Case shoulder setback on LC Match 7.62 brass?

Status
Not open for further replies.

Adventurer_96

Member
Joined
Dec 31, 2002
Messages
266
Location
MN
A few years ago I came into about a .50-sized ammo can of some Lake City 7.62 match brass of various vintages dirt cheap. After that, I got into reloading and picked up a case gauge.

All of this stuff has been resized and deprimed, but here's the problem. About 2/3rds of the cases appear to have been resized to the point that the shoulder has set back, and the case's base sits below the low mark on a case gauge. In some cases, the case sits up to .009 below the lower level of the case gauge.

Now, I hate to see good brass like this go to waste, and I want to find out if it would be unsafe to load this up and shoot it as blasting ammo in a FAL, for example, that doesn't have a match chamber.

Any ideas on how to save this stuff?
 
FWIW I had the same problem back when I first started shooting Highpower. I had set the shoulder back on some LC cases for my .308 M1 Garand. One of the guys I was shooting with said they would probably be okay...the only risk I was running was to possibly break the extractor if I continued to do the same thing. Once I shot them, I made sure I did not do that again when I resized them. After that, they were okay.

I was loading 41 grains of IMR 4895 with the Sierra 168 HPBT match bullet. They all went bang and the rifle survived the experience.
 
I'm not an expert so take what I say based on this just being a "what if" type of comment.

Isn't this basically just a fire-forming issue? If you loaded up some light loads and fired them, wouldn't that expand the shoulder back to where it should be?
 
Load some bullets "long" to seat into the lands and fireform them like dmftoy1 suggested. Use full power loads to fireform though.

Different brass will set back different amounts since some is softer (probably newer) and some is harder (probably older-more fireings) and "springs back" more. This can be a problem with mixed brass.
 
If it's the stuff with the cannelure on it, I'd probably go through and toss the really short ones.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top