help needed on reloading .223 rem.

[mozeppa]

i sized the brass with a full length sizing die and reloaded them...now i find that the rifle won't go fully into battery.
(yes they were length trimmed to a uniform length & seated correctly to a uniform over all length.)


so i checked a hand full of loaded rounds with a case gage... and sure enough they won't sit flush in the gage , they stick up almost 1/16"
above the gage.

should i have NOT used a full length sizing die and used a 1/2 die?

[Dancing Bear]

Might be shoulder issue. If it's not bumped back enough.

[tunnug]

That was my first thought, resizing die needed turned in a little more, I always check with the gauge the first few before continuing, saves you the problem you're encountering, hopefully it's not too many to disassemble.

[gloob]

If these were not fired by you, and especially if they are a military headstamp, it's possible they were fired in a machine gun or a rifle with an out of spec chamber with way too much headspace.

The brass should fit into a case gauge even before sizing it. At most you should be getting a few thousandths sticking out. 1/16" means these cases are probably garbage. Even if you annealed them so that they could be FL sized back to spec, they've already been stretched and the damage is already done. They'd be prone to breaking in half when fired, jamming your gun.

[gloob]

It's not dangerous to reload a stretched case, by annealing and then sizing. Just be aware they may break and leave the top 1/3 of the case in the chamber. The easiest way to remove a broken 223 case is to load another case/cartridge and lightly push it into the broken one, then extract both out, together.

[tja6435]

I had to get a RCBS small base sizing die to correct the same problem I was having.

[gloob]

Well, one way to tell the difference is with the case gauge. If the base is too wide to fully fit in the gauge, it's going to get jammed in there. If the cases are too long, they will stick out that 1/16th inch and still slide out under gravity. If they're too long, the problem is the brass, not the die.

Brass that is stretched that long won't go back to normal size, unless you anneal it before trying to size it. It just springs back out to the same length as before.

And cases that are too fat won't only prevent your rifle from going fully into battery. It'll also be quite the effort to manually extract the cartridge when it gets stuck in there.

[M-Tecs]

i sized the brass with a full length sizing die and reloaded them...now i find that the rifle won't go fully into battery.
(yes they were length trimmed to a uniform length & seated correctly to a uniform over all length.)


so i checked a hand full of loaded rounds with a case gage... and sure enough they won't sit flush in the gage , they stick up almost 1/16"
above the gage.

should i have NOT used a full length sizing die and used a 1/2 die?

Take a black magic marker and black the case and bullet than chamber a round to see where the contact is. If it's just over the base than you need a small base die for that brass. If it's on the shoulder you need more shoulder bump. If it on the bullet you need to seat deeper.

Head separation is caused by repeated stretching caused by bumping the shoulder back to much. I have been using four five-gallon buckets of LC brass fired out of M249 Saw's since the late 90's for my prairie dog loads. No anneal first sizing was with a small base die after that standard die with .002" shoulder bump. With the loads I am using the primer pockets start getting loose after 10 to 12 firings. I have started neck annealing primarily for increased accuracy but it does reduce neck splits also and reduces the shoulder bump variations. On average I shoot about 5K of this per year. I have yet to have a head separation or ever a sign of a head separation.

I did give some to a prairie dog shooting buddy. He was getting head separations after 3 or 4 fires with both the M249 SWA brass and commercial. His die (when touching the shell holder) was bumping the shoulder back .008" under the minimum headspace. His chamber was .005" over minimum so he had .013" stretch each firing. After I showed him how to properly adjust his dies he stopped having issues.

[gloob]

I must be wrong then.

Every case I've found to gauge as too long (not too fat) by more than the barest smidge, it is still too long if I size it. At first, this meant pulling bullets and trying to size them, again. Then I started gauging pickups before any case prep. Not a single long case ever sized back down to normal without annealing. After anneal (of just the neck, not the base!), they go back to proper size, no problem.

I learned to toss these cases due to breakages, many on the first firing.

Maybe my too-long cases were fired multiple times in a rifle with excessive headspace, to make them more work hardened. Just the luck of my own draw, maybe. I have no way to know what caused them. I've found many in purchased LC "OF'd" brass and also a few in random pickups at my shooting spots.

Are those buckets of MSAW cases stretched (way) too long or just too fat? OP's cases are seeming to be way too long. 1/16th inch is 63 thousandths. Assuming they're not wedging in the gauge. These are exactly the kind of cases I have come across. They don't spring back to just a few thousandths over max. They spring back out to nearly 1/16" too long, still, after full length sizing with solid shellholder contact. This sounds exactly what OP has described. That would be a strange problem to fix with a small base die.

My pettiness makes me curious to see if OP will post his findings.

[M-Tecs]

The RCBS Precision Case Mic takes all the guess work out of this. It is direct reading actual mic. The zero setting is the minimum SAAMI headspace. It's slower and case specific than the Hornaday case comparator but the Hornaday does not give actual dimensions unless used with a headspace gauge as a standard. One other thing to look out for is the expander button pulling the shoulder out some.

With annealed brass I can hold the shoulder bump to around .001" variation. With brass that has not be annealed that increases to .002" or .003".

[Winger Ed.]

A small base die is highly recommended for those.

I had the same problem with a old Colt AR 15 and a M1A.
Small base die fixed it for me.

