Trimming brass

This particular batch of brass was annealed before Alpha sent it to me and then I annealed after the 3rd firing... I have started annealing after every firing so hopefully things will straighten out here soon after this batch gets shot and annealed more! Thank you for the insight! On the Redding type S, I plan to not use the expander stem since alpha brass is pretty top notch and the neck thickness is within 0.0005 across 300 cases and two lots. Sam at Panhandled Precision shoots Alpha brass almost exclusively and he uses the Type S die and has stated that neck turning is not needed with this brass. If I remember correctly it’s 0.0135 thick in the neck, which puts me at 0.335 loaded round OD. Now my Hornady brass is all over the place and I just use that brass for plinking or taking up space under my bench. I’m excited to try this die because I can tell a difference in seating pressure when the brass was sized with a normal non bushing FL die and expander ball.

The biggest thing to take away from this is if you want consistency is you want to anneal after every firing even if you only shot it once. Find out where you want your brass trim length to be at and keep trimming them until they all get to that point because like I said it takes a few firings for the brass to actually fully fire form in your chamber. It doesn’t do it in just one shot which is why I only bump the shoulder back with a full length sizing die .0005-.0015” you do the least amount of work to your brass you get the most amount of life. But do you make sure you trim after any sizing as that can throw off the over all length aswell. I get pretty consistent results after two firings with new brass. But I have a tedious process. I’ll wet tumble for 30 minutes, amp anneal , lube , Full length size , neck size , expander mandrel, trim, wet tumble for three hours, chamfer and debur then a light coating with a dry neck lube inside the necks inner diameter, then I’ll load it all up. I have an arbor press so I can measure how much pounds of force it takes to seat each of my Bullets . The dry neck lube only helps with that consistent seating pressure and it won’t corrode overtime for metal to metal contact. But you won’t really see much of an effect in ES and SD for a little bit of difference in the length of the neck