[SIZE=3]The last few years I've been telling myself not to pick up anything which would require me to get yet another set of dies, bullets & moulds.
You're already loading for enough cartridges I said. So what do I do but pick up another Contender pistol but in 7TCU.
No one else listens to me, so I guess, why should I.
After doing an appropriate amount of research, most saying to not use military 5.56 brass, but rather new .223 brass I figure to use some of this fully prepped range brass that I have a large quantity of. Hey, I'm frugal. So after acquiring a used set of die, for cheap, I took a small quantity of the prepped brass, stood it up in a shallow pan of water and annealed it, step one accomplished. Onto step 2, after liberally lubing the inside of each case mouth I proceed, with some caution initially, to run each case thru the FL sizing die. I was pleasantly surprised to find not a single split neck. This got my confidence level up a notch, so I went ahead and annealed some more brass and then re-sized it. I was cautioned to expect some split necks, but not a one was found. Maybe there's a reason why it's recommended to liberally lube the inside of the case neck? I'm sure that the annealing didn't hurt either.
The resulting cases have virtually no shoulder and after being loaded and fired have very little taper from the base to just below the shoulder, or what there is of it. The only thing I would do differently, if I had any new brass, would be to re-size the brass and then trim if necessary as I found that all of the prepped/fired brass is short by about .020" of the recommended trim length.
from left to right would be a .223, re-sized to 7TCU, 7TCU w/140gr. Sierra(previously fired case), 7TCU w/Hornady 154 gr.