308 brass

[rwilson452]

I went back a ways and didn't find whit I was looking for.

I'm looking for the best ( most consistent) 308 brass. I bought an M1A and this will be the first time I am loading for 308 Winchester

[Bart B.]

Most commercial brass is fine. But none of it first fired in M1As, M14NM or 7.62 Garands shoots as accurate if reloaded. Those rifles never had their bolt faces squared up when match conditioned and shooting cases with out of square case heads added a half MOA or more to inherit accuracy levels.

Rebulleted 7.62 M118 match ammo using Sierra 180 HPMK's tested near half MOA at 600 in those match grade service rifles; pretty good cases to start with.

Is your M1A match conditioned?

[hounddawg]

do a Google search for once fired .308 brass, lots of options out there

If you want match grade a buddy uses this stuff

https://www.luckygunner.com/308-new-...s-1000-casings

[Unclenick]

An alternative, is to get new brass like this pull-down brass.

[T. O'Heir]

"...Primed with CCI #34 Primers..." Geez. I wonder how Midsouth determined that. Unless they did it. You cannot tell anything abut a primer by just looking at it. Mind you, it means the primer crimp removal has been done.
CCI #34 Primers are nothing more than magnum primers too. You don't need magnum primers for any typical .308 powder.
The only thing you need to do when loading for a semi, any semi, is check the case lengths(trim, chamfer and deburr, as required only.), FL resize every time and watch the OAL. Any .308 brass will do nicely. That IMI stuff from Lucky Gunner is a decent price though. .308 brass usually runs about $40ish per 100, depending on the seller.
The most important thing about buying brass, in general, is that neither the name nor high price equals higher quality. Lapua and No$ler are no better than domestic brands. They cost more because they come from Europe. Hornady is just as good. "Good" meaning how long it lasts before it cracks and you have to anneal.

[RC20]

Ok, my often repeated (I should have a sticky here)

RP brass is great. I just shot an MOA .190 x 5 shot group with RP brass that has been reloaded 15 times. No I am not consistent otherwise I would be competing in the old fart league (uh Senior League )

Other than that, mostly I am not impressed with the rest. As good maybe, no bettter.

Lapua is fine but nothign special over RP in my experience. Side by side shooting of same loads (with enough variation to account for any brass variation though the two weigh close to the same) and there is no sudden magic (06 and 308)

Norma is supposedly a leap above, have never had any, its usually really expensive.

PPU is about the same as RP, I don;t like it as well as its a bit harder but I use it a lot in 7l.5 Swiss as its the only stuff I can get and no issues (you don't find once fired 7.5)

My RP is either once fired or range pickup once fired (look at the primers and or who is shooting it). Some I get handed and its in new boxes, others you see the new box.

Range pickup I only had one issue very and it was Lapua (nothing to do with Lapua) that someone had clearly loaded some excessive pressure round (prime pockets loose)

I sill have some that was lower loaded and doing fine.

LC is probably fine but you have to be sure the staking is gone. Forster die will not tolerate even a minimal amount (don't ask me how I know)

I have bough PPU on sale, Lapua on sale, not RP. I am edging towards more and more of .250 MOA and better with the RP.

[bacardisteve]

I run once fired lake city in most my 308 rifles. The ones where Im looking for tiny groups get hornady match brass.

[DukeConnor]

I use lc with 168 or 175 smk's in my M1A.

