If one neck sizes, anneals the case neck every three firings, and shoots only moderate or less cast bullet loads, what case life can one expect from a No4 MkI Enfield? Will a fresh No4 Mk2 do better?
Will using appropriately prepared Graf’s 30-40 Krag brass do better? How does PPU Privi Partizan compare to domestic?
What else can one do to extend case life?
Thank you.
I have some Privi cases that are cast only, I don't know how many times I've been through them in 20 years. They do get annealed and sized with a Lee Collet Sizer with a larger mandrel. Some cases have split at 5-6 shots with jacketed loads. Enfields usually have large chambers but the large neck is what gets you. Not setting the shoulder back will help, you are basically headspacing off the shoulder. A collet neck sizer, annealing, and moderate loads are the best you can do.
I have read about using Krag brass, it is a little larger at the back but that doesn't help the large neck.
Proper headspace keeps the case from stretching at the web on the first shot, check that if you can.
I think it has everything to do with how generous the chamber in your particular enfield happens to be. I have a sporterized mark 2 star that is amazing as far as brass life goes (10ish reloads). A couple of 1895 winnie's that are similar. But a WWII era unissued mark 3 that I am lucky to get 4 loadings out of. They are all shot with the same load and the same cast bullet.
I anneal every 5th reload, use an M die and neck size for each rifle.
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Best case life?
- Start with quality new brass. Nothing made in America qualifies. Privi Partisan is probably your best candidate.
- Before firing the first time, create a false shoulder (I use a .33 Lyman M die). Then run the cases into a full length sizing die until the bolt will just close with a slight crush fit.
- Resize with a Lee collet die until you reach the point where they need a bump in your full length die, then back to the collet die.
- Anneal necks about every four or five firings.
When I first started loading for my 1902 Brit with a new #4 barrel that was cut back half a turn to clock the extractor groove, giving it a tight chamber, cases would last me about three loadings. Then my uncle who was WWII armorer then gunsmith, told me a trick - he said don't dry the cases after sizing. Load them with the residual lube. Never had head separation again. I still have some of the original cases. I have a few cases I used for load development and testing that have been reloaded over twenty times. The rims get worn down by the extractor from not magazine loading.
I know some folks would frown upon that practice, saying it increases the bolt face thrust. Well, it doesn't actually - unless one over does it. One can do a test for oneself. Try full length sizing a case with insufficient lube on it. But before you do that, remove the expander plug - that's so one can drive the stuck case out of the die.
Rest In Peace My Son (01/06/1986 - 14/01/2014)
''Assume everything that moves is a human before identifying as otherwise''
I have read that some people use a thin O-ring or wrap dental floss in front of the rim to hold the case against the bolt face for the first firing. It sounds reasonable but has anyone here tried it? The headspace was good on one of my rifles, the other has been corrected.
as I understood it, it depends on the headspacing for the most part. A rifle with more headspace will result in case problems more soon than a rifle with it set just about right. but they made untold numbers of rifles with too much headspace in them. In a military sense, they are only shooting the cartridge and case once, they are not reloading, a little too much headspace results in a little more reliable functioning in hostile dirty environments.
I have too many .303 rifles and carbines and each is reloaded for with all ammo specifically reloaded to each individual arm. I label each box of reloads so I keep it straight. The reloading die makers put bad info in their .303 reloading die boxes when some say to run the sizing die down to the shell holder and then GO down another quarter turn! Wrong.
The .303 headspaces on the rim but must be reloaded to headspace on the shoulder for long case life. Since 1958, I use a light load for first firing to fireform the case in each arm. On the next loading, I set the resizing die only enough to permit a slight crunch fit and record on the label how far I backed off the sizer above the shell holder for each specific arm. I have .303s backed off a quarter turn, others - one half turn and one old MkIII backed off 1.5 turns. I get very long .303 case life.
