years ago, brass was annealed standing in water to protect the case head. The torch over heated the necks. Over done brass necks can be pinched closed with your fingers. NOT GOOD.
My old photo.
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kmw1954
Member
Correct. Brass does not quench like ferrous does. Dunking in water serves no purpose other than to chill the piece. I do it becuse I do not want a pile of hot metal sitting right in front of me while I am working. Seems I have an aversion to getting burned. The only reason I do it.
FROGO207
Member
I dip mine in a pot of molten lead. So far has worked out well for me.
OP do let us know how it goes.
OP do let us know how it goes.
kmw1954
Member
Don't know how this method will play out but after I started annealing with a torch I did see a difference.The number of unexplained fliers was reduced tremendously in my 223 bolt gun and the group size was also consistently reduced. My belief is that I improved the consistency of the neck tension as for these rounds I do not add a crimp.
Also I quickly noticed that my sizing was more consistent and that when I trimmed them in my Lee Quick Trim it took less turns and less effort.
Lastly once again I have been criticized for using an unreliable and inconsistent method for doing this but yet I can see results and I haven't spent hundreds of dollars on a commercial machine.
OP
OP
AJC1
Member
Other than my lapua for matches everything I have is range pickups. Maybe that's why I freely experiment so much. Most of my efforts are trying to overcome not just going to the store and buy the good stuff. In a match it matters, the rest is a chance to learn.
OP
OP
AJC1
Member
Well even the max time of 17 seconds is no where close. This case was shot in one of the fluted chambers and would not size even after 15 seconds. I flattened the end with a hammer and it took two good swings with a small ball pien. I believe currently this technique may help stress relieve to prevent cracking but even at the maximum time I used is not softening enough to give the good sizing repeatability we want.
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OP
OP
AJC1
Member
It does stop the migration of heat toward the case head, when heat transfer is effecting the case.
jmorris
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That is going to be highly dependent on the firearm (and shooter). For example my 6mm PPC rifles are all cut with chambers that require case modification to even fit. It’s not “blown out” the same as usual, when fired,because of this. Tolerances are so tight, I can fire a case several times without sizing, just replace primer, add powder, seat bullet. Annealing doesn’t seem to be very important with them. They will shoot 1 hole groups at 100 yards without annealing, ever, for 30+ firings.
With other firearms I have a case won’t last 10 firings if I don’t anneal.
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kmw1954
Member
I'm right on your heels with this thinking. All my 223 brass is range pickup. The range were I work PT is littered with it. So much so I can even be picky about what I pick up. Which these days is mostly Norma and Hornady and Nosler when I see it. Otherwise I have 2 one gal. nut jars full of PMC brass so I have plenty of that. If it has a crimped primer pocket it get thrown into the recycle barrel.
One of my target shooting buddies keeps harping on me to buy some good Lapua or Peterson and I keep relying, One Day.
OP
OP
AJC1
Member
The sizing part is what I am really after and so far I'm not convinced this is the right method for that. In a simular result I was also hoping that it would soften it enough to fire form fully on the next shot, reducing that time.
OP
OP
AJC1
Member
Spend the money when points matter or your paying big money on a hunt. Otherwise we're just having a good time.
kmw1954
Member
This is why I am shooting a factory barreled Savage 223 in our local league. To show what can be done with a store bought gun and ammo the average shooter can reload w/o spending $$$$$$. Sure I could go buy a custom gun and use custom cut dies but then I feel I would just be chasing the crowd. Anyone can do that and many do.
Last year I finished 15th out of 19 shooters and most of them were shooting BR guns in some form of 6mm. Also after the 3 week I git the VID and missed 6 weeks and had to make that up so that added pressure on me to were I was shooting 2 matches per week.
Also this year I will be shooting a new factory barrel and I have also learned much and improved my shooting skill level and have refined my loads. Looking forward to this years league.
OP
OP
AJC1
Member
I miss the varmit Compitition with my dad. The exact same senerio where they were shooting br including my dad and I was shooting 223. I wasn't good enough to spend the big bucks so I shot to learn, get trigger time and spend time with dad. Being around people who enjoy doing what I enjoy doing was plenty at the time.
Douglas Lee
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Thanks for the quick replies, so non-ferrous annealing is a two step process, during which the cartridge case
is heated to a predetermined value, then cooled.
