Annealing Brass

[Toddco]

Searched for discussion on annealing brass. Looks like there are a lot of methods out there and a lot of discussion as to whether it improves accuracy or not. Looking for ideas on how to do it and has anyone studied the effects on accuracy? I have tried a few and am unable to tell if i have them annealed properly.

Thanks,

Toddco

[jmorris]

If you want to make sure you are doing it right this is the best thread I have found on the subject http://www.6mmbr.com/annealing.html

I built a machine to do the job it's in this thread.
http://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=344637

I have a few of the "blades" left if you are a project type person.

[Toddco]

i was going to use the drill/socket method as i do only a few now and then. The biggest problem i have is exactly when to take the heat away. Do i do it when the shoulder turns blue, wait a few seconds, or immediately?

[Tuzo]

Prior to annealing my first batch of thrice-fired .223 cases I read, watched videos, and read some more about how to properly anneal brass. The information ranged from neat and clever machines that anneal brass almost automatically to holding the casing with two fingers.

I took the advise described in several pieces of information passed on by "old-timers" who annealed their brass with minimal equipment. Annealing 100 .223 cases required two fingers and a propane torch with a narrow flame tip. The casing neck was heated until a change in color began migrating past the shoulder. It was too much annealing if I felt a bit of heat in my finger tips. No need to drop the heated brass in water. Seconds count when annealing and too long in the flame will result in ruined brass and sore finger tips.

This method resulted in casing necks that have about the same ductility as new brass. I tested this with a pair of small pliers. Prior to annealing the necks of thrice-fired brass took greater effort to deform than new brass.

Hope this helps your annealing adventure.

[Unclenick]

Toddco,

If you want to maximize accuracy and not just case life extension, you want consistent bullet pull. Using Tempilaq temperature indicating wax is about the only way to anneal singly with consistency. You can either buy some 650°F Tempilaq and put it on the neck, or you can buy 475°F Tempilaq and put it just below the shoulder, as the Hornady kit does. This Ken Howell article describes the former. He uses the stick crayon form, but I find the liquid easier to use. Your choice.

[Toddco]

I guess i should mention that i am trying to achieve a more consitent velocity in my hand loads. Am i headed in the right direction?

[SL1]

Todco,

Without knowing what you have already done to achieve consistent velocity, nor what your current velocity variation is, it is hard to answer the question in your last post.

Usually, annealing is not a big part of getting consistent velocities. But, some bench-rest shooters who are doing pretty much EVERYTHING ELSE also anneal, and some say it enhances their accuracy. Whether they have proper test results to support that claim, I don't know. Perhaps one will chime in here if that is the catagory that you are in with YOUR reloading.

SL1

[Toddco]

I have become quite diligent in my brass preparation. It is from the same lot, it is the same weight, the same length. I measure each powder charge and am confident that all charges are exactly or very nearly exactly the same as the next. Sometimes i get a spread of 5-6fps, which is excellent, other times i get a 50-60 fps spread?

[Unclenick]

The Precision Shooting Reloading Guide has a chapter in which one of the authors says he seats primers hard, compared to the anvil touchdown most benchrest shooters use. He says he has yet to fail to get deviation within 10 fps on any rifle doing that. You may want to give it s try?

[Toddco]

I am now starting to wonder if i may need to change some of my components. Powder, primers? Is there any chance that promer pockets are an issue, i see no signs of leakage around any of them. The scale i use is an rcbs electric, every time i check it against my balance beam it looks accurate. When i set my chrony i put it as far away as the cord will allow. I use redding dies, which should give me consistent pressure on the necks. any other ideas?

[dlb435]

You only need to anneal the brass after about 5 reloads. As brass is worked, it becomes harder. In the "Bronze Age" they made swords by hammering the soward edge until it was very hard and would hold an edge. To get the brass back to it's original "soft" condition you need to anneal the neck.
It's really very easy. Get a propane torch, a bucket of water and dim the lights. Heat the neck evenly until it just begins to glow (that's why you dim the lights) and drop it in the water. Nothing to it.

[jmorris]

If you make it glow you have gone too far. All water does is make sure your over annealed brass doesn't turn into dangerous brass if the over heating anneals the base of the case too. Read the information at the 6mmbr link above.

[Unclenick]

Actually, by reading a detailed paper on a brass industry site, I learned the quenching also stops grain growth, which apparently can continue for a bit after the heat source is removed. Grain growth decreases tensile strength.

