annealing brass

[William Yanda]

Let's start with the question of why do you want to anneal. Are you experiencing splitting?
Then consider, rifle or pistol and what caliber?

For calibers fired in a bolt action, is weakening the base a real consideration?

[ulav8r]

If a weakened (too soft) case head does not blow, it will soon have loose primer pockets.

[GregLaROCHE]

Has anyone here ever tried dipping cases into molten alloy to aneal them?

[Hannibal]

Has anyone here ever tried dipping cases into molten alloy to aneal them?

I have and it works except that I had trouble with small bits of alloy sticking to the necks and causing problems.

Hard to load a case when the neck isn't perfectly round anymore.

[OS OK]

Has anyone here ever tried dipping cases into molten alloy to aneal them?

Never heard of using alloy...did hear about salt...

[country gent]

I use a similar method dipping onto lead but use a very fine silica sand for the medium. I set the temp with my thermometer and tun the cases.
I use a lyman big dipper 10 lb pot. set to 700*
I made a rack round with 3 levels bottom is just that sets in the pot next is a plate that is the case stop, sets the depth of the case in the sand, and last is the plate with a series of holes around the out side edge. this sets the cases and keeps me organized.

In use I bring it up to temp and a little time to normalize thru. I then insert a case into each hole around when I get to 1 empty hole I pull a case and insert another work around the the circle until the batch is done.

Each case gets about a 15 sec soak at 700*. The time and temp are very consistent. On my starline brass I get a very light pink discoloring. The lack of color may be do to the lack if oxygen in the sand mix at 700*.

My sand is a very fine sand used in making glass, but I think very fine glass beads would be good also. I mostly do BPCR cases straight walled. bottle necks may take a tap or two to remove sand

[dtknowles]

The only cases I anneal is .22 hornet. I did a few 30-30 but I have so much brass that I see no need to anneal them. I might anneal my 450 BPE brass and 50-70 brass if I ever get some starting to split.

What works for the hornet might not work for other brass, bigger, longer, fatter thicker whatever makes things different.

Here is what I do for the .22 hornet brass. I first practiced in the dark but once I got the timing down, I stopped doing it in the dark. I stand up the torach and light it. Adjust the flame to a medium burn. I pick up a piece of brass with my thumb and trigger finger. Hold it so the flame hits the neck/shoulder region and twist it back and forth for 2 to 4 seconds. Not long enough that my fingers get uncomfortably hot. Pull it out of the flame and set it aside and do the same for the next one. Repeat until they are all done. I have not had a split neck since I started doing this and I have never had a loose primer pocket. Before I did this I lost most of two boxes of reloaded ammo because the necks split while they were in storage. I had never heard of this happening before, but it happened to me. Two boxes of 50 ea. reloads with jacketed bullets that were in not temperature-controlled storage and most of the RP brass split at the neck. We are talking about Florida, California and Louisiana so not real big temperature swings. Probably 6 years of storage.

Simple not high tech annealing will stop neck splits. Not real important to get a full or special anneal. Just a little anneal from time to time. Now for case forming or benchrest shooting: more precision and a particular temper might be more important.

Tim

[almar]

I just got the annealeze. I anneal everything often for a wide array of reasons. I anneal at 650 deg and use tempilaq. The batch process oven method you suggest is NOT the way to go. I use it on everything from 22 hornet to 45-110.

[slim1836]

https://imgur.com/VqO17RV

I just made my own following instructions off of YouTube, hope it shows up.

Slim

[huntinlever]

https://imgur.com/VqO17RV

I just made my own following instructions off of YouTube, hope it shows up.

Slim

Nice build. By my count, I'm getting about 7 seconds with your cycle, longer than I'd previously thought. I just do it by hand and go by fingers getting hot, not the best method with some diminished sensation and I'm probably paranoid about frying the brass but for my 45-70 cases I get about a solid 4-second count, and with my .338 WM, about a 5-second count. The metal does look annealed, now I wonder if maybe I'm "under" annealing.

[dtknowles]

Under annealed, in what way? You don't want to go to fully annealed. Brass temper is usually stated as annealed, quarter-hard, half-hard and full-hard.

If you want to avoid neck splits, you don't need to be full annealed. It is also important to make sure there are no crack starters in the case mouth and that the mouth is not chamfered to a sharp edge but is chamfered so there is no sharp corner as well. If you don't over work your brass you will have longer life, go easy on sizing and expanding and crimping unless necessary. None of this will matter if life is limited by primer pockets getting loose because of high pressures.

Tim

[huntinlever]

Under annealed, in what way? You don't want to go to fully annealed. Brass temper is usually stated as annealed, quarter-hard, half-hard and full-hard.

If you want to avoid neck splits, you don't need to be full annealed. It is also important to make sure there are no crack starters in the case mouth and that the mouth is not chamfered to a sharp edge but is chamfered so there is no sharp corner as well. If you don't over work your brass you will have longer life, go easy on sizing and expanding and crimping unless necessary. None of this will matter if life is limited by primer pockets getting loose because of high pressures.

Tim

Sorry, what I mean is that I wonder if I'm even doing anything - whether I'm actually reversing any work-hardening on the premise "too little and you're not doing anything, and too much and you've ruined your brass."

Thanks for the notes. Hadn't thought I might be hitting the chamfer too hard, beyond what's needed.