The second step is where I get hung up . . . does the cooling process need to be rapid (using some cooling medium) or
natural heat dissipation. (just let it cool off)
Doug
*
is heated to a predetermined value, then cooled.
The second step is where I get hung up . . . does the cooling process need to be rapid (using some cooling medium) or
natural heat dissipation. (just let it cool off)
Doug
*
Varminterror
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At least some guys THINK this is true.
Varminterror
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Just let it cool. Rapid cooling, aka quenching, does absolutely nothing to cartridge brass.
Unclenick
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AJC1,
The candle method really cannot affect your resizing properties. It is only used to prevent neck splits. What it does is take the brass into recovery, which is the first stage of annealing in which dislocated atoms pulled from the crystal structure by moving grains around during working are allowed to return to their crystal lattice. You can think of the dislocations as little springs pulled taught and trying to pull the grains apart. Heat lets them return to the crystal lattice, which relaxes the spring. Thus, recovery stress relieves the brass and gives back some of the ductility (you can stretch it farther without breaking after recovery) but doesn't change grain locations or orientation, so it doesn't affect strength and hardness a lot. Just some. It is not something you can see in a metallograph, as it requires X-ray diffraction equipment to see what is happening at the atomic level.
If you want to effect a serious change in hardness, you need to go to the next stage of annealing, which is recrystallization. That takes a bigger T×t (temperature times the exposure time) to achieve, and the candle just isn't going to get it there practically. This is where you need to think of a stronger heat source. Recrystallization requires recovery to occur first (which it will do automatically on the way to reaching the recrystallization starting temperature), and then it can nucleate a restart to the grains and give you a new set of crystal locations with zero work hardening stresses. The third stage of annealing is grain growth. This will happen if you leave the brass hot for too long or go to a still higher temperature. This is undesireable for good brass life because it leaves you with fewer but larger crystals. They will have a smaller edge area. This means you can more easily bend the brass past its yield point to deform plastically, so it is softer. But it also means the tensile strength of the brass is lower, and brass weakened this way will build up dislocations more quickly (because all working is working on the smaller grain boundary area, and therefore works it harder), and you will therefore have to re-anneal more frequently to prevent splitting.
Eric Cortina has a video in which he intentionally overcooks brass until it won't hold a bullet but then shows how little reworking it takes to bring it back in and that it still shoots (IIRC, it was just one resizing). But if he reloaded it several more times in that state, it would have started splitting prematurely because of the large grains.
So, all this begs the question, what is so arcane about annealing, and why do some people find it simple and some make it complicated (and expensive) to do, and still others just can't seem to make it work at all? I think this is due to two factors. The tricky one is that while brass is all annealed or put through the three stages of annealing by increasing combinations of time and temperature, how much time and temperature you need doesn't have a fixed answer. A piece of 75% work-hardened brass at the same annealing temperature as a 50% work-hardened piece of brass will recrystallize almost ten times faster. In other words, the harder the brass, the lower the combination of time and temperature needed to initiate the different stages of annealing. Brass that is splitting (assuming no complicating factors like exposure to ammonia fumes) is nearing 100% work hardening. We know this because brass has a specification called the percent elongation at break, which can be upwards of 35% for soft brass and approaches 1% as brass gets fully hard, and running a case neck through resizing and bullet seating doesn't stretch its circumference by much more than that. This means a work-hardened neck will anneal comparatively quickly and have the lowest workable annealing temperatures. It also means people who anneal every load cycle must use higher time and temperature to see any effect at all.
The second thing that confuses the issue is that the strength of the friction grip a given number of thousandths of interference fit between a bullet and a resized neck (commonly called "neck tension") doesn't change over a wide range of hardnesses, as long as the neck is not stretched outside its elastic range. The engineering specification called Young's Modulus or The Modulus of Elasticity determines how much tensile stress it takes to produce a given amount of hoop strain (the amount of stretch resulting from applied hoop stress) is the same for all different brass hardnesses. So you can anneal cases over a wide range of hardnesses without changing "neck tension" if you keep the amount of interference fit the same. This means a lot of sub-optimal annealing jobs work just fine. It explains why Bryan Litz's experiment with the AMP machine showed no significant difference between a case annealed with it for every load cycle vs one loaded and fired ten times with no annealing. The only issue with loading too many cycles without annealing is likely to be the brass getting springy enough to refuse to resize consistently for that same interference fit.