Todco,

I had a brain phart and mistyped in my last post. Reread and see if hard primer seating helps? The only other thing that occurs to me is matching cartridge-to-cartridge seating pressure. RSI has an instrument for that called Load Force which works fairly well, but it is not inexpensive. It comes with an adapter for measuring gun recoil, too.

[Toddco]

Thanks for the input, i now have some loads tuned and will be heading to the range to chrony them next week. Will keep you posted.

Toddco

[mete]

The Norma method is to put the cases in a tray and add water up to the shoulder .Heat with a propane torch tilll the neck is red and immediately tip over the case into the water.

[amamnn]

For what it's worth

After 57 + years of handloading (ok I admit the first 7 years were all spent at the kid's just helping wink wink stage) I have tried every annealing method I have ever seen, heard, read, dreamed, or thought about. I have read a lot of learned nonsense about the practice--most of which had to do with industrial treatment of sheet brass, which is somewhat different than what we can do at home. I have bought 4 different "annealers" including the highly touted Ken Light machine in both its one and two torch incarnations.

I have looked at downrange performance in annealed and unannealed brass, studied the longevity of the same and formed a few opinions which you can learn from (read here avoid my mistakes) or ignore as you choose. This gets to be a subject on which a great many people with a great lack of knowledge type a great many words--and vehemently.

In my experience, a guy with a propane torch in a dark or light room with or without a bucket of water is only fooling himself if he thinks he is restoring the ductility of case necks of the larger caliber cases, say .243 or larger. He may or may not restore some ductility in the smaller necks, such as the .223 rem or smaller. That same guy with the torch will IMHO see an increased life in his brass as concerns cracking due to overworking it in a FL die. This is not the same as saying that ductility has been restored. Propane torches do not heat the larger necks through and through-- this is something that anyone who wishes to learn the truth can easily find out by just looking inside an overannealed --on the outside--case and scraping off the carbon--you will see the brass on the inside surface has not been heated the same as the outside, ductility has not been restored to all the brass. People who hold the brass and twirl it in the flame generally drop the brass in a bucket of water as soon as their fingers get warm, which stops the annealing process before it has fairly begun due to the low heat of the propane and its tendency to heat the surface of the brass faster than the interior and the splash of the flame. Fingers heat up too quickly to be good guides. Unfortunately, temp-l-lac and temp-l-stick live on the outside surface of the brass too. I've painted those chemicals on many a case and found them to be deceiving. Again--if painted on the underside of sheet brass, shielded from the flame splash they are useful.

Standing the brass in water and blowing a torch over them is so ridiculously ineffective that it has almost ceased to be touted except by Larry Potterfieild and those may be old old films on his Outdoor channel commercials. Those that tout this method do not understand how it WAS done at the factory--the flame method used was not propane, which is too weak to overcome the heatsink of that much water, or indeed much metal out of water. By the time you've left the brass in the propane flame long enough to restore the neck--if in water--hell will have frozen over--if handheld you will have burned off your fingers and incidentally ruined the case--which is where the quenching myth comes from--remember this is not a large sheet of brass but a tiny cylinder--not the same dynamics. I've found several sources over the years that recommend fast heating and slow cooling to be the best method of annealing copper alloys. It seems to be true as far as I can tell. Recently, I heated a .30-06 case way beyond the point where I would consider it to have been annealed and let it stand on a pizza stone. The temp-l-stick on the web and head of the case was unaffected giving the lie to the myth that brass must be quenched to stop the head being ruined. I used a flameless heater to do this. Using a propane flame to perform the same experiment yielded a different result--one that anyone with a torch can repeat.

There is one method that is fairly inexpensive and 100% effective and available to us at home. It's a new product--new to me at any rate--an induction heater. Previously, such tools were very expensive and only corporations running factories could afford them. Today I use and you can use a hand held induction heater to anneal brass and restore ductility through and through. Like any new tool there is a learning curve and if you are all thumbs I would not recommend it.

You will find more information about the tool on this forum as a rather lengthy thread was run here some few months back. We should all thank one of our members, who uses the name Gearheadpyro for bringing this tool to our attention. The tool is made by or marketed by Induction Innovations and sold by various retailers online. Mine was about half the price of my old Ken Light system set up to do all the cases I use.

