Annealer

[Wendyj]

I’ve got about 250-300 rounds of brass I need to send off to get annealed. 308-7-08 and 6.5 creedmoor. Does anyone know of a reputable company I can send it to with a few week turnaround. Guy that used to do mine sold all his stuff due to health reasons.

[akinswi]

Originally Posted by Wendyj

I’ve got about 250-300 rounds of brass I need to send off to get annealed. 308-7-08 and 6.5 creedmoor. Does anyone know of a reputable company I can send it to with a few week turnaround. Guy that used to do mine sold all his stuff due to health reasons.

Wendyj,

I dont know how much it costs to get someone else to anneal your brass, but a propane torch and a few minutes of your time you can anneal your own brass.

[RC20]

WendyJ:

I do not recommend you try a torch. Its far harder to achieve the right results than many think. Metalgod is an example of a meticulous approach required with a torch.

I doubt there are any reputable companies that do annealing. Maybe an individual here and there.

[Metal god]

Wendy did you try a flyer on the bulletin board at your local club ? There’s likely someone there that will do it for you . I am curious , what did you used to pay per let’s say 100 pieces . There are some machines out there in the $200 range maybe better said would be under $300 that would likely pay for them selves in no time .

RC20 , thanks yeah the socket method is not the simplest if looking to get specific temps below full dead soft annealed . The machines are much easier to get the consistency we all try for .

[Wendyj]

The guy that done it before just asked for a little money for propane. He just enjoyed having company and talking shooting and hunting.
I tried a socket and propane on about 20 cases a month ago and they are now in the scrap brass bin. Saw an ad on some forum at first of the year where you could send off for $25 for 350 rounds. Can’t find it again. Better safe than sorry in my case.

[ed308]

I use the Annealeze. I think they’re around $250. No complaints. It does what it’s suppose do. Easy to use too.

To update, I use the Gen 3 Annealeze.

[akinswi]

RC20,

Its not hard at all to anneal cases with a torch. I dont know what “meticulous” process he has, but its not hard. If you want to go the ultra conservative route you can anneal cases with a candle flame then drop them in water.

Ed,

Do you have the Annealeze, Gen 3 or 2? I wanted to buy the gen two because it came with a tray (which he sells separately now) and the gen 3 doesn’t have the hose attachment anymore that the gen 2 had. Gen3 comes with just a ubolt for the Tank.

Looks like he only has the Gen 3 now.

[Nathan]

It is possible to anneal by a socket and torch. You are looking for the first hint of glow to pull it from the flame. You have to control this at a high level. That said, it is a bit hard to ruin brass.

The Annealeez is better as it just makes this a one time setup.

[akinswi]

Originally Posted by Nathan

It is possible to anneal by a socket and torch. You are looking for the first hint of glow to pull it from the flame. You have to control this at a high level. That said, it is a bit hard to ruin brass.

The Annealeez is better as it just makes this a one time setup.

Not to mention its alot faster. Just Wish you could still buy the Gen 2. I currently only have 50rd range sessions now in large or small rifle. Doesnt take long to do 50 cases now couple hundred def worth the investment

[Wendyj]

Nathan, It may not be ruined. It just got further down on the body than I wanted. I waited until it almost turned red and dropped it on a wet towel. First time trying. Used a deep well so neck was all that was showing.

[akinswi]

I did the samething when I first started annealing keep at it you will get better as time goes on. and you can practice on the scrap brass. I ditched the socket and use a shell holder in a drill and I just spin it slowly evenly thru the flame. its a bit longer because you have to chuck each case in but it does it extremely evenly and its pretty easy, I drop them in water. Remember you dont need a huge flame coming out of the torch just a tiny one

There a plenty of videos you can watch and you can decide which method works best for you remember always wear safety glasses and gloves.

[tangolima]

It indeed isn't hard. I just use propane torch and my fingers. With that I regularly have 20 loads out of a brass. True that I don't do hot loads. But split neck has little to do with the load's warmth. I know it is fun to fiddle with precision. I find that fun somewhere other than annealing the brass.

-TL

Sent from my SM-N960U using Tapatalk

[RC20]

RC20,

Its not hard at all to anneal cases with a torch. I dont know what “meticulous” process he has, but its not hard. If you want to go the ultra conservative route you can anneal cases with a candle flame then drop them in water.

I have read Metalgod process, a fellow by the name of Jeephammer used to post here as well. He was doing batches for sale to someone. He was actually looking at grain structure through some kind of fancy microscope to see if he achieved the right consistency or not.

