Did I get lucky?

[justingrosche]

I fire formed 50 winchester 30-30 into 7-30 waters cases yesterday and only lost one due to a split shoulder. None of them were annealed prior to firing. Would you have annealed prior to sizing into the 7-30 die? I thought the loss of only one was pretty good. I had planned on annealing once the shoulder was established.
I've also yet to check for length. I have gone thru and resized them and now realize I should have checked the fired length against the FL sized length to see how far I was setting the shoulder back. Oh well, next batch I will.

[s mac]

I have fireformed several and have never had one split, without annealing. Maybe I got lucky.

[1Shirt]

Bored1 and I formed about 40 of them this week (once fired 30-30) and only had one neck split. All were lightly lubed, and sizing was done fairly slowly.
1Shirt!

[BrianL]

I have done 150 so far with no splits without annealing. I did use good lube and slow speed.

[justingrosche]

I guess I did alright then!

[fryboy]

lucky ..... maybe ... mostly ;) you'll know by the 2-4th firing lolz just dont be stingy with the lube inside the case neck
pretty sure after forming 99% of the cases i have done ( used to feed 3 of these barrels , down to 2 now with me eye on a carbine barrel ) ended up shorter after forming , if you set your dies up to just close the action on a sized case you should be ok ( eg; minimum setback ) but yeah you did alright :P questionable brass gets annnealed first and if not new again after fireforming , for me once fired starts splitting where the old shoulder used to be around 2-4 firings later if not annealed at least once

[justingrosche]

Thanks fryboy,it's good to hear from you again. Steve and I were just talking about you a few weeks ago when we were at the range. No worries, we didn't make up any new lies.:bigsmyl2:

[ironmonger]

I had fire formed cases for my 30 Herrett that is used in a 10" barreled TC Contender. When I went to fire some of the reloads in the 14" bull barreled TC I had case failure with the first two that I shot... and stopped there. I found that the chamber in the 14" barrel was a couple of thousandths larger at the shoulder and neck than the chamber in the 10" Barrel. I am going to start annealing.

I was pretty anal about setting the dies to the actual chamber after fire forming, but never did check the fit in the 14" barrel... I should have. The fire forming was done with Lyman 311359 115 gr bullets and a light load of unique.

I'm pretty sure that if I had not tried the other barrel I would not have had a problem. This probably speaks more to the crappy chambering jobs that TC did than the annealing...

Good thing 30/30 brass is plentiful around here.

paul