Getting ready for antelope this fall, was shooting some great WW brass in my first year of production Ruger #1, neck sizing only and they got tight.

Called Hornady and talked to Steve in customer service. Turns out he also loads for 6mm Remington and in a 10 minute conversation all my problems were solved. He is one of the most knowledgeable Customer service reps I have ever talked to and super nice guy to talk to.

He tell you to turn the neck?

I had already trimmed and turned the necks. The brass was WW brass and tolerances in weight were + or - 0.7 grains. I did not want to full length resize, hoping to get long life our of the brass, problem was they expanded after 5 reloadings to where they were a very tight fit. My load was not extreme, accuracy of 10 shot groups was 3/8ths inch 9 measuring outside edges of the holes. He found that full length resizing was necessary every 4th reloading.

My plan is to resize these, load them up and save them for serious target work and pick up some every day brass for town dogs that get in my sheep etc.

Thanks for the reply,I also like win brass.
I don't own that die that stops brass growing so I just wind up full length sizing all the time.
I have one die in 06 for neck sizing but gave up years back.
It would stick in the browning and sometimes in the Garand.
Rem bolt would use it ok but pain in the ass to have different rounds and I get confused quite easiely

I always full length size everything. I do not want to risk a no chamber situation.

The weak points of brass is most often the neck and shoulder areas that split/crack. The best treatment for this is annealing. This removes the work hardening that has occurred by firing/sizing of the brass.

The next area that fails is base/web of the brass. This results in casehead separation. Unfortunately, there is not much that can be done to prevent this.

Good Luck
Andrew

The reason I reload is purely in the pursuit of accuracy. My addiction started in the 1950's and many cartridges and rifles have shared in my experience. My favorite 06 and 222 have been the most shot, others a few times. This 6mm Remington is the first time neck sizing only has failed me.

I figure it was just the luck of the draw, but a new lesson for me. This rifle seems to shoot the full length sized ammo just as well as the neck sized cartridges.

One thing about re-loading is there is always some lesson waiting for us. I just wish I had several 100 more of that lot of brass!

I thank you for your responses to my post.

quote:

Originally posted by Ed Fowler:
The reason I reload is purely in the pursuit of accuracy. My addiction started in the 1950's and many cartridges and rifles have shared in my experience. My favorite 06 and 222 have been the most shot, others a few times. This 6mm Remington is the first time neck sizing only has failed me.

I figure it was just the luck of the draw, but a new lesson for me. This rifle seems to shoot the full length sized ammo just as well as the neck sized cartridges.

One thing about re-loading is there is always some lesson waiting for us. I just wish I had several 100 more of that lot of brass!

I thank you for your responses to my post.

Hello Ed Fowler,
I submit to you that if your goal for reloading is purely in the pursuit of accuracy, and you are neck sizing, you are engaged in an exercise in futility. Neck-sizing for accuracy is something to which we refer as an oxymoron.

The most important aspect of accuracy in shooting is repeatability; being able to do the same thing over and over again in the exact same way.

Starting with a virgin case, the first time you fire it in your rifle, the case will expand to obturate the chamber and barrel and then spring back a little. This allows the action to pull out the case so another one can be inserted and fired. The fired case will approximate the inside dimensions of the rifle's chamber, but it will be a little smaller (obviously.) When you neck size the case, the body is not touched and depending on how you do it, neither will the shoulder. Essentially, the necksizing operation only squeezes the neck down to an ID smaller than the OD of the bullet and then if you use an expander ball, that item will push the ID of the neck out to the diameter of the expander ball, which is usually .002 inch smaller than the OD of the bullet.

The next time you fire the necksized case, the case will again expand to obturate the chamber and barrel, but not as much as the last time, because the body of that case had already expanded the last time you fired it and you did not put it back as it was. Same with the shoulder. Now, since there is less energy spend expanding a case that had already been expanded, this energy will be spent propelling the bullet and making a loud noise and report at the muzzle. Granted, it's not much, but there is a difference. Now the case may have expanded a little more than last time, which makes sense and the spring back will be a little less than the first time.

Neck size, ignoring the body and shoulder and we fire once more. Again, the bigger internal dimensions of the case make for less pressure, the obturation occurs once more, a little faster and there is less energy spent pushing the case out because it's at max for the chamber. Spring back once again a little less and the fat case starts to give problems pulling out of chamber. Next cycle will further agravate the situation.

But no you decide to full length resize the case. Once that is accomplished the internal volume of the case after the resize is different from the ones in the firing just before the resize operation. How in the hell can you have any consistency loading after loading with that method?

Also, I believe the Ruger #1 is a falling block action; not one of the stronger ones for chambering and extraction. The bolt action is the stronger action for that, especially when it comes to extraction. The bolt action will turn the case in the chamber and the turning action has the benefit of breaking the bond between the case and the chamber. This is where you hear about difficult bolt lift on high pressure loads. The case expanded more than it should have and did not spring back as much as needed. When your action totally locks up, that's because the pressure was so high that it went beyond the point where the brass looses its spring back quality.

The idea that a rifle case loses "case life" because of full length resizing is ludicrous in the extreme; that is the very last thing to worry about in resizing. I would urge you to read my stickied thread on this forum to find out how competition shooters always full length resize their brass as a major component of accuracy, load after load.

