what brands of ammo to avoid for reloading

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I have had a bunch of problems with Privi Partisan in 5.56. I have problems with how tight the pockets are even after the removal of the crimp. I also have problems with the brass getting stuck in the sizing die and tearing the rim off when I have had this happen with no other brands of brass.
 
In my experience Fiocchi brass is excellent.
S&B 's have too tight primer pockets in all calibers I tried (.38 spl, .357 M, 9mm, .45 ACP)
I don't much care for Federal brass: it is usually very thick-walled, something I don't need since I don't use heavy loads.
 
As has been discussed in another thread, I don't use WCC or S&B cases.
When I first started reloading, I made a bunch of test sets of 9mmL with Red Dot to see what-all worked. I made sets of 50 rounds in two lines of 115 RNL and 124 FMJ. Each set went from 3.0 grains of Red Dot up to 4.2 in .2 grain increments, using different brass so I could easily tell them apart. From this, I basically learned 4 things: My favorite gun wouldn't cycle reliably with the 3.0, 3.2, or 3.4 grain sets, I couldn't prime WCC (I concluded that they had a tendency to have off-center primer pockets), I couldn't size or prime S&B (the cases popped out of the shellplate), and the 4.2 grain rounds with 124 grain bullets had more kick than I wanted.
It has been suggested that the WCC and S&B problems may have been caused by using the wrong size shellplate, which is certainly a reasonable thing to check, but I have had no problems at all with any other brands. When I compared S&B cases to others, there was a visible difference between the bases. The extractor ring on the S&B was more like parenthesis () while all others were more like brackets [], and I concluded that if there was excessive force needed, other cases would be held but S&B would pop loose, either when retracting the sizing die or when pressing in a new primer.
Eventually I decided that "all brass is the same" and after I culled the WCC and S&B I just listed "mixed" for case. That turned out to be not true, and I am back to segregating by headstamp.
(I am gradually getting rid of all that original "test" ammo, and recently found that the 4.0 grain GFL set had 35 split cases out of 50; I am carefully testing the rest of those old GFL cases again and will report in that thread when done.)
 
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