Lyman sells a set marketed for ARs. It's the one I got.
After a thousand or so cases, I wore out the expander and had to get a carbide expander for it.
They call them 'black dies for black rifles'.

[JoeJames]

I had to get a RCBS small base sizing die to correct the same problem I was having.

What I learned by bitter experience - 556 brass in a machine gun seems to stretch it a lot. OAL cartridge length is critical, small base die is critical.

[CastingFool]

It is possible you may have over crimped your brass slightly. That can cause a small ridge to form at the shoulder of the case and doesn't allow the loaded round to fully enter the chamber.

[charlie b]

What brand brass and where did they come from? What rifle? Does factory ammo fire in your rifle and can you reload it without issue?

Like above, color the case with a permanent type magic marker (eg, Sharpie) and chamber it to see where your problem is. Surplus brass is a big question mark. You have no idea where it was fired, sometimes not even how many times it was fired.

My .223 was a bolt gun for longer range paper punching. I stopped messing with surplus and got two boxes of Lapua brass.

[Hannibal]

If you have a few unsized cases see if they will fit in your case gauge. If not, full length size them and see if they are still too long for the case gauge. If so, try adjusting your die down further but remember, that brass will have to go somewhere so you may need to trim all the necks for proper case length. If your die is adjusted all the way down to touch the shell holder and you still find that the cases are too long for the case gauge either you have a die/shell holder problem or as others have said you may have to anneal the neck/shoulder due to the brass springing back.

Sometimes range brass is a whole bunch of work.

[Texas by God]

It is possible you may have over crimped your brass slightly. That can cause a small ridge to form at the shoulder of the case and doesn't allow the loaded round to fully enter the chamber.

^^^This^^^^


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[bedbugbilly]

I ave had the same experience with range pick-ups that who knows what they were fired in - can be frustrating for sure. I bought 1K of 1 X fired commercial brass from a guy to load for my Ruger American ranch bolt action. I just got don FL sizing them. I use a Lee FL die with the sten removed because I expand with a Lyman M die. Anyway . . . when I started FL sizing, I adjusted the die as I have previously and had the same issue as the OP. I had to adjust the die down so it just kissed the shell holder and walls! Problem disappeared and casings were perfect in the case gauge. I came to the same conclusion as others - the shoulders needed to be bumped down just a kosh.

I'm not an AR shooter but have picked up 223/5/56 range brass at various places and it has reinforced my opinion that not all 223/5.56 chambers are created equal. I picked up about 300 military cases one time - I know they were shot in an AR as I watched the fellow shoot them, pack up and go home leaving the brass behind. I deprived them, swaged the primer pockets and them wet tumbled in SS pins. When I tried FL sizing them, no matter how I set my FL die, I could only get a handful of them to pass the cartridge gauge - and all were in the OAL specs. I finally tossed that batch and another batch of pick-ups from a different rifle/location FL sized just fine. Go figure!?

[gloob]

I have a guess on how cases get stretched this long. 10-20 thousandths over max chamber dimension is already excessive, and 60 thousandths seems highly unlikely. Even a home smith on his worst day would never do that.

In a handgun, it's possible to get sticky extraction when firing hot or slightly overcharged rounds. The slide velocity is too high. Pressures have dropped off, but the case is still imprinted and stuck to the chamber wall when the extractor attemts to pull it out. Usually this results in failed extraction or chewed/ripped case rim.

Is it possible for this to occur in a semiauto rifle? I don't think there are tons of reloaders out there using overcharged ammo. Reloaders pick up their brass and they notice when cases are ruined. But a standard factory round might be hot enough to do this, considering people build their own rifles and can use the wrong combination of parts, creating excessive bolt velocity. With a beefy extractor, maybe the rims don't rip or slip off the extractor. Instead, the case gets stretched a little before it releases from the chamber, when operating on the edge of normal functioning. If this shooter doesn't reload, he might leave a lot of these cases behind, unwittingly, until he sorts out it out a year or 3 later, if he hasn't sold the rifle off by then. If you're the first one at the range after him, you get a bunch of these screwy pickups. If are a few reloaders later, you may only find a few mixed in with the other stragglers.

Another potential cause of "overcharge" from factory ammo is the effect of temperature. This why I figured machine guns cause some of these. After firing off long bursts, and then letting the next round sit in the extra hot chamber before being fired, it goes off with a bit bigger bang. This could results in 95% good cases that may benefit from being base-sized, but a few that are screwed up beyond that.

So instead of being fire-formed to an incredibly badly machined chamber, these cases are being physically stretched after pressures have dropped. Maybe this affects the case differently, making it resist sizing efforts to put them back to length. As well as causing the failure point that is typically 1/3 down from the case mouth, rather than closer to the head which is what you expect from repeated reloading of most rifle cases. That's why we have the term "casehead separations." These super long cases (shoulder-to-head; not trim length), if you anneal and size them, result in behind-the-shoulder separations.

223/556 is just the most common caliber fired in a semi auto rifle which people put together themselves, like lego blocks. I bet they could also happen in some of the other semi-auto rifle calibers, too. It's just less common.

[gnostic]

I had to get a RCBS small base sizing die to correct the same problem I was having.

What he said....

[JimB..]

Forgive the question, I mean no insult, but you said that you trimmed and full length sized, in what order do you perform those operations?