[Unclenick]

What is usually valued most for gas guns is having a case with a hard head so the rims won't tear off or bend during the rapid extraction they produce. Two years ago, member Bobcat45 tested a series of factory-new never-loaded-or-fired bulk cases I sent him with a 500 gram micro Vickers hardness tester, preparing the brass and applying it to the head and neck and taking photomicrographs of the work. The heads were done in two places. The average head hardness result is listed below:



So that makes LC and Starline look like the best candidates. However, since those tests, a new player has appeared called Atlas Development Group. They make their brass specifically for handloaders, for which they make it with a little less powder capacity and more brass where the pressure ring thins for extra reloading life, and they double-strike their heads, which is how heads are made extra hard (like Lake City). So this is another good gas gun brass candidate. They have put extra effort into controlling the internal capacity of their cases. You get a little bit of brass weight variation (I measured 172.51 grains with SD of .58 grains and ES of 2.40 grains in a 30 piece sample; they claim 172.3 grains average), but it is difficult to find more than a tenth of a grain extreme spread in their 54 grain case water overflow capacity, and that's small enough to make me doubt the precision of the measurement. Pressure and velocity will be about as tight as case influences can encourage them to be. Neck wall runout had an ES of 0.002" in my samples, which is the only place the Lapua and Norma I have can beat it (both about 0.001" neck wall runout ES in my lots of .308 W and 6.5-284), but with most common match bullets that's going to amount to a group spread on the order of about 1/8 to 1/4 MOA in an otherwise bughole-shooting gun, depending on the bullet. Since group error SD adds as the square root of the sum of the squares of the contributors, the difference between the two runout levels would change a ½ MOA group by something on the order of 0.05". So, for any but a benchrest shooter, it is likely to be an error source lost in the noise (though individual guns can present some funny circumstances where that might not be so; as always, you can only try something to be sure of it).

The ADG cases are not inexpensive, running about what Lapua costs, but their extra durability compensates some for their initial price and the hard heads for gas guns is a plus. They can be purchased in small quantity (50) directly from ADG, where they are available either polished or with annealing stain intact (the latter resist corrosion better, but are harder to find in the grass) or in 100 piece bags from neconos.com, though Neco sells only the stain-intact finish.

Anyway, if I were looking for super brass for a gas gun, I would give ADG a try.

Originally Posted by T. O'Heir

"...Primed with CCI #34 Primers..." Geez. I wonder how Midsouth determined that {?}

You can tell from the photo. The primers are the original crimped-in, brass-colored primers the military put into the cases originally: a military Number 34 primer.



Number 34 is a standard military primer designation. It did not originate with CCI. They borrowed it to mean the CCI #34 commercial primer has the same ignition sensitivity as the military #34, which they obtain by modifying the anvil in what is otherwise identical to the CCI 250 magnum primer. An actual CCI 250 is more sensitive than a CCI #34. The top drawing number on this list is the drawing above and is the sensitivity spec met by CCI's commercial version.



The heights listed are for a standard height test (H-test) in which a primed case is placed in an upside-down shell holder with a floating firing pin resting on top of it and the pin is struck by dropping a 3.940-ounce weight onto it from the heights listed in the specification.

[RC20]

That is interesting. My experience with FC was it was really soft and heads tore off easily if there was a bit of stick in a press.

I use it as cycle thorough the sytem once now on the Mil Surp rifles (30-06) - it also seemed to crack quicker at the base.

It might be interesting to experience with it now I am using minimum shoulder bump back.

I did like how it felt handling wise for some reason, a bit shinier maybe and I like clean brass (yes I know shiny is not anything near a have to but its a pride thing and appeals to me so I polish it all very thoroughly - in a hurry I just clean the case lube off and use it but that is rare)

[Unclenick]

That result was a complete surprise to me too. It made me wonder if the issue was not softness but other constituents of Federal's particular alloy perhaps giving it a lower elongation at break than standard cartridge brass has? Like Remington, Federal uses a form of Low Brass, with only 20% zinc instead of the usual 30% for cartridge brass. But they are only 78% copper, with 2% being other stuff. That's more 'other stuff' than most brass has. The NATO cartridge brass spec has only 0.23% other stuff. Federal has three times the iron, at 0.15%, and has 0.17% chromium, which is not an element in NATO brass at all. But that's all speculation on my part. I don't know and would have to do tests I don't own the equipment to do to prove it.

