Assumed neck thickness gage. Yes, no?

Attachment 301823

This came drifting into the gun club for dissection and discussion.

The old guy carting it in is cleaning out an even older(but not getting any older no more) guy's reloading stash. This was in amongst the stuff.

To my eye it looks like a case neck thickness gage set up for probably .243. Pin is too fat for a .22 but not by much. .22 was the only case we had to try, 90% of this club is shotgun 10% pistol. they don't even have a rifle range so no range scrap brass to experiment with.

Anybody used or have seen such an animal?

I've never seen anything like it.
It might be like some of the oddities that end up among my 'shoot'n' stuff that really doesn't belong with them.
It might give you a hint if he was some sort of target shoot'n, super bench rest guy.
Nobody else hardly bothers with neck thickness measurements.

For neck thickness, I always measured inside and outside diameter, subtracted the inside dia. and divided that by 2.

IIRC often called a 'ball' mic. Get a smaller ball end.

As popper noted, I use a ball mike to measure the case thickness on 300 BO made from 223. Some cases are too thick and need to be neck turned. The ball mike has a ball on the far end instead of a flat.
That said, I think it is a neck thickness gauge.

I would say thats a wall thickness tool of the home made variety. Maybe not for case necks but for bullet jackets when swaging.
Thats an old Ideal indicator mechanical style that reads to .001. If the pivot on the arm is 10-1 then it will read to .0001. But it will only have +- .001 range instead of the original .010

Pretty sure it's reloading stuff. Place case mouth over rounded pin near top of photo, spring loaded long arm ho!ds it tight against post and rotate. OD of case rides against little gizzy with the tiny hole, operating the indicator near the bottom of the picture that registers deflection shown on the graduated scale.

That's my take on it anyway.

Not a ball mic:https://www.brownells.com/reloading/...10090301008005

Just curious if anyone got consistent readings with one, I've used a lot of gages over the years, this one didn't look like it would be able to pass a gage repeatability and reproducibility study.

And I think it might have been a commercially produced item. It was in a plastic case that fit it like it was sized for it. May have been just luck, but length, width and height were a pretty good fit.

I have one I made that uses a mititoyo dial indicator It is accurate and repeats. But it is way different that what is shown in the picture.

I've got a for real ball mike marketed by Lyman, but I can see how that would probably work okay.

Robert

That set up just dosnt look right to me. The case and levers spring tension would be pushing the case neck off the mandrel where the measuring is being done, not up against it meaning that out of roundness in the neck as well as wall thickness would affect it.