[Toddco]

just read through the gearheadpyro post about his mini induction heater. It looks like the way to anneal brass for sure. The heat is very uniform, completely encompasses the case neck, heats in a very specific place. I didn`t see what size of coil he used or how long he heated his case necks. You on here gearheadpyro

[Dave P]

Todd, many of us like science projects for being fun, technical things to do in our spare time. But you might want to verify that your 50 fps extreme spread is really an issue. Maybe SD is more critical??

Why do you want more consistent velocity? Do you expect better groups ??

50 fps will change a 308 impact at 600 yards about 1 MOA. Can you do better than that consistently?

Here are some things you can try - I think more important to accuracy than annealing: check cartridge runout; ditch the expander ball; polish inside necks; use better bullets; read Long's articles on Optimum Barrel Time; use better cases; try different powder. And have fun!

[Unclenick]

Toddco,

It never occurred to me to ask the size of the groups that gave you your different deviations? I would not believe I had seen a serious sample in any shot string shorter than 20 rounds, and 30 is preferable. That is not something shooters want to hear, not usually wanting to do that much shooting, but the 3 and 5 shot strings in particular are small enough to be randomly close or far apart and still be members of the same population.

One thing that has come up repeatedly in recent threads is that many people don't realize you need to set a chronograph back far enough to avoid false triggering by muzzle blast and stray powder particles that can false trigger one screen or the other. A fellow with a .338 Lapua found he had to go back to 18 feet before its readings became reliable. I usually use 15 feet because magazines and manufacturers seem to spec their velocities there, and I prefer to duplicate their method just to avoid a variable. Apparently the big magnums can need more.

Setting a chronograph up at a distance can be an alignment nuisance. What I do is put an already sighted-in rifle on the bags so that it sits aimed at the target. I then drop a laser bore sighter into it. I go out to chronograph and use the palm of my hand to find the laser spot and adjust the tripod until my palm finds it in the center of both screens. A bubble level on the beam helps speed the process.


Amamnn,

What exactly are you doing to determine ductility change? Colored oxide layers are on the surface of brass that has been heated, and if you clean them off you just see the color of brass underneath, whether its ductility has been restored or not? I've noticed that if you look at polished new commercial brass and hold it in the light just right there is a very faint color difference where the annealing oxide was polished off, but its really hard to see that difference, so I'm not clear what you are looking for?

Nick

[Toddco]

I use nosler brass and bullets, i have checked runout and have yet to find any over 2 thou. My groupings are all within an inch. I beleive this rifle if capable of much better. I am still experimenting with powder combinations. So yes i am still having some fun with "sorting" this rifle out. I am looking to make all bullets as consistent as possible to achieve the best possible groupings i can, leaving my ability as the only variable. Can you explain what ditching the expander ball will do for me? I have recently started to clean my brass with the ultrasonic cleaners, which clean brass as close to new as is possible. I usually stretch my chrony out as far as the cord will allow, which is approximately 12 feet. The rifle i am working with is a .243 rem 700 sps varmint, which has a 1 in 9 1/8 twist rate in a 26" barrell. I will try to move the chrony back another few feet on my next trip to the range and shoot larger strings of groups. In closing can anyone tell me what "good" standard deviation would be, i have never paid much attention to it. I should also add that i am using Reddings neck sizer and bullet seater dies.

Thanks again,

Toddco

[Unclenick]

I think anything under about a percent of mean velocity is pretty good SD for most purposes. For 1000 yard shooting on a standard long range target it is desirable to get as far below half a percent as you can.

Removing the expander ball increases neck tension. Expanders also tend to pull the neck off axis with the rest of the case in most instances. Increased start pressure results and that sometimes improves velocity variance. If you want to make the tension even more consistent you outside turn the necks and use a bushing die without an expander to dial the tension in where you want it?

Understand that neck thickness has a tolerance and the way a standard sizing die is set up is to size the thinnest in-spec brass far enough, then the expander brings the inside back out to a diameter the manufacturer feels provides adequate neck tension. But if you know the brass is all the same thickness and it is thicker than minimum, there is no point in putting it into a die that will size a thinner neck down. That's just working the brass more (and creating the need for more frequent annealing) than necessary. Once you have the brass all the same thickness, as long as it's not dented, you can just select a bushing that leaves it the right diameter for the bullet on the inside without the expander's adjustment.

Have you tried running your load development by Dan Newberry's method? If the gun is not in need of new bedding, recrowning, or bolt lug lapping, it can usually get you in the range of 1/2" groups at 100 yards before any of the special brass treatment, runout gauges and whatnot come into play.

