Old Argentine Mauser conversion brass cracking up

[DonMountain]

After "unloading" the Argentine Mauser brass that had been converted from 30-06 brass 30 years ago, I inspected all of them and discovered that more than half of them had cracks about 1/2" down the case from the mouth down over the shoulder. So all of them went in the trash and I am ordering new, real Argentine Mauser brass with boxer primers and start over again. Next time I do a conversion like this I will anneal the cases before the first time I load them. And I better go back and check all of those other converted cases I am using. Although now days I shoot mostly low pressure lead projectile loads in them and just go to bigger calibers for deer hunting and leave these small caliber lead bullet guns for target shooting. Especially those Swedish Mausers!

[ulav8r]

Instead of the trash can, sell to a recycling center or melt them and cast into useful items such as muzzle loader furniture.

[fatelk]

With that many cracks, I can't blame you for just scrapping them all.

Just yesterday I bought several boxes of .45 Colt: someone else's reloads from the 1970's. They were cheap, component value. I just got done pulling them all down. They were all clearly labeled, so now I have a bunch of primed brass, half a pound of Unique, and a few pounds of cast bullets to recycle into new cast bullets.

A couple of the boxes turned out to be unfired brass, one was marked as twice fired, and another thrice fired. On the thrice fired ones some of them pulled too easy so I looked and about a dozen of them had cracked necks, just from sitting.

I think that brass that is a bit hardened from repeated firing or reforming without annealing just can't take the neck tension over the years. I assume they probably would have been fine 40 years ago.