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Old December 27, 2012, 11:07 AM   #12
Unclenick
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Join Date: March 4, 2005
Location: Ohio
Posts: 21,022
Rutilate,

The military cartridge case specs are more detailed than commercial cartridge specs. They have recommended brass hardness profiles, for example, and thickness specs at key places, none of which SAAMI has for commercial cases. As a result, the military cases tend to have more reliable toughness. For an AR or a Mini-14 or any other self-loader, they are recommended for that toughness; especially at the rim, which gas guns tend to bend.

If you are shooting a bolt gun, however, that toughness doesn't matter very much except that you don't want brass so soft the primer pockets get loose prematurely (Federal is frequently accused of producing brass this soft, though I've also seen complaints about recent Winchester production). If you want the best made brass, dimensionally, Lapua and Norma brass from Europe will be the choice, but you'll pay a pretty penny for them. I find that if I make a bulk purchase of LC brass, I can usually sort out about 15-20% or so that randomly happens to be about as tight as Lapua and Norma and wind up paying about the same price. But have to put the time in for the sorting and flash hole deburring that the Euro brass doesn't require. On the other hand, you wind up with a lot of additional brass for plinking, off-hand and rapid fire match shooting, and other lower precision requirement shooting, so the best ones can be sequestered just for long range precision loads.

Then you have to ask if the extra precision matters in your gun or not. The only way I know to do that is to use gage tools to identify the most perfect brass I can, work up my best accuracy loads with it, then start putting that same load into the worst of the 80% of cases that didn't make the cut to see if the groups really average larger or not. In many instances, if your shooting platform doesn't let you tune a geometrically perfect load down below 1/2 moa with the best 20% of your brass, you don't see much difference with the other 80%. Some chambers seem almost immune to such variations while others seem sensitive to it, so you just have to try it and see if your gun cares.
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Last edited by Unclenick; December 27, 2012 at 11:12 AM.
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