[OS OK]

Nice build. By my count, I'm getting about 7 seconds with your cycle, longer than I'd previously thought. I just do it by hand and go by fingers getting hot, not the best method with some diminished sensation and I'm probably paranoid about frying the brass but for my 45-70 cases I get about a solid 4-second count, and with my .338 WM, about a 5-second count. The metal does look annealed, now I wonder if maybe I'm "under" annealing.

Annealing is a bit more complicated than getting the fingers warm...it's about 'time & temperature' & then about the sequence of how you process the brass.

Here's a page to get you started with the facts. These people have done exhausting research into annealing...

https://www.ampannealing.com/articles/

One of many of their articles...these folks look at annealing 6 ways from Sunday.

[imashooter2]

Never heard of using alloy...did hear about salt...

I use molten salt bath annealing. I shoot for 10 seconds at 850°F using a metronome app on my phone to time them. I pull them from the salt and drop them into a water pail at my feet. Like lead, you do NOT want to get water into the molten salt.

[dtknowles]

Sorry, what I mean is that I wonder if I'm even doing anything - whether I'm actually reversing any work-hardening on the premise "too little and you're not doing anything, and too much and you've ruined your brass."

Thanks for the notes. Hadn't thought I might be hitting the chamfer too hard, beyond what's needed.

Again, I will provide the not scientific but practical, (cheap and easy) approach. You have fully annealed if you can pinch the neck closed with your fingers (without he-man effort). You have not annealed it much if you can't feel the difference between a before case and an after case when pinching the neck with pliers, small pliers not a set of channel locks. Kind of like using wire cutter to check wheel-weights for zinc. You just know what a lead one feels like vs. zinc.

Tim

[huntinlever]

Annealing is a bit more complicated than getting the fingers warm...it's about 'time & temperature' & then about the sequence of how you process the brass.

Here's a page to get you started with the facts. These people have done exhausting research into annealing...

https://www.ampannealing.com/articles/

One of many of their articles...these folks look at annealing 6 ways from Sunday.

Thanks for the source. I actually got this simpler approach from youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Url1QguVhHE. I recall some others talking about it here, too. But I know the metallurgy of all this is a heck of a lot deeper and the process can be much more refined.

[huntinlever]

Again, I will provide the not scientific but practical, (cheap and easy) approach. You have fully annealed if you can pinch the neck closed with your fingers (without he-man effort). You have not annealed it much if you can't feel the difference between a before case and an after case when pinching the neck with pliers, small pliers not a set of channel locks. Kind of like using wire cutter to check wheel-weights for zinc. You just know what a lead one feels like vs. zinc.

Tim

Missed this when I just posted. Thanks Tim, will do.

[pjh421]

I didn’t anneal before I bought my first RCBS precision mic. I would just follow the FL resizing die instructions to screw it down to contact the shell holder, lower the ram slightly and give the die another eighth to one quarter of a turn in order to get “cam over” when resizing. Ignorance is bliss, I guess. Even when all the head stamps matched and the cases had all been fired the same amount (as in I bought a box of factory and reloaded it 3 times) my headspace was all over the place. Pre-precision mic, I didn’t know this.

So now I thought, how the heck can there be four to seven thou difference between cases that were all processed the same? Aha! It’s the case lube I thought. Just like when you swage a bullet core in a jacket, if one gets more lanolin it swages to a greater length in the point form die! Nope. That wasn’t it. I did extensive testing (in my garage, lol) and determined that that was not occurring. Dwell time! It’s got to be dwell time at TDC in the die! Nope. Not that either. The only thing left I thought had to be hardness and subsequent spring back. Just like when you fire a cartridge and the case obturates momentarily while the chamber pressure is high enough and then the case “springs back” by design to a smaller size to allow extraction.

So I bought an annealer from GTC, put it together and ruined a few cases. Once I got it dialed in things improved. These annealed cases mic’ed a lot closer together in the RCBS precision mic after resizing and I thought I had this licked.

Then I noticed how erratic the flame would become as pressure dropped in the little camp stove bottle. So I rigged the annealer to run off of a 20 pound bbq tank. Hmm… not a lot of improvement in flame quality. GTC began offering a double torch modification so I put that on. Now I had two flames that seemed to “breathe”. Something’s gotta give. Don’t know if I needed a better regulator or what but quickly forgot about that when I became aware of the Annie annealer.

I replaced the gas assembly on the GTC annealer with an induction unit. The heat cycle is adjustable by the tenth of a second. Once you get the heat time dialed in for a particular cartridge/head stamp combination you just write it down. As long as you run some junk brass through (I do a dozen) before processing good brass it works very well. This gets the induction circuit all warmed up and working consistently.

I’ve got a small library of heating values recorded for specific types of brass that I have. It’s nice to watch the heat build in the neck and then quickly migrate through the shoulder and stop. This is a very consistent process albeit time consuming and boring. It’s akin to case trimming in that regard.

Anyway the primary reason I anneal is to narrow the field of headspace values I get when trying to bump shoulders to fit a particular chamber. It’s better than the way I used to do it.

[Jungle Dave]

I just do it with socket and drill and dump in water. It's like casting, after one or two, you get the feel of it when it's just right and the temp is right. Do it with all my nitros and bpe's if needed, but especially with a lot of .303's that I size to .30-40 Krag for my Winchester 95'. When I did my first ones back in the 90's, I did not know what I was doing and ruined about 3 or 4 .450 no.2 cases by giving too much heat. Since then, I just go slow and when it just starts to turn color, get them in the water.

[Shiloh]

I anneal in the dark. When the case, twirled in my fingers, just barely starts to glow, it gets dropped in an old Folgers can.

Shiloh