We are not talking about benchrest competition here, were the shooters had 12 cases for the rifle, each with their own name and that wine and dine them every night before taking them to bed. I'm talking F-class, High power, Palma, Service Rifle, Fullbore and PRS shooters here. Certainly the Ruger #1 is not anywhere close to a benchrest rifle or even any type of competition rifle, but it's still capable of decent accuracy and should be fed proper ammo.

The reasons for retiring a case from the rotation of proper competition handloaders are: 1- primer pocket expansion. 2- . Hum, wait, there is no number 2 or greater. Cases don't split, crack or separate. I will say that the Service Rifle folks do lose cases in the grass. You only have so much time to police your brass after firing.

In reloading circles, the other reasons for case failure are: split neck, cracked shoulder and case separation above the web. These are all items that denote a problem with the rifle or the reloader.

Split neck: This will occur because of overwork on the brass from the reloader using a regular (non-bushing) sizing die. The sizing die has to be able to deal with any brass out there so on the upstroke it will squeeze the neck a lot more than it has to, to make sure it does it for any brand of brass, thick or thin. Then on the downstroke, the expander ball will push out the over-squozed (is that even a word?) neck so that the ID is large enough to accept a bullet. As an added bonus, the expander ball will drag the neck and cause the case to grow in length. You deal with that by using a bushing die with the appropriate bushing and discarding that evil, spawn of the devil, expander ball.

Cracked shoulder: This will occur because people do not adjust their sizing die properly and cause the shoulder to be pusher back more than it needs to, thus overworking the brass. This problem has the same solution as the next one.

Case head separation: This is when the case head breaks away from case after a couple of firings. This denotes a problem with headspace and a lack of proper adjustment of the full length sizing die causing the shoulder to be pushed back too far. The solution to that issue is to set up the sizing die to properly push back the shoulder. If you want to use the ammo in multiple rifles of the same caliber, you should set the die to push back the shoulder to SAAMI specs. If you use the ammon only in one specific rifle, you should set the die to push back the shoulder by about .001 or .002 from the dimension of a fired case in the rifle, after the second loading. It has been my experience that the first loading does not quite show the proper dimension you want to use as reference. I'm actually pushing mine back about .001 in my match rifle. I never let the rifle get dirty and may cases are always tumbled clean. This is not a hunting rifle or an HD rifle.

I noticed that I do not talk enough about how I use the Redding Instant Indicator to measure the shoulders and the resized results in my stickied thread. I plan to update that soon.

Anyway, proper case preparation is critical to the consistency of the ammo and full length resizing is the only way to achieve that. I even go so far as to use a small base reloading die to try to retard the inevitable primer pocket expansion that will ultimately kill me cases. I used to get 8 loadings from my cases before I dropped the barrel and rolled on a new one. I never lost a case. Nowadays, with the heavy bullets I use, the barrel life has been shortened and I'm now looking at using the same 500 cases with the new barrel. Since I always order my barrels in pairs and get them chambered the same way at the same time, the cases happily fit either barrel.

Good Morning NiconUser:
I appreciate your sharing thoughts with me. You give me a lot to think about. I do realize the neck sizing is a problem in this #1 Ruger, it is not in my #1 06 Ruger or my .25 Kraig wildcan #3.

I plan on trying some experiments with my 06 mod 70 target rifle. Contrasting neck sized vs full length sized same lot and uniform reamed and trimmed and uniform by weight cartridges. Should be fun.

Thanks Again
Ed

quote:

Originally posted by Ed Fowler:
Good Morning NiconUser:
I appreciate your sharing thoughts with me. You give me a lot to think about. I do realize the neck sizing is a problem in this #1 Ruger, it is not in my #1 06 Ruger or my .25 Kraig wildcan #3.

I plan on trying some experiments with my 06 mod 70 target rifle. Contrasting neck sized vs full length sized same lot and uniform reamed and trimmed and uniform by weight cartridges. Should be fun.

Thanks Again
Ed

Hello Mr. Fowler,

Something in the terms you use leads me to believe that we have a different understanding of "neck turning." Which device do you use to turn the necks of your cases?

As for neck sizing only, I am fully aware that older folks who have been reloading for a long time swear by it. In the 70s and 80s it was all the rage for "accuracy" and once you get fixated on a concept, it can be challenging to question it, let alone rethink it; hence the saw about teaching old dogs new tricks.

There's also a lot to be said about "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." And if neck sizing for you other rifles has served you well, why change? Right?

If you read my stickied thread, you can read about how I produce gobs of world-class competition handloads to sustain me in matches throughout the years (we shoot monthly matches year round, and I also attend the nationals and several state matches during the year. (I've only been to two World matches in the last 5 years.)

I have a rotation of 500 cases that I start from virgin state. I load them up to 8 times each in a round robin fashion, in lots of minimum 100 rounds. I have been to matches where I finished shooting one box of X-fired cartridges and switched to the next box which had X+1-fired cartridges, in the middle of a string even, and there was no detectable difference on paper. I can take an 8X fired case, and slip it into a cartridge guage and it will slip in and out just fine and that's before I resize it after its eighth firing. I could never expect that from neck-sizing only.

That is why I full length-resize with a small base die, each and every time. My action opens easily with just an upward push of my thumb. I don't need to be fighting trying to open my action every time during a match. It closes nicely and it opens just as nicely. And the loads are not light by any means; I'm at max or over max all the time.