The candle method really cannot affect your resizing properties. It is only used to prevent neck splits. What it does is take the brass into recovery, which is the first stage of annealing in which dislocated atoms pulled from the crystal structure by moving grains around during working are allowed to return to their crystal lattice. You can think of the dislocations as little springs pulled taught and trying to pull the grains apart. Heat lets them return to the crystal lattice, which relaxes the spring. Thus, recovery stress relieves the brass and gives back some of the ductility (you can stretch it farther without breaking after recovery) but doesn't change grain locations or orientation, so it doesn't affect strength and hardness a lot. Just some. It is not something you can see in a metallograph, as it requires X-ray diffraction equipment to see what is happening at the atomic level.
If you want to effect a serious change in hardness, you need to go to the next stage of annealing, which is recrystallization. That takes a bigger T×t (temperature times the exposure time) to achieve, and the candle just isn't going to get it there practically. This is where you need to think of a stronger heat source. Recrystallization requires recovery to occur first (which it will do automatically on the way to reaching the recrystallization starting temperature), and then it can nucleate a restart to the grains and give you a new set of crystal locations with zero work hardening stresses. The third stage of annealing is grain growth. This will happen if you leave the brass hot for too long or go to a still higher temperature. This is undesireable for good brass life because it leaves you with fewer but larger crystals. They will have a smaller edge area. This means you can more easily bend the brass past its yield point to deform plastically, so it is softer. But it also means the tensile strength of the brass is lower, and brass weakened this way will build up dislocations more quickly (because all working is working on the smaller grain boundary area, and therefore works it harder), and you will therefore have to re-anneal more frequently to prevent splitting.
Eric Cortina has a video in which he intentionally overcooks brass until it won't hold a bullet but then shows how little reworking it takes to bring it back in and that it still shoots (IIRC, it was just one resizing). But if he reloaded it several more times in that state, it would have started splitting prematurely because of the large grains.
So, all this begs the question, what is so arcane about annealing, and why do some people find it simple and some make it complicated (and expensive) to do, and still others just can't seem to make it work at all? I think this is due to two factors. The tricky one is that while brass is all annealed or put through the three stages of annealing by increasing combinations of time and temperature, how much time and temperature you need doesn't have a fixed answer. A piece of 75% work-hardened brass at the same annealing temperature as a 50% work-hardened piece of brass will recrystallize almost ten times faster. In other words, the harder the brass, the lower the combination of time and temperature needed to initiate the different stages of annealing. Brass that is splitting (assuming no complicating factors like exposure to ammonia fumes) is nearing 100% work hardening. We know this because brass has a specification called the percent elongation at break, which can be upwards of 35% for soft brass and approaches 1% as brass gets fully hard, and running a case neck through resizing and bullet seating doesn't stretch its circumference by much more than that. This means a work-hardened neck will anneal comparatively quickly and have the lowest workable annealing temperatures. It also means people who anneal every load cycle must use higher time and temperature to see any effect at all.
The second thing that confuses the issue is that the strength of the friction grip a given number of thousandths of interference fit between a bullet and a resized neck (commonly called "neck tension") doesn't change over a wide range of hardnesses, as long as the neck is not stretched outside its elastic range. The engineering specification called Young's Modulus or The Modulus of Elasticity determines how much tensile stress it takes to produce a given amount of hoop strain (the amount of stretch resulting from applied hoop stress) is the same for all different brass hardnesses. So you can anneal cases over a wide range of hardnesses without changing "neck tension" if you keep the amount of interference fit the same. This means a lot of sub-optimal annealing jobs work just fine. It explains why Bryan Litz's experiment with the AMP machine showed no significant difference between a case annealed with it for every load cycle vs one loaded and fired ten times with no annealing. The only issue with loading too many cycles without annealing is likely to be the brass getting springy enough to refuse to resize consistently for that same interference fit.
The original reason I started annealing was because after a bunch of firings I was having bullets drop directly into the case when seating and I was sizing with a FL sizing die. So more than anything it was an exercise in extending my brass useful life rather than throwing it away.
The biggest reason I anneal now is neck tension consistency. Having consistent neck tension from shot to shot is one of the bigger factors for accuracy.
The secondary reason is case neck life. Not splitting necks is good, but largely I will wear out the primer pocket before the neck splits when annealing.
Now I anneal for consistency, and consistency helps with accuracy.
The biggest reason I anneal now is neck tension consistency. Having consistent neck tension from shot to shot is one of the bigger factors for accuracy.