Adam
I can't answer the question as to brass life expectancy but I can say that for my Lee Enfields, all have typical military chambers that are much oversize so the shoulder gets pushed back about 1/16" and the neck gets sized back to suit 0.311"/0.312" bullets then expanded for my 0.315" cast boolits.
Another issue I found was that due to the very tight/small case neck being stretched from about 0.310" up to 0.315" was that the cast boolits were being sized by the tight neck leading to poor accuracy. Annealing helped by allowing easier stretch but wasn't much helping brass overworking. Next I made a larger case neck expander and that really helped but of course wasn't doing the brass any favours, just the boolits. So, I bought a Lee collet sizer and made a 0.313" mandrel. Now I am just neck sizing and only enough to suit 0.315" boolits.
By only neck sizing and to suit my boolits I have reduced the overworking of the brass dramatically. That has to help.
I have been planning to run some tests to see how many reloads I can get starting with new brass but haven't gotten to it yet. I have a lot of brass and have not been very good at segregating by number of reloads plus I have not been shooting the .303's for a while. I'll get to it!
Longbow
Brass quality has a lot to do with case life.
Avoid S&B brass as does not lend itself well to reloading, I have had cases split after only 1 or 2 reloads, PPU brass is very good, HXP is better.
I neck size HXP cases until I need to bump the shoulders back and anneal every third reload.
So far, I have had some cases that have been reloaded seven or eight times and are still going strong.
ukrifleman
I have two 303s; a No4 Mk2* and a Ross M10, both Canadian. The headspace (rim) is good on both so I just use fire formed cases kept seperate for each that are NS'd. I use a Redding shortened 30-6 bushing die with the appropriate bushing to give .002 - .003 neck tension on whatever size bullet I use.
I have R-P and Winchester cases that have been fired with jacketed and cast bullet loads i don't know how many times.
I have some SA cases I converted to SR boxer primed and they have been fired 9 times.
I've yet to anneal any 303 case.
Larry Gibson
“Deficient observation is merely a form of ignorance and responsible for the many morbid notions and foolish ideas prevailing.”
― Nikola Tesla
I do that for the first firing of once-fired(?) brass to set the headspace. Seems to work for me.Originally Posted by beemer
I doubt that even 10% of the Lee Enfield variants that supposedly have "excessive headspace" would accept a no-go gauge. They are overwhelmingly well within the headspace criteria set by Great Britain for the cartridge and rifle.
BTW, if you want a glimpse of the case side of the issue, measure the rim on an assortment of .303 British of various manufacturers. You will find that military brass, whether DAC, Radway Green, Greek HXP, etc is substantially thicker than the stuff pawned off on shooters these days from S&B and North American manufacturers like Winchester, etc.
Privi Partisan, on the other hand, not only measures pretty much the same as military ball cases at the rim as well as case thickness at the web and shoulder. I have the pictures to prove it... The people at Privi knew what they were doing when they set up to reload .303 Brit. (not thinking of reloaders probably, but perhaps that their cases might end up loaded with military ball that might be fired from somebody's Bren gun).
The Brits, when they settled on the .303 British cartridge and chamber dimensions, were at the end of a century of colonial wars and uprisings, most of them taking place in miserable places with miserable climates, monsoons, humidity, etc. When the time came to fight the next uprising in some barely known colonial malaria and cholera ridden hellhole, they probably presumed rather than suspected, that ammunition drawn from musty colonial arsenals might well be covered with verdigris, etc after a decade or so of being subjected to high heat and humidity in storage for the inevitable next war. And the cartridge was designed at a time of black powder propellants - and resulting fouling.
The last thing the pragmatic Brit military mind wanted in this new bolt action rifle and ammunition was cases that would not chamber because of corrosion, fouling, (or as it turned out, the mud of Flanders instead of somewhere in a muddy jungle). Therefore, we have the chamber dimensions we have today: designed for fighting wars in crappy places, not reloading. The Canadian Ross rifle's chamber should be a precautionary tale: a chamber that could not deal with the substandard ammunition the Brits foisted off on their colonials, that at times even defeated the Lee Enfields. Then you have the mud.