So yes, anyone can grab a torch and heat up the end of the case (WendyJ tried what I did initially and my results were a train wreck)

I can say that as long as you do not heat the bottom of the case up and wreck its tempering, at worst you go too soft and those will shoot fine, not the accuracy I am after but they shoot ok (1 inch or so)

If you over do the heat and your case heats gets mis tempered, then its going to go boom as it will fail.

I have an Annie and go through several steps to ensure I am staying below a full anneal. Partial anneal done often enough has the same outcome as a full anneal.

But the Annie also notes that as the machine is used it changes its output and you need to run 10 cases through first (and I have seen it change 20-30 cases in, so yes I pay serious attention)

Metlagod:

You are welcome. Not the way I want to do it, happy with the Annie, but the dedication, professionalism and details involved is appreciated.

[akinswi]

Its really not that hard.

[hounddawg]

When I first started annealing I annealed 1000's of cases using a plumbers torch and a drill & socket, it is not at all difficult. Never ruined a single case. Then I had a Annealeze for a bit, did a fantastic job on .308 and .223 brass but sucked at the short cases like 6BR and 6.5 Grendel. I now own a AMP which really does a perfect job but is pricy. If I were to start over this would be the annealer I would get

https://www.derraco.com/

oh and they are available on Amazon.com for $315, https://www.amazon.com/%E3%83%8E%E3%...dDbGljaz10cnVl

[Metal god]

I stand by my last post that said

yeah the socket method is not the simplest if looking to get specific temps below full dead soft annealed . The machines are much easier to get the consistency we all try for .

As you can see the hotter the brass gets the softer it gets . If you are looking for bench rest bullet hold/release consistency you can not simply look for a color or drop it when it gets to hot . These methods WILL NOT result in a consistent brass hardness . Will those methods relive stress and extend brass life ? yes 100%

Over the years I've posted my torch method in great detail many times . I do believe I can get pretty darn consistent annealing from case to case but you must use a temp indicator and each time you start a new batch to anneal you need to start from scratch and not base the new batch on the last .

Thickness of your brass , torch heat , angle of flame on brass , rate of spin , time in flame among other things will all effect when your case reaches a specific temp . I've tested these things and believe I have a good understanding how to get consistent results . Sorry I'm not going to give another 12 paragraph post explaining all that again . Been there done that enough times now

Wendy , One of my test I did was to see how long a 308 and 223 case needed to stay in the flame to heat the head of the case to a point of compromise .



These cases were in the flame for 10sec+ . The tempilaq just below the shoulder is 750* and the tempilaq at the head is 450* which is the temp grain structure starts changing in a big way . .

Based on the limited test I ran with the temp indicators on the cases as described . I concluded it's actually hard to over anneal a case to the point of heating the head to much "IF" a single torch is only heating the neck and shoulder area . As you can see it was actually harder then I thought it would be to heat the case at the neck and shoulder area long enough to heat the head to 450* . To be clear you CAN over heat the case head but the case would need to be in the flame for 12+sec and necks glowing bright red ( well over 1200* ) or the torch angle pointed down the case towards the case head . The cases in the above pic were glowing bright red at the neck . Short of that it's not likely your case heads were annealed or softened .

If you plan to use the socket method and want consistent results I recommend 450* tempilq just below the shoulder just out of reach of the flame . When it melts remove from flame . You can do 750* inside the case neck but that's a pain to clean out IMO the 450 below the shoulder wipes right off with a rag if still hot .

[hounddawg]

the thing is annealing is not just temperature but the time at that temperature. With flame annealing the best you can hope for is stress relieving as you can see from this chart. If you were to hold the case in the flame for 1/2 hour it would be ruined. Fortunately a bit of stress relief and softening is all you really need as a reloader. I have some 15 year old .308 Palma cases that had been sized and shot close to 30 times using nothing more than the plumbers torch method for "annealing" until last year when I bought my AMP. Never had a case split at the neck or any other place on them. I have lost a few due to loose primer pockets but that was about it

https://sites.google.com/site/lagado...ress-relieving

bolding added by me and some formatting was done to make it more readable

Quote from How to make it in Brass - Copper Development Association
250-300°C - 482-572°F

stress relief
When cold worked brass is progressively heated, the first effect, at about 250°C, is for the internal stresses to be relieved. This prevents stress corrosion cracking subsequently occurring and also minimises the amount of distortion which may occur during machining. This low temperature heat treatment, which should be applied for 1⁄2 to 1 hour, is known as ‘stress-relief annealing’ and has little, if any, measurable effect on the mechanical properties of the material. The improved strength due to the cold working is therefore retained.

