i bought a bunch of 44 mag brass about 2500 to 3000 ....seller states "once fired"
they were all cleaned real shiney!
so i decapped them ...sized and flared them.
i'm "o.c.d." so i like sorting brass by head stamps up to a point....8 or 9 separate jugs... one for CBC
one for W-W SUPER ...one for PMC .....R-P ....FC you know, nice and neat.
so on to priming....
i use the RCBS bench mounted "APS" priming machine ...its good and it can be fast!
but the primers were going in way too easy....thought it was my imagination.
after priming about 1200 i had a few jugs with all their respective headstamps
all finished ..........when i spied a couple free loose primers in the bottom of the jug.
****....worst fears confirmed.
so i poured out the contents of that jug .....cbc brass....and examined a couple...they look okay.
let me try putting a skinny ice pick inside the shell case ...thru the primer hole ...onto the new primer's anvil on the inside ...and push....no it didn't detonate...it fell out.
so i sat down and did the same over 1200 times ...they all fell out ...of every brand of brass i had.
thought i had a bad batch winchester Large Pistol primers....as they measure by my mic's at .2094
which is only 6 ten-thousandths small.
then used pin gages on the brass .....almost consistently a .209 pin fits in with very little looseness.
my guess is not a half a thousandth loose.
.210 will not go into any of them.
they are supposed to be so tight that you cannot push them back out with a probe ...right?
of course i'm right!
so i looked even closer to the primer pockets.....8 out of 10 has a faint red ring close to the heads surface.
red paint
my "once fired" brass has been fired so many times the primers pockets were loose for him...so he painted the primers in.
then cleaned them in ss pins so well you could hardly tell without using a microscope (which i have)
evidence of red paint on the pocket wall where the flash hole is ...(likely used a q-tip)
also on the winchester brand they were shiney too. except the rim and head stamps were pretty scratched up.
i imagine that my "once fired" 44 magnum brass has probably seen more than a dozen re-loads
maybe more.
i have maybe 10,000 rounds of 44 mag....and that's more than i'll be alive to shoot...but that's not the point.
it aggravates me to be taken by a huckster.
i can't say who i bought from because i bought from multiple sources....that info is lost on me.
spent the last 2 days painting in primers in brass i know i won't want to reload.
i'll leave time capsule notes in the ammo instructing my son in law what's up and why they are painted ....and to not try to reload them as it is more of a time waster than its worth.
ratz!
rant over.