It's also important to be clear that we only had one sample of each case brand in that hardness measuring experiment. If Bobcat45 still had access to the lab equipment, I'd have requested he repeat the experiment for the ADG brass and samples from other lots of the brand names involved, but alas, that is not the case. So there is no way to know if any of those data points were outliers.

This is from a declasified NATO document:

[RC20]

Thanks, its interesting data.

My feel has been that RP and Lapua are dead on equal, seem the same harness and workign with it.

PPU seems to match up in that area but feels harder.

I have not had enough Hornady to get a real opinion though I did not care for it being low weight (not that the mix can't change how good it is)

All in all once fired RP has done me well.

[Don Fischer]

Best of anything doesn't exist. Rather our gonna hear from people that like this brand or that. at some point you may find the brass that you think is best and some will agree with you and some not. So, is it the best? Doesn't exist. For myself I find that Winchester brass is the best! What make's it that? Easy, I can get it around here and it's inexpensive! Works every time till it doesn't work anymore!

[Bart B.]

Originally Posted by Don Fischer

Best of anything doesn't exist.

There is a best of everything for each of us. It's when it best meets our objectives, conditions and standards.

[Bfglowkey]

I had real good results with Winchester brass I bought from Cabelas. This was for a bolt rifle but I got 8 firings and still no failures of brass and my go to kid includes a modest charge of Varget and 168 SMKs. I use Lapua brass I got for cheap for my 180 Juggs and 1K loads and have equal success and accuracy. On my 3rd firings with Lapua atm and it looks like new still

[lugerstew]

I have a batch of about a hundred 243 win Hornady brass with at least a dozen loadings on them, and they still look like new, not even a hint of a stretch line at the case head, and primer pockets still doing great, its like they are invincible.

[Marco Califo]

Wideners is selling IMI 7.62 match brass for $275 per K.
https://www.wideners.com/reloading-s...-brass-casings

[Unclenick]

I have purchased the IMI Match brass in the past. One of those cases was sampled for the list in post 9. It is not hard like LC. It doesn't have to be, because even though there are suggested hardness numbers for these cases from NATO, meeting them is not required if the brass passes functionality testing. But, again, the military is not normally reloading anything, so how resistant the rim is to being bent a little by extraction does not concern them. It does concern handloaders. You can see the difference when you line up the bases of the fired cases up on a flat surface. If the rims have been bent, the case mouths don't line up when the heads do. This means recoil will alter the recoil moment locations during firing and introduce muzzle deflections that alter exact POI.

The other factor with IMI is the primer pockets run about two to four-tenths of a thousandth smaller than U.S. brass, so priming them is more difficult until either the head grows a little or you swage or ream the primer pockets to a U.S. standard profile. I've found this in both their 7.62 Match and 45 Auto Match cases.

[Oldwoody]

Looks like this thread is pretty old, and I know that there are LOTS of EXTREMELY experienced 308 loaders out there, but I've loaded many, many hundreds of 308's for various guns. My experience is that just about any decent commercial brass will support accuracy of 1MOA or better, if trimmed consistently. That said, my favorite is to buy up M118LR surplus, shoot it, and use that brass...reliably consistent, if not quite world-class competitor stuff.

[Unclenick]

Welcome to the forum.

The first post was 8 days ago. Not old enough to declare it a revived zombie thread yet (there was a 14-year-old thread revived on another forum a week back).

Keep in mind the OP is asking about the M1A, specifically. For that and other gas guns, the harder headed brass is generally best for maintaining accuracy through multiple load cycles because they best resist the rim bends that tend to throw cases off-axis in the chamber and cause recoil moments to shift in the direction of the stretched portion, shifting POI slightly.

[Marco Califo]

Thanks Unclenick. I just stopped considering IMI for the reasons you stated.
Isreal is not a NATO member nation, so that may be why they do not comply with the hardness spec.
I do not know of IMI brass has the NATO symbol.