Ok then, I was under the misconception that the rapid cooling caused the molecular change like in dealing with ferrous metals.
Thanks for the quick replies.
Doug
I'm curious to see if there is a detectable difference in the targets.
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.
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.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.
View attachment 1099080 My old photo.
It does stop the migration of heat toward the case head, when heat transfer is effecting the case.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.
I'm curious to see if there is a detectable difference in the targets.
Other than my lapua for matches everything I have is range pickups. Maybe that's why I freely experiment so much.
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.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.
Spend the money when points matter or your paying big money on a hunt. Otherwise we're just having a good time.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.
Otherwise we're just having a good time.
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.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.
It does stop the migration of heat toward the case head, when heat transfer is effecting the case.
does the cooling process need to be rapid (using some cooling medium) or
natural heat dissipation. (just let it cool off)
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.
AJC1,
. 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.
You need an award for the best answer I've ever received. Merica!!!!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.