As for obtaining case life in chambers intended for certain reliability rather than case life, o-rings, tape, and thread will get you something of the exact same end as forming a false shoulder that allows chambering with a crush fit: the base of the rim tight against the face of the bolt at the moment of firing. That reduces some degree of the initial stretching above the web that leads to case separations at some point.
What it DOESN'T get you is that the case is not tightly headspacing on the shoulder rather than on the rim, as it is if you use the false shoulder method to avoid "excessive headspace". So the base of the case is tight to the bolt face thanks to your o-ring or whatever, but only that.
But everything in front of that is just hanging out on it's own at the point of firing, somewhere in the middle of that large military chamber. It may well be laying in contact with the bottom of the chamber with neck misaligned with the axis of the barrel, etc. If you put a micrometer to .303 British cases that are range pickups, you will eventually find more than a few that are far more elliptical in dimensions than can be explained away as a poor chambering job or chambering reamer. When the cartridge is ignited in that government chamber, that brass is going to expand to the walls of the chamber and neck as well as forward to the shoulder. If that means mostly expanding upwards from lying on the base of the chamber while expanding forward to meet the chamber shoulder, it will do that. But it will expand, whatever you do or don't do beforehand to manage the expansion.
If you're hoping to get equilateral expansion of your brass at first firing without any stretching forward at any point, o-rings, tape, and thread aren't it. A false shoulder is. With a case tight against the bolt face at the rear, and tight against the shoulder at the front, centered in the neck portion by the false shoulder, the case is as close to being completely on the same axis of the barrel as you can hope for at the point of first firing. And tight against bolt face and shoulder, the least resistance to the expansion of the case at firing is outward in all directions for the brass between those two surfaces of contact.
Accompany this with neck sizing only until you find you need to bump the shoulder a bit, and that will give you your best case life (with annealing case necks and shoulders). And probably (if you have a particularly accurate Lee Enfield) better accuracy due to better case/bullet alignment with the ball seate/leade.
This is why many with more than one Lee-Enfield segregate their cases to the individual rifles: for each rifle, the cases it uses are fire-formed to headspace in that rifle.
How much doing any of this prior to first firing is worth to each individual Lee-Enfield owner is up to them. Having extremely accurate Lee Enfields that I want the best performance from, both cast and jacketed, (and being as cheap as my ancestral Scots ancestors supposedly are), I am more than happy to take the small additional time to go the false shoulder route with new brass. And properly neck sized/expanded cases for the .315" cast bullets that is the size that delivers the best groups out of cast. The cases for jacketed bullets are set aside after first firing, exclusively for jacketed use.
Last edited by MOC031; 03-25-2021 at 02:14 PM.
Yep. Agreed. Particularly in Lee Enfield type situations i.e. large chambers.
That is not my experience, having gone through thousands of rounds of HXP varying in year of manufacture from 1969 through to the 80's, starting in the early 90's and forward to current day. I'm down to my last eight 48-round boxes of 1969 ball, and the cases from the ones fired before are still in use. I really like HXP, but after measuring rims and case wall thicknesses versus Privi Partisan, they are for all intents and purposes identical, and in that identical when compared with wartime military cases. And for that matter, with the cases from 1930's and 1940's Dominion civilian ammunition manufactured and sold for hunting.PPU brass is very good, HXP is better.
Maybe more importantly, in North America at least, Greek HXP now seems to be as easy to find as rocking horse poop. And the little I see advertised, the sellers are pricing it as though it were gold. Opting for the much more readily available Privy Partisan cases or ammunition loaded with their 174 gr FMJ or different weight hunting bullets is probably the only realistic choice for the best cases available for reloading these days.
What I have never done, and probably should, is compare the grouping ability of PPU 174 gr FMJ to that of HXP at 300-400 yards.
