Checking new Nosler brass- opinion #2

[hemiallen]

I just recieved 3 boxes of 50 Nosler brass in 300 wby. Did a weight check of all of them, and they varied from 217.56 gns to 220.65 gns, which is good enough for my ultralight rifle.

Necks of the 30+ I randomly inspected varied from .010" to .011", pretty consistant .

Good news is from previous postings I was anticipating having to send them back and purchase some Norma/ Wby brass, but so far so good. Once I do load development I will post my findings, good or bad. I do have some once fired Wby brass I got with the gun, so I can compare them to these for case capacity and accuracy of the loaded rounds.

Hope this helps someone. Nosler has been very good from my experiences over the last 25 years of reloading.

Allen

 

[LRHWAL]

I don't trust the product after seeing what I did here.

Allen maybe provide the lot number so that others looking for 300 Wthy can get exactly those you have. From what I've seen in the other posts it's possibly that hit and miss.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

 

[hemiallen]

I purchased the brass direct from Nosler, the numbers on the inside of the box are 113011301198, and EF27B1-1.

I'll do a better search, but when this thread opens up, if you look at the bottom of the page for similar threads they all seem to be 2007 or older. Maybe Nosler HAD issues, and they have delt with them?

I can't see how the one poster, who I think is a gunsmith, had such negative replies from Nosler as I have nothing but good experiences with their sales and tech staff. Could be a deeper issue than poor customer relations, if you know what I mean.

Not trying to start a feud with any other posters experiences, I suspect they are true. Just want to share my experience, as one bad post shouldn't dictate how others spend their hard earned money.

Someone earlier posted the Nosler is Norma brass.... not currently.... I believe it is "worked" ww brass.

Allen

 

[LRHWAL]

Allen,

Don't get me wrong, I think it's great and helpful that you shared your experience. I was just suggesting that more information may be more useful in this case.

WL

 

[Buffalobob]

I bought a 100 pieces of Nosler brass in 308. It was used in 1000 yard F-class and it was terrible stuff. About every third or fifth shot would be a flier.

Once I figured out that the problem mightnot be me but the brass, I loaded up some Nosler, some weight sorted Winchester, some Norma and some RWS and went to a 100 yard range and shot each from a bench. The Nosler brass consistently shot larger groups than any of the others.

If things are not right at 100 yards they are really bad at 10 times that distance!

 

[hemiallen]

Thanks for the information.

Q1: Which brass do you prefer? I may order some Norma brass and compare the accuracy of both.

Could you cull the flier brass? I would guess that is standard practice for benchrest shooters.

I suspect you spend a lot of time modifying your brass, and use good dies and check the ammo's concentricity. What dies do you use?

Sorry, never done much in the way of good practice for benchrest shooting, but all of my guns can be worked up to .5" 5 shot groups, but that is probably more luck than skill.

Thank you
