About straight walled revolver cases, all my load manuals show a “trim to case length” which I believe is the case length used in their published load recipes.
I reload 45 Colt, 38 Special and 357 Magnum. My problem is I’m lucky if I get 5 cases at or over the “trim to length” out of the whole 100 case bag. Most cases are up to 9 thou shorter that the trim to length. There are a very few that are over the trim to length.
So far I’ve been dealing with the bullet seating by eye, by making small adjustments to the micrometer seating stem on the bullet seater die to get the case mouth at the crimp spot. This custom adjustment on each case makes the whole bullet seating step rather slow and tedious. It would be nice if these cases grew on firing/resizing like bottle neck rifle cases.
I could just trim back all cases to match the shortest case in the bag, but that will alter the pressures from the load manual.
How should I deal with miss matched case lengths?