Better accuracy with Virgin Brass?

[rcoody]

well lets think about this a bit. What are the differences between your fired brass and virgin brass.

have you checked the difference in runout between your virgin brass loads and the fired brass loads. Could be something is throwing the case neck alignment out of whack. wouldn't take much.

We know that the volume of a fired case and virgin case is different. Case volume increases after firing. You might want to do a little fine tuning on your load.

surely neck tension is different from virgin brass and fired brass. How do you clean your brass? That virgin brass was clean and tarnished. I find it always grips the bullet firmer than fired and cleaned brass.

do you have a way of measuring seating effort? Do you find it easier or harder when you are seating bullets between the fired and virgin brass?

any other differences you guys can think of?

 

[rcoody]

There is no reason to suspect an annealing issue with the situation described. And Neck cleanliness will not cause described. In fact, neck cleanliness changes nothing other than bullet seating force.

The bottom line is that it's normal for results to change from new to fire formed brass, and that reloaded brass is not new, and never will be again.
So the reloading object is not to figure out a cosmic abstract in shooting new brass, but to figure out how to get your reloaded brass shooting it's best.
I call it load development.

totally logical

forget about it. that brass will never be there again!

 

[MTLIVIN]

I'm in agreement with most of what is being suggested. I personally do not enjoy load development like I enjoy shooting long range and try to minimize the number of trips I'm only doing development. If I had more free time I'd probably like it more.

I agree that the fired brass is not the same and I need to do more development on that brass. I think I'm going to keep sizing the body back 0.001 and try a couple of neck bushings and work down loads in .2 grain increments to see what happens. I could try seating bullets deeper too, likely will try that as well. Thanks for the replies

 

[MTLIVIN]

Well, finally made it back out to the range again and I think I found the issue. I sized the Norma brass like I normally would with a 0.001 shoulder bump & .002 undersized neck bushing. Shooting 180 hybrids with a 0.015" jump.

I did a quick velocity test and found I had to drop 0.2-0.3 grains to get the same velocity of the virgin brass load that shot so well. I then shot groups and was surprised to see how much the group was opening and closing between even 0.2 grain increments. However, the same velocity that shot well with virgin brass also shot well with the reloads. Just 20 fps higher and my group grew to over double in size!

So maybe I don't have an incredibly stable accuracy node, but I would need to try another powder to find one that isn't soo sensitive to variation, and with 10 lbs of the same lot H1000 I think I will settle for now.