(Mods, Not quite sure where to put this - If this isn't the right place, please feel free to move it!)
I saw a (to me) odd YouTube video earlier. I'll refer to it in a future post. In this video, the maker of the video is stating that neck sizing is evil, wrong, causes hair growth on the back of your hands and the inside of your eyelids, makes you mean to nice people, makes you cheat on your taxes and drive stupidly, and so on (well, not quite, but darn near all that.)
My understanding of case dynamics (what happens with the case when you touch off a round in a bolt action rifle, specifically) is that the brass expands to obturate the chamber, preventing gas leakage past the case; As pressure drops, later, the case slightly shrinks (since there isn't 45k PSI or so pressure inside it any more, forcing it against the chamber walls) and will then extract easily. If you opened the bolt and then re-chambered the same fired case, my experience has been that that fired case will happily chamber with no issues. Maybe a smidge of bolt force needed but no hammering needed to close the bolt. Since it shrank once the pressure dropped, it's smaller than the chamber, unless pressures are insanely high?
The guy making this video, on the other hand, claims that neck sizing causes no end of horrors - Claims that people are having to hammer the bolt closed to get neck sized rounds to seat, and later hammer the bolt open to get the action to open; Claims that people get lug galling from firing neck sized cases; and so on. Claims it hurts accuracy horribly and reduces the life of your brass. He's an "authority figure" to some but, watching his rant, I felt like I was watching Alice in Wonderland or something...
Am I incorrect in my experience that, if you have to hammer the bolt closed on a round, it strongly implies that something is HORRIBLY wrong with said round? My guess would be that someone's running pressures around 65k PSI or something, not safe pressures like the 45k PSI I try to stay near... Severe head expansion + then just neck sizing WOULD cause that, but you're NOT going to solve the CAUSE of this problem by just full length sizing!
And the same for having to hammer the bolt open, to me that implies SEVERELY high pressures, not implies that neck sizing is bad...
In what, 52 years or so of reloading, I don't recall ONCE having to hammer a bolt closed OR open; Call me paranoid if you want but I stop at "the bolt is a teeny smidge sticky to open" instead of insisting on increasing the pressure to the point of the rifle screaming at me "OWWWWWW THAT HURT, YOU MEAN SO AND SO, NEXT TIME I'M GOING TO BLOW UP IN YOUR FACE!" I try to be kind to my hardware!
Has anyone else here had experiences contrary to what I'm saying here? It makes me wonder what in the world is going on there...