Apparently I accidentally helped create this forum. That wasn't my intent, and I'm darned sure not qualified to pretend to be an expert on case forming, but I have recently put a lot of time into my 6.5 project, and I have learned a lot about case forming in the process. I want to share a few things, and have a thread in which to ramble on as I continue down this path towards making my own brass.
Background: 20 years ago, or more, my grandpa gave me his '69 vintage Remintgon 700 in 6.5RM. He bought the gun new in the late 70's. He saw it in a local store, where a distributor had found it hiding in a warehouse and sent it to the store on accident. The store kept it, thinking some gun-nut would come along and buy the oddball caliber (so the now-deceased owner of the store, a friend of mine, told my grandpa, who was the gun-nut that showed up and bought the thing). My grandpa never shot the thing much, but as a kid I was absolutely enamored by it. Guns fascinated me; fast calibers fascinated me, and I knew that one day I, too, wanted to own something fast and flat - because, surely I would outgrow the puny old 30-06 one day.
I never outgrew that 30-06. But my grandpa knew how much I admired this mysterious rifle of his, and he gave it to me. I never touched it. Fast forward twenty years. My grandpa died. The rifle sat in the safe another year. I have agonized over whether to shoot it. It wasn't mint but it's very close......but here I am. I have factory ammo, but don't want to use it. And a reloader ought to know how to work with brass, anyway.
My first attempts to make brass involved Winchester and Remington 7mmRM brass. I managed to crumple them, trying to go from 7mmRM to a 6.5x30 of sorts, made by dremeling the bottom off of an old .300WM sizer. Remington .300WBY brass formed a bit better, but the neck was too thick to use.
Member gunwonk sent me five pieces of .300WM (R-P and WIN) that he had shortened and necked to .350RM. I annealed these and ran them through my short .300 die, then my 6.5 die, and ended up ruining one, slightly overdoing one, and making three of them downright pretty.
Member cabezaverde sent me an entire box of Remington 6.5RM brass. They were fired an unknown amount - lengths vary, which suggests some may be fired more than once - but I HAVE BRASS. This emboldened me to pick the project back up.
What I have found thus far, in a nutshell:
-Winchester and R-P brass seems to have thin walls, and as such will not make the trip from 7mmRM to short .30 in one pass. They absolutely must be ran through a .350RM sizer first. The walls won't handle more radical work in a single pass.
-Belted cases of any caliber that have an OD at the shoulder of less than the 6.5RM (this would probably include 300H&H, but I have tried 375H&H and 7x61S&H) leave room between the brass and the wall of the die; this lack of support means that while you're trying to form a new shoulder and neck, the body of the case is buckling. After ~10 attempts to form cases from these 'skinny' cases, I abandoned that effort. I suppose that I now have reason to buy a 7x61 one day, as nobody seems to want the brass.
Federal brass seems to be slightly thicker-walled than the aforementioned Winchester and r-p brass. I am able to take federal 7RM brass and run it through the short .30 die, and 1/3 to 1/2 of it will survive the trip. I anneal, form halfway, anneal again, and form the rest, and each half of the forming operation is done in very tiny in-and-out steps. What frustrates me about this brass is that the defects I end up with are TINY this way. Tiny, but of the sort that I know will cause the case neck to split quickly. But I still end up with a good amount of usable brass.
I also have some Norma brass. Norma brass is notable thicker, and, once annealed, Norma brass will happily take the trip from 7RM to short.30 in one pass, and look perfect when finished. I then anneal it again and run it through the 6.5RM sizer, and......wait. Problem.
Remember that I said the Norma brass is thicker?
My 6.5RM sizer is an old Pacific die, donated by BrassMagnet (have you noticed that much of this project involves donated material? This speaks volume of the generosity of this site's members). The decapping stem is very close to 6.5 diameter itself. If I remove the stem, Norma brass sizes down easily, and looks wonderful. If I do not remove the stem, the brass is so thick that it wedges between the neck of the sizer and the stem of the decapper. The case fails at the shoulder and is ruined.
