Reloading .32-20 Winchester

[MEHavey]

Nickel will embrittle your cases somethin' fierce (as you know)
Interesting thing is... throw them in a walnut tumbler and after a week -10 days....
No nickel.

I'll be honest.... since all I load in 32-20 is cast, the residual bullet lube on the case is all I need to resize.

 

[FROGO207]

Walkalong those plated cases sure look sharp though! I try to stay away from those and keep to plain brass ones. I will say that I have had a pile of 38 SPL plated cases over the years that have been reloaded so many times that the plating has worn off and the headstamps have been peened off them as well. Might be the newer ones are exposed to different chemicals or something. Hard to say but light WC loads and minimal taper crimping sure worked well for me though.

 

[jski]

This thread inspired me to get off my but and load my .32-20 cases. When I bought my M-1905 in .32-20 some years back the only brass I could find was some Starline nickle cases, bought 200 of them. I opened one box of 100 and have been using those for testing and playing. I hadn't owned a .32-20 since my early 20's. I didn't keep it long.

I have had a lot of neck splits with these nickle cases, sometimes when sizing, but often times, like today, when expanding them. Oh, and lube dents in the shoulders if I put on too much lube. I have 53 cases left after the two neck splits today. In their defense, they have a lot of loadings on them. I used Load # 43 today, which of course has already been tested. I still have the other box of 100 new Starline nickle cases, but intend to buy some brass cases.

Starline was quick to inform me, when last I asked about “their” nickel plated brass, that they don’t make nickel plated anything and that was solely done by 3rd parties, e.g., MidwayUSA.

 

[Walkalong]

I did not know that. IIRC, that is where I got them, been a while though. Like I posted, that was all I could find, not my first choice. Overall I can't complain, I've gotten a lot of firings from them.

 

[jski]

Interesting statement from John Taffin in the 2018 American Handgunner:

The .32-20 has an all-important rim allowing bullets to be crimped for use in sixguns, but the .30 Carbine has much stronger brass. The necks of .32-20 brass were lost with regularity until the advent of Starline brass would solve that problem.

Obviously buy Starline brass when reloading .32-20 ammo.

 

[35 Whelen]

I sold my last 32-20 a few weeks ago. I never had a single problem brass being crushed and used Remington, Winchester and Starline.

I loaded a S&W Hand Ejector 4th Change and a Uberti SA and the problem I had, at least with some loads, were the insane extreme spreads, especially with heavier loads. E.S.'s in the 100's were very common and a few actually exceeded 200 fps. It was bad enough that there was a noticeable shot-to-shot difference in recoil with some loads due to the higher velocities. Brian Pearce has done a couple of really good articles in Handloader magazine on loading the .32-20 and he mentions this.

So what I finally found was if I keep the loads fairly light, that is a 115-120 gr. bullet at around 850 fps, using powders such as Bullseye, IMR Target, 700-X and others similar, things settled down quite nicely. Also, as per one of Pearce's recommendations, I used a Lee Factory Crimp Die for crimping. If you look at the cartridges in the photo below, you can see the crimp applied by the FCD.

I really hated to sell the Uberti because it was such a nice looking revolver!



35W