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Old February 28, 2010, 06:40 AM   #1
shakes
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What do you guys do when you get a junk case

I am just curious what you all do if you get a bad case. My case guards hold 50 or 100, and I like to keep them full but don't want to put a new case in with some that have been fired a few times. Drives me crazy if I'm hunting and lose a case, messes up my whole world thanks you are free to pick on me too if ya want over something silly I have a good sence of humer.
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Old February 28, 2010, 07:56 AM   #2
Jim243
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I use to say brass was cheap, but with todays prices, I can no longer say that. Since I bought most of my brass new for hunting, I don't worry if I use 10 rounds just to check my scope zero. I just reload it and put it back in the case. As long as you inspect each case as you reload it, it will not make a difference on hunting loads or you could buy cases that only hold 20 rounds and keep eveything sregregated.

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Old February 28, 2010, 10:28 AM   #3
howlnmad
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If you mean damaged, nonreloadable cases, I either pinch the neck shut and fold it over and put it in the scrap bucket or polish them and put in my wifes craft box. She makes wind chimes out of them.
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Old February 28, 2010, 12:23 PM   #4
5R milspec
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if they are scrape I put them in tha scrape box.and for me I try to load brass for hunt'n like the other gent said.heck just for my 308 I load up 260 brass that I have resized to a 308 to keep me from useing my target brass.and yeah for me I hate to add in a new case all so when one of the cases has split or something of the nature.

and I sometimes make key chains out of old brass.but rather hange them from the mirror of a car/truck than have it to pock me in the balls or leg.
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Old February 28, 2010, 01:01 PM   #5
Myke_Hart
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My bad and berdan cases go in the scrap box for smelting or recycling.
If I smelt them they get made into rods or bricks for making ornate stuff in the lathe.

Sometimes I make solid brass bullets out of them.

308 solid brass in process
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Old February 28, 2010, 02:26 PM   #6
Sevens
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Oh trust us... if we wanna make fun of you, we won't wait for permission to do it! But I feel like I know what you are talking about, so here's what I do.

When I first got rolling in handloading, I simply didn't have much brass. So I would keep a box of 50 together and then I knew how many loadings they had through them. They always stayed together, and I marked the box with a dash to denote how many times they had been loaded.

As I branched in to more calibers...
and got in to semi-autos that chucked brass for hell to breakfast...
and then picked up OTHER people's brass left on the range...
then bought occasional lots of used brass...
...it became ridiculously obvious that it was next to impossible to track my brass or keep boxes of 50 of them together. Pretty soon you can't tumble 300 pieces because you don't want to mix some "5th fired" with some "twice fired" and the truth is -- NOBODY should have to live their lives with that much havoc going on inside their heads. Nobody deserves that.

I'll bet I have... hell... ballpark guess... 20,000 pieces of brass in my man cave. Maybe it's 17,000... it realistically could be 30,000. I don't damn know. I'm sure there are a hundred guys in this forum that have 100,000 pieces of brass.

What I do know is that if I tried to keep them in groups of 50 at a time, my head would explode and the pieces of scattered brain matter would likely total 20,000 pieces.

My suggestion is to convince yourself NOW that it's all brass, and it's all good to go. Inspect AFTER sizing each piece, cull out the suspect pieces and put them promptly in the recycle bucket. I love brass as much/more as the next guy but when you consider how important a job it must do, it makes no real sense to use even a single piece of it that might be troublesome. Your prized firearm... your hands and eyes might pay the price if you willfully kept a piece of brass that you should have junked.

If you want to get away from the pain of a 50-count box that has only 47 pieces of it, you can do that RIGHT now: Take each of your case-guard boxes and dump them all in to a coffee can. Now, there's not a single piece missing, it's all good to go.
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Old February 28, 2010, 03:40 PM   #7
Unclenick
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I've lost track of how much there is in my subterranean haunts, too. My strategy these days is always to buy new brass at least 500 at a time for rifle. 1,000 to 2,000 for handguns. Every match means some are sacrificed to the Range Gods and the non-cognoscenti (the guys who don't look at whose headstamps they are policing). That's just part of the price of admission. The match brass for handguns is kept segregated by load history through the use of labeled baggies and periodic change in headstamp (Starline, Starline +P, Top Brass, Top Brass +P). Rifle brass is likewise in baggies, but is usually given an additional segregation based on gauging the cases to set aside the best 20% for high accuracy and long range shooting.

The pistol practice loads and rifle position practice (except prone) loads are where my OCD comes in and are compulsively collected range foundlings of mixed origin and history, always loaded well below maximum pressures.

Expired brass and Berdan primed brass and aluminum Blazer cases and steel cases, as suggested earlier, get crushed by the flat of my arbor press and tossed into the appropriate scrap bucket. I've got four scrap buckets to segregate steel, stainless steel, brass and aluminum chips from my lathe and other shop tools. The scrap brass gets added to them. Once a year or so, I bag them and take the scrap to a dealer.
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Old February 28, 2010, 09:26 PM   #8
shakes
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Ok. Thanks for the answers. The way I shot today I don't think I need to worry so much about my brass. I couldn't shoot worth a damn today. Will get better when it warms up, hard to shoot straight when your freezing. I'm going to take your guys advice and just sort by head stamps from now on and call it good enough. I couldn't imagine having that much brass, maybe someday. So u guys just store all that in a little kiddie swimming pool in your gun rooms?
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Old March 1, 2010, 01:08 PM   #9
GP100man
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Brass management

I buy a batch & put it in boxes of 50 then start load development , after R&D I load & shoot the 50 ,cleanin as I go Then tumble in on big load as I prepare em for the next loadin .

If I lose 1 I replace from the bulk & it joins in the cycle, I try to replace "missin" brass with cases less fired !

Junk or brass unfit gets the mouth crunched & goes into the spent large primer bucket to be recycled , the small spent primers I load into shotshells sometimes .
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