In order to make the Norma brass form, I had to borrow the smaller-diameter decapping stem and expander from my Bonanza 25-06 die. It will unscrew and drop right in to the 6.5 die. This allows me to partially expand the Norma brass, then after it's trimmed I can fully expand it by running it just deep enough into the sizer to go over the expander, then back out.
At this point, I have very pretty Norma 6.5 Remington Magnum brass, with one problem: the necks are way too thick to be safe to shoot.
Some measurements are in order here:
I do not have the right tools to measure neck thickness, however, I do have a set of calipers that, while imprecise, seem to give repeatable readings, so consider these values to be more of an index than a set of absolutes:
If I try to measure the neck thickness of factory r-p 6.5 brass, I get 0.0120 to 0.0135
Brass formed from r-p or Winchester 300WM or 7RM measures 0.0120 to 0.0140.
Federal 7RM brass, when formed, measures 0.0140 to 0.0155, mostly around 0.0150
Norma 7RM brass measures a very consistent 0.0180.
The upshot:
For the guy forming cases on the cheap, I think - and limited shooting has supported this - that I can 'get by' without neck turning or neck reaming, if I stick to Winchester or Remington brass for use as parent brass.
Federal brass would probably make slightly better brass, and I intend to try more, but I have to get a .350 sizer first.
Norma brass would probably allow me to make some truly match-grade brass, but will absolutely require the purchase of some neck-turning or neck-reaming equipment.
Some random things I have learned while coming this far:
Case lubing is tricky. Lubing rifle cases for regular resizing is easy enough, but for case-forming, if you get a tiny bit too much lube, you make a dent in the case, and the tiniest dent in the shoulder of a case will turn into a crease in the neck, and that crease will ruin brass. By the same token, too little lube will stick the case. It seems, so far, that the best thing to do is lube the case normally, then lightly wipe the lube off the body, and wipe the neck and shoulder pretty hard. Dry bodies stick cases; wet shoulders make dents. If one case works, the next one will need even less lube, as there will be lube left in the die. I have more-or-less worked out a rhythm of lubing a case, wiping the shoulder clean, wiping the body partly clean, run it through the die, then use even less lube on the next case, then on the next I lube like the first one. Lubing with a pad seems to help focus on lubing the body, not the shoulder.
Second, case capacity varies from case to case. Nosler's load data for the 6.5RM shows that, with a 123-grain Custom Competition bullet, I can get over 3250' MV. I don't need that much speed. With either factory 6.5 r-p brass or the converted .300Wm r-p and .300 wm Winchester brass, a maximum charge of RL19 (59.0 grains, worked up from 55 grains, seating slighter longer than Nosler specs) gave me, not the 3250+ that I expected, but an average of 3160.
This is PLENTY of speed for what I would do with this bullet. People do all sorts of magic tricks with smaller 6.5s that won't hold a candle to this speed. But I'm 90 to 100' slower than Nosler specs called for. Part of that may be due to chamber or bore issues, but part of it has to be due to the fact that Nosler shows the 59.0 charge as being a compressed charge; with my brass this charge doesn't leave the case more than 97% full. I fully believe that, given this extra capacity, and given that the 6.5 has a very outdated max pressure rating (52K, IIRC, whereas modern cartridges often go past 60K), I believe I could easily ease past the stated max powder charge, and get some or all of that speed back. Problem is, I don't need the speed. I *DO* want to fill the case up. That's the main problem - I prefer to shoot mildly compressed loads in rifle cases.
The case capacity issue is what led me to try Federal and Norma brass. Federal is slightly smaller, internally, than the R-P or Winchester brass, and Norma is smaller still. I believe that if I formed the Norma brass, turned the necks, and loaded a max charge of RL19, I'd have some very consistent ammo. That'll have to wait; for now I am going to see whether the Federal brass can be used without any neck issues.
If anyone wants to critique, correct, argue with, or ask questions about any part of this process, I'll be happy to answer the best I can. This is a learning process for me, and I'm enjoying it, and I hope I can document the rest of the process and possibly help some future case-former.