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I was over at the range today and picked up a mixed bag of regular and nickle plated 270 bras. I don't shoot that caliber and usually resize it down to 30-06 or 7.7 Jap. Is there any reason I can't run the nickle plated 270 brass down to 7.7x58 for the Jap.?
I've made 30-06 out of .270 no problem. Never made the Jap brass though and don't know how much the brass has to be worked to do it. If you split some at least you got the brass for free.
Shouldn't be an issue. Just don't forget to anneal to relieve the stress off the metal and undue the work hardening.
Going to give it a try, it would be unique to have nickle plated brass for a 7.7 Jap ;)
Not sure how annealing will work with the plated brass. Some considerations are different expansion rates between brass and nickel. difference in the heat points of the 2 materials.
For the amount your expanding I would try it as is on a few and fire them to see how they hold up. I have formed a couple wildcats with nickel plated brass with no real issues so yours should not be a problem. I did notice a slight increase in the force required to re form the nickel platted brass. One thing to do on the first few is watch close for cracks in the nickel after expanding. It is much harder than the brass and may not flow the same
I only picked up eight of the nickle platted 270 brass along with about fifty regular. Guess most of the 270 shooters around here don't reload.
I've resized nickel plated .270 to 30-06 with no issues. I haven't reloaded more than once on that stuff, so I don't know how long it will last-- but it can be done.
I have nickle plated brass i have been reloading for a while. It last. Its how i ID specific loads. I convert all the 30-06 and parent cartridges to .270 Win. Size it up or down, neck turn it and then anneal.
I annealed the 270 brass after trying to open up a neck to .312 for the jap and had the case split. I'm opening up the mouth of the case after annealing then trimming them and running the brass through a FL resize die. After that I'll do a final trim to size. The nickle platted brass is behaving just like the regular brass so far and I don't expect any problems with it. The neck wall thickness might be too thick but both of the rifles I'm planning to shot the brass in has some wear in the throat so it shouldn't be a problem.
Measure the neck on a fired case outside dimension and compare to the loaded rounds neck dia. The throat isn't where the problem will be but in the neck portion of the chamber itself, if the case cant open to release the bullet then pressures rise quickly. Opening up the brass should make it thinner. If you have a ball mike you can measure the neck wall thickness with it.
Finally got all the brass trimmed down to 2.270 after annealing and opening up the neck. Ran two or three through the FL die just to see what happened and found that the brass grows by almost .030. It looks like I'll need to trim a second time which is what I expected but I didn't think the brass would grow by so much. The nickle plated brass is acting just like the regular so far.
Got all 55 cases resized and trimmed, it is a mix of Federal, Winchester and Perfecta brass along with a few 30-06 HXP that got added to the run. One thing I noticed with the Perfecta brass is when I pushed the shoulder back there is an increase in the neck wall thickness where the shoulder of the 270 brass used to be.
I have formed a few hundred 17 Squirrel cases from nickel hornet brass just to see if I could do it.
I wound up using sizing wax with a little moly mixed in with it and I ended up with maybe 10% failure. For most of the failures it dented the neck or shoulder and folded the dent as to ruin the case.
It was interesting to do and once in awhile someone who is well versed in reloading asks about forming cases that are plated.
And I anneal them just like any other case. With most the case coloring of the nickel tumbles off.
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