In order to relieve internal stresses without loss of properties a low-temperature anneal such as 1⁄2 to 1 hour at 250-300°C should be used, dependent on section size.

400°C -752°F


As the temperature is increased further, a rather more fundamental change occurs at about 400°C and above and the material starts to ‘anneal’ or soften with time at temperature. The strengthening effect of the cold working is progressively lost, until at about 500°C the alloy is in the fully annealed condition. Restoration of the cold worked properties can then only be achieved by further cold work.


500-550°C 932-1022°F

In order to fully soften most brasses, heat to 500-550°C for 1⁄2 to 1 hour at temperature, then either air cool or, especially for alpha alloys, ensure that excessive grain growth is prevented by a quench or rapid furnace cool.

550°C -1022°F
‘Flash’ annealing can be carried out at higher temperatures for considerably shorter times, but care is
needed to avoid excessive grain growth.

900-940 °C- 1652-1724 °F melting point of brass
source: Wikipedia

[Metal god]

Those timing numbers only pertain to large blocks of brass . It’s not too unlike baking, the larger deeper the dish the longer it takes to get the proper temperature to the middle . You need to heat it up slowly at a lower temp or the outer sections will over cook before the center reaches the correct temp . Cartridge brass is a completely different animal because it is so thin . It’s the very reason we use a 2500° torch for just seconds rather than a 600° oven for hours . We can heat a very specific section to a desired temp quickly getting the core to the correct temp while at the same time leaving the rest of the brass relatively cool in comparison to the heated area

[hounddawg]

the thickness of the sample has nothing to do with those numbers. We are talking about the time and temp to cause a change at the molecular level, not a block of metal. Samples could be .000001 thick or 1 inch thick and you would still have to hold the entire sample at that temperature for that length of time for any changes to take effect

Damon Cali of Bison Ballistics has one of the best articles out there on Annealing that you do not have to be a metallurgist to understand

https://bisonballistics.com/articles...rass-annealing

if you want something a bit heavier and have a degree in engineering this might interest you. It's a free PDF download. BTW he used coupons 1 x 1/8 x 6 inches

https://www.academia.edu/21283133/Re...of_70_30_Brass

[Metal god]

I disagree and believe the entire sample needs to reach the desired temp . Not time related regardless . Your theory would suggest we never get our cases annealed or stress relieved ,which is clearly not true . Please explain how thin cartridge brass is stress relieved when only in the heat for seconds if size does not matter and to anneal “anything” it must be in the heat source for several minutes ?

Did you read your link , it cleary states they use/d bars of material and cartridge brass can be annealed very quickly . How can it be anneal quickly with your theory of time .

[hounddawg]

It's not my theory of time. It is the copper Institute of America's table for annealing of 70/30 brass. But you are right the entire thickness needs to be brought to temperature, it just is not as slow as what you are making it out to be.

Brass (70/30) has a thermal conductivity of around 120, in comparison the thermal conductivity of water is about .598, air is .024 and silver is 419. 60/40 brass is about 96 because of the difference of the alloy. Your cake batter analogy would be a slurry of water and solids with gas bubbles being formed as it bakes so I would guess the TC would probably be around .3 - .5. Just guessing but it would be very low regardless.

edit - if you want to cut down the time to bake a potato take a aluminum rod and insert it into the potato to transfer heat and bake the potato from the outside in and from the inside out at the same time

Bottom line is heat is transferred very quickly throughout a piece of brass. Not as fast as silver, gold, or aluminum but PDQ. Thankfully for our purpose a full anneal is not needed, some stress relief is sufficient.

If you want more of a anneal a flash anneal can be provided by a AMP because it is able to time the anneal down to the millisecond and uses a tightly focused magnetic field to do so. Something that cannot be accomplished with flame. The AMP's Aztec software takes the test case up to the melting point to determine how much energy needs to transfer to heat the mass and alloy of the case being tested to achieve a flash anneal of the neck/shoulder. The test case is unusable after the test but then you can dial in the number provided for future anneals of that brand and lot number afterwards.

