Recently I bought 100 pieces of new PPU brass in 6.5 Carcano caliber for the 91/38 carbine that I was testing. This brass has to be the most curious challenge I have ever seen, thus the comments here in the brass forming/reforming topic area. Here we go:
(1) The case rims are extremely thin (but measure within .001" of the caliber's standard rim thickness) and easily bend or deform when the cases are resized. I had to use the "stuck case remover" on 3 of these when the rims tore off from resizing when using a lube pad and RCBS lube. Now I add more lube to the pad but get marginal help from that. My dies are RCBS, feel they are OK.
(2) The case heads are soft and I see the impressions of the shell holder on them after sizing fired brass.
(3) The web area shows bright, shiny rings where the sizing die (RCBS dies) stops. This suggests an overload, or pending case failure, on 2 times fired brass with published starting loads. These were mild loads that should not cause a case to be ready to separate yet.
(4) The primer pockets are not uniform as some Winchester large rifle primers will seat properly while others (same primer batch) have to be crushed to make a flush fit in the pocket
I considered the rifle could be a partial contributor to all this but it appears to have extremely little use on it. I got the RCBS dies used but they appear correct. I fashioned a .266" expander ball from a .270 Winchester expander ball (.275") and it works well to expand the case mouths to start the .267" bullets I am loading. Right now I am leaning toward soft brass as the answer. The annealing on the neck area of these cases stops just below the shoulder, so that should not have softened the rest of the case bodies. I want to suspect the actual composition of the brass used to fabricate these cases is softer than normal. For future use these cases will be separated for mils cast boolit loads only, hoping to not stress them out of usefulness. I would appreciate hearing others' thoughts on this brass. Thanks.
Thin Man