Anyone have experience annealing the necks of (very!) old .22 Hornet brass?
It was almost 50 years ago when I obtained my first .22 Hornet…a Savage 219 shortened to an 18” barrel…from a former part-time Alaskan bush pilot. Fred Phillips was a USAF Navigation Equipment specialist who also held civilian commercial pilot and flight instructor ratings. He’d just been transferred from Elmendorf to the base where I was working as a civilian and, as he didn’t feel he needed a ‘survival gun’ in Central Illinois, he sold me the Savage…along with almost a full case of USAF-issue ammunition from the mid-1960s.. (USAF crews in Alaska were issued M6 .22 Hornet/.410 shotgun Survival Weapons as part of their bail-out gear.)
Needless to say, with almost 1000 rounds of milsurp FMJ, it was quite sometime before I began to feel a need to reload Hornets. And, when I did, I managed to snag almost three thousand Sierra ‘seconds’ from the factory outlet store while passing through Sedalia, MO on business. (They sold those ‘seconds’ BY THE POUND back then!)
Now, the old Savage is long-gone but I’m still shooting that 1960s brass through my current Hornets...a Ruger #3 and a 10-inch Contender…and beginning to lose a considerable percentage to split necks. I’m no newbie to case annealing; I regularly (re)form brass to feed several of my old milsurps but I’ve never tried working with case necks as thin as the Hornet’s so any hints will be appreciated.
Btw: I still have two unopened boxes of that USAF ammo and have never managed to duplicate the ballistics of those original loads…like 45 gr. RNFMJs chrono'd at just over 2700 fps from an 18” barrel. Nothing in any of my library of reloading data comes even close.