Nick

[gearheadpyro]

Hello Toddco, I am on here, but late to the party as always.

I've been so busy with work and stuff here at home that I haven't had much time for the forums.

Thanks for the very kind words Amamnn.

I've been working a lot lately in my attempts to automate the annealing, it's taking considerably more time than I had anticipated due to the intricacies of an induction heater (and my limited wallet). I have found a much less expensive induction heater to use in my machine, the engineer (who is an active shooter as well) says it is far more powerful than the mini-ductor. I should have it back (I burnt it out the first time I tried to use it 1 1/2 months ago) sometime this week and will post a video of it in action on my blog.

My automatic machine should be able to handle about 600 cases an hour, with all of the benefits of using an induction heater. I hope to have the prototype running soon. I'm doing my best to keep the price of the finished unit (which I do plan to sell) in the same ballpark as the other automatic annealing machines ($450-$700).

[Toddco]

Thanks for all the ideas, everyone. I think i will wait until i can get an induction heater before i anneal any more brass, it looks like the way to go. I have done some more shooting, i reloaded some bullets with bench rest primers, went up in weight in bullets, and have tried 4 different types of powder. I think i now have the load that i will try to take to the limit. I am unsure if turning the necks on my brass will bring me any better results as i am shooting a factory rifle? Anyone know if it will improve accuracy and how much i could expect at 100 yards? The next step for me will be to start lengthening bullets to see what that gets me. The load i have developed i had all bullets set at what nosler has for length in their 6th edition manual. For the record i am trying to bring the best accuracy out of a remington 700 sps varmint in .243. So far i have put it in to a hs precision stock and installed a jewel trigger. As i am left handed i am very limited to my choice in rifles, it seems the manufacturers occasionally throw out the odd left handed rifle and call it good. So in work with what i can find. This rifle is quite accurate so far. The load i have developed is a 95 grain nosler ballistic tip in nosler brass, with 38.7 grains of reloader 22. This combination produces 5 shot groups that had each bullet touching the others. I am sure that some of that spread is me as i was just down by the river shooting off of my homemade bench that i use for gopher hunting and it swivels so is a little unsteady. So in conclusion i will say that i have a rifle that shoots well at 100 yards so far, i will continue to play with components of my loads until i can get it to shoot sub moa at 600 yards, maybe by that time i may have the barrell shot out and can have it blueprinted, rebarrelled with a top quality barrell, etc. Please keep all of the good ideas coming.

Thanks,

Toddco

[dlb435]

Maybe I made it sound too easy to anneal brass. I've spent a lifetime dealing with metals and know their properties very well. What I can do with a torch and the right touch may not work for most people. All I know is what works for me. After reading over the post here I can see that the goals of many of you are not the same as mine. All I need is good ammo that works well. I'm not going for the ultimate ammo that is perfect at 500 yards. All I need is reliable ammo that works well at 100 yards. (I can't see too much beyond that, let alone hit anything at 500 yards) As for the complex and expensive solutions offered for getting the brass "perfect", I'll just dismiss those. Brass is cheap enough that it is more practical to discard and replace brass than it is to go to great lengths to try to preverve it. I discard more brass because of range damage than I ever have because of metal fatigue. I've never had a split case or other any other case failure. I reload to save time and money. Reloading is not my hobby or my passion. It's just something I do to make shooting more affordable.
If reloading is your thing; go for it! Spend as much time and effort as you want. I think most of us reload as just a part of shooting and a good way to keep cost down. As far as my simple way of annealing brass goes, give it a try and see if it works for you. If not; just buy new brass.
One great things about this forum is the many different view points you get. Guys like me that just want good low cost ammo to the real dedicated few that want the best that can be made. I will say this; when I reloaded my very first batch of ammo I was truly suprised that what I made myself was better than factory ammo.
Regards, Dave

[4runnerman]

Have never found the need for it.I shoot 45 ACP. I never load hot loads or push my brass. I have 150 cases that i am on 14 times reloading.I have lost 3 to split necks,other than that primer pockets are still tight and all is well. Maybe the fact that i load only mid range loads has something to do with it.
I do inspect my brass after fired and also after they come out of tumbler.I think if you are looking for accuracy start with a few different powders,make 20 round groups of 3 or 4 different loads with each powder,Use a vise and see what shoots the best.After that it is no longer the gun or the load it is the shooter.Just my opinion
Thanks