Quote:
Originally Posted by dovehunter
When cleaning out my loading cabinet a while back I found 10 .30-30 rounds I had loaded back in the 70s. They were made up with Reloader-11 powder which you can no longer get. I figured I'd just shoot them to recover the cases. When I did, about 6-7 out of the 10 rounds resulted in case splits. I wondered at the time if the cases were too old and/or work-hardened. Obviously I tossed the remaining cases. All were Remington cases.
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If the splits were at the neck, that's called "season cracking". Either the brass was improperly annlealed from the factory or as you guessed, work hardened. A simple anneal before loading them propbably would have prevented that.
Here's a real tear jerker for you. I like to load my ammo in fairly large lots. I spemt the time loading up some .308s a few years back with my pet load. About a year later, I go to the range and accuracy just did not exist, WTF? When I looked at the brass that gave the flyers the necks had spit. When I got home, I inspected some of the unfired ammo from that lot of 500 round and over 300 had split necks.
Salvage time on a grand scale. I could pull the bullet from the split neck brass with my fingers and I used a bullet puller to break the rest down. After repriming the now empty brass, the bad brass went into the scrap bucket destined for the recyclers and the ones with the still so far good necks were annealed. So far, they're still going strong. Now all that extra work in not the real tear jerker part. The fact that the brass was new unfired factory brass is.
I guess sometimes stuff just happens.
Paul B.