The secondary reason is case neck life. Not splitting necks is good, but largely I will wear out the primer pocket before the neck splits when annealing.
Now I anneal for consistency, and consistency helps with accuracy.
tightgroup tiger
Member
Good to see you Uncle Nick. Thanks for the explanation. I'm going to save this.
kmw1954
Member
Yes #2, Thank you Unclenick. Very well explained and understandable. Helped me to understand a few things.
Engineer1911
member
Uncle Nick, thank you for a metallurgical answer to the annealing issue. I tossed my Metallurgy textbook back in the 1990's, but felt my annealing technique was effective without the rose garden window dressing.
westernrover
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I anneal straight-wall revolver brass for the same reason I believe most people that anneal rifle brass do it -- for consistency in 'neck tension.' When we resize, seat the bullet and shoot brass, the case neck is crunched and expanded and then expanded more. To load it again we will first crunch it again and then expand it as we seat the bullet. We might also roll or crunch the mouth crimping it. In an effort to maintain the consistency of the temper, we can anneal the brass before resizing it and loading it with the bullet. The hope is that as the resizing die and/or expander mandrel finish the diameter of the neck, cases with a consistent temper will have a consistent diameter. When the bullet is seated, the spring pressure and friction of the neck on the bullet bearing surface is also hoped to be more consistent from one cartridge to the next. Annealing consistently is hoped to give us some control over the variable conditions of the brass neck. Does it result in greater accuracy on-target? That's hard to say. We can see that it is consistently practiced by bench rest shooters, but the efforts I've seen to prove its worth in accuracy through controlled tests have not been convincing. Does it result in longer brass life? Not unless you store your cartridges over horse urine. Many shooters report they do not lose brass due to neck failures without annealing. But annealing to stress-relieve the brass was the solution to stress corrosion cracking when the British stored their ammunition in barns in India that were full of ammonia gas from urine. It was called "Season Cracking."
Unclenick
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But many other shooters DO report brass failures without annealing. I've personally had a good number of 357 and 44 Mag cases split at the mouths after being heavily roll-crimped, some after only half a dozen reloadings. I've also had 45 Auto brass start splitting after I took a lot through 50 reloadings to measure case length loss per firing. By the time it got to 50, over a third of the original 500 cases had split and about another third had been lost to the Range Gods, and close to a third remained. This, despite using only light lead bullet target loads and a light taper crimp. With rifle brass, I've experienced neck splits, shoulder separations, and other a couple of shoulder splits along the way, especially firing in generous military chambers, and annealing does prevent those issues. By the time you've fired a quarter of a million centerfire rounds, you have usually seen some of everything.
You are correct that annealing by manufacturers was started by military arsenals to prevent season cracking, but those military cases were new and not reloaded. In the same conditions, reloads that had never been annealed would have split even sooner and more completely than the Colonial British new ammo did in the rainy season in India.
As to annealing for accuracy, you are correct that results generally do not give it much support. Nor should it be expected to in normal circumstances for the reasons I gave regarding the constancy of Young's modulus. It prevents much difference in "neck tension" from developing despite differences in work hardening, right up until springiness causes failure to resize adequately. At that point, it will make a difference.
If you can find a copy, check metallurgist Fred Barker's article in the July 1996 issue of Precision Shooting. Alternately, read John Barsness's article in the July 2017 issue of Handloader, which you can find online. He credits split prevention as the primary reason for handloader annealing and has a picture of an example for you to look at.
You are correct that annealing by manufacturers was started by military arsenals to prevent season cracking, but those military cases were new and not reloaded. In the same conditions, reloads that had never been annealed would have split even sooner and more completely than the Colonial British new ammo did in the rainy season in India.
As to annealing for accuracy, you are correct that results generally do not give it much support. Nor should it be expected to in normal circumstances for the reasons I gave regarding the constancy of Young's modulus. It prevents much difference in "neck tension" from developing despite differences in work hardening, right up until springiness causes failure to resize adequately. At that point, it will make a difference.
If you can find a copy, check metallurgist Fred Barker's article in the July 1996 issue of Precision Shooting. Alternately, read John Barsness's article in the July 2017 issue of Handloader, which you can find online. He credits split prevention as the primary reason for handloader annealing and has a picture of an example for you to look at.
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OP
OP
AJC1
Member
You need an award for the best answer I've ever received. Merica!!!!
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