I have not noticed any difference either in chronograph numbers, accuracy or case life since switching to the AMP from my Annealeez so for me I don't find the "perfect" anneal really worth the money from that standpoint. It is however fast and convenient and I have no plans to sell mine.

edited at 6 PM EST to make it a bit more readable

[markr6754]

@WendyJ
This is the unit that I use. I had a manual 2 torch unit that I used in the past, but switched to this Burstfire Annealer and Case Prep Center and greatly improved my annealing and my brass processing.
Since purchasing my unit the developer released a new articulating torch holder that greatly improved the process for my short .300 Blackout cases.

https://burstfireguns.com/collections/burstfire

[hounddawg]

This is the unit that I use. I had a manual 2 torch unit that I used in the past, but switched to this Burstfire Annealer and Case Prep Center and greatly improved my annealing and my brass processing.
Since purchasing my unit the developer released a new articulating torch holder that greatly improved the process for my short .300 Blackout cases.

https://burstfireguns.com/collections/burstfire

Nice! A good price and all made in the USA as a bonus, I like the 4 station prep center also

[Unclenick]

Thickness matters because the temperature is not instantly uniform throughout the brass. As you say, it takes time for the core of a sample to approach its surface temperature. In steel annealing, the general rule of thumb for an oven, where the heat source is self-convecting hot gas, is to allow one hour per inch of thickness for the core to be close enough to temperature. This is called heat-soaking. The value of 70:30 brass thermal effusivity (a measure of the ability of a material to exchange heat with its surroundings) is about 1.6 times greater than 4140 steel. In addition, the thermal diffusivity of brass (a measure of how quickly heat will move within the brass once it gets there) is about 1.3 times greater. From those numbers, I would expect brass to need about half as much soak time as steel does per inch of thickness to heat-soak. That may seem like too little difference looking at the thermal conductivity alone, but what happens is the greater conductivity drops the temperature more at the interface with the hot gas or other heat sources, so a chunk of the speed advantage is self-limiting. Then you have to work out from the specific heat capacity and density of the material, how much heat has to move to make a given temperature change. That's what those numbers do.

All that is part of what makes induction heating attractive. The heat is generated internally in the metal. Exact uniformity depends on uniform field strength from the coil at different places in the metal, but, generally speaking, with the right coil, you can make the heat more uniform throughout the piece during a given exposure time. On the other hand, case neck brass is so thin, that the temperature drop to the core is less significant than it is with a thick piece of metal. Based on the rule of thumb we looked at, 25 seconds for a 0.014" neck wall in an oven, and less with the torch, which won't allow as much of a gas temperature gradient at the surface.

As we've been over before, in ascending order of the combination of time and temperature required to achieve them, the stages of annealing are:

1 Recovery
2 Recrystallization
3 Grain Growth

To stress-relieve to prevent case splitting, all you need is recovery. This is using heat to provide triggering energy that allows dislocated atoms to find their way back into the crystal lattice. But there is a complication: The more numerous and extreme (greater work hardening) the dislocations are, the less time and temperature it takes to initiate this process. For example, a 50% work-hardened piece of brass requires about ten times longer exposure to a given temperature for recovery than a 90% work-hardened piece does. Same for recrystallization (for which it is believed recovery is a required pre-cursor). So when you target a particular temperature for a particular amount of time for highly work-hardened brass, it can stress-relieve all your very hard brass completely and do practically nothing to your half-hard brass.

As a practical matter, this means that if you set up your annealing time and temperature to anneal a very hard case and use it for every load cycle, for most of those cycles, it won't do anything. When the work hardening finally builds back up enough over several load cycles for that time and temperature combination to start recovery again, the brass will go back to the stress-relieved state, and you have to start re-working-hardening it over again. So it won't be the same hardness every load cycle. It will, instead, go through a series of hardnesses during which each piece with the same load history will track each other's degree of hardness, but they won't be the same as they were on the previous cycle or will be on the subsequent cycle.

If you want the brass the same every load cycle, you have to find a time and temperature combination great enough to get recovery completed after one load cycle, then repeat every load cycle. Just be aware that any other piece of brass you anneal at that time and temperature that starts with a greater degree of work hardening will go further in that time and temperature, so its hardness won't match the other brass, either.

[hounddawg]

edited for politeness

question for the Metal God and Nick - The test samples used in the studies I have quoted are normally 1 inch wide, 1/8 th inch thick, and 6 inches long. How many seconds do you think it would it take for that piece of brass to be heated through in a 800F lab furnace.