Lots of good advice here. I let my 303 brass form to the chamber first time out then only neck size, so that the shoulder stays conformed to the chamber. My sets of brass are at 12 reloads each without failures and without annealing.
Hick: Iron sights!
Excellent info. If I could find someone who could set the barrel back on two enfields I'd be a happy camper. But set the barrel 1 full turn, rechamber to closer specs than the Brits. .065 for the go and .070 for the no go. American cases are junk. Thin brass especially at the solid part where the case body meets the case head. They nominally measure less than .455 which is what they should be. Case head thickness also leave a lot to be desired. PRIVI, HXP, And the South African 303 are all good brass except the South African is berdan primed. I posted once on the Gunboards Forums in the Lee Enfield section about when the standards for Lee Enfield barrels were again after the war were tightened up to pre war specs. Seems that a huge number of barrels were made during the war years and The Brits were not just scrapping any. So unless your Lee Enfield was made later than 1950 you have a WWII barrel. Oh sure a lot of returning Lee Enfields were refurbished but they sure as heck didn't trash any barrels they didn't have to. So basically were stuck with what we have. If anyone has any of the 1950's mummy wrapped Lee Enfields I definitely would love to hear what your barrels slug out at. And as said it's not so much the longish headspace. It's those shove in a cartridge and a half gallon of mud and no worries it'l go bang. Thats one of the reasons for setting back the barrel 1 full turn, rechamber with a sammi spec. long cone reamer and set the headspace tight. Were either hunters and cast bullet shooters not going to war. Frank
Thank you everyone. I have been afraid to use scarce brass but now can confidently get my SMLE back in action.
Privi Partisan brass is just about as good as it gets as well as readily available in North America. You can even find the 50 pc bags of brass at pretty good discounts once in a while. Graf's had a sale on it a while back if I remember correctly. So you don't have to worry about 'scarce'.
PPU brass is great and the best you can get tiday. Winchester is also a great choice. One I would avoid is Sellier and Bellot. These always sperate even if you neck size.
Anyone who shoots much .303 British, and is in the market for brass, with a little work you can figure it out for yourself. Others, in other threads in the past, have posted comparative measurements of rim diameter, brass thickness at the web, at the shoulder, etc for military ball brass versus the commercial makes of brass out there. Shouldn't be hard to find with a search, and right now I'm not inspired to head down in the basement to make measurements of assorted brass to compare them here. I never wrote it down the multiple times I've done it before, when Privi Partisan wasn't as easy to find as now, and I was looking for the best brass to supplant my diminishing supply of HXP.
Measure up some military brass, whether WWII, Korea, or modern HXP. Then take your micrometer to the commercial makes of brass you're thinking of buying and take the same measurements. Compare them.
Unless some North American country has changed their manufacturing radically in the last few years, the only commercial brass manufactured to the same brass thickness as military ball cases is Privi Partisan. That brass is for all intents and purposes, practically identical.
If I had to guess, I'd guess that is because Privi Partisan has been manufacturing .303 British military ammunition for other countries like Greece until recently - maybe still is. Privi Partisan still had .303 British Mk VIIz in their military/police catalogue back around 2015 (the "z" refers to the propellant being modern nitrocellulose rather than cordite, if memory serves me correctly). There are more than a few small countries on the globe where the police at least are still armed with Lee Enfield rifles, if not territorial/reserve forces as well. Privi Partisan has made a lot of money over the last five decades manufacturing ammunition chambered for American, Commonwealth, Russian, etc military weapons.
Maybe North American manufacturing of .303 British has changed in the last few years - but I doubt it.
Given that military manufactured Lee Enfields probably outnumber civilian manufactured rifles probably a hundred to one, you would initially assume brass to military standards would be the standard for manufacture. On the other hand, I'd also assume people annoyed with getting fewer reloads out of their civilian brand of brass would not offset the savings in manufacture by making the brass thinner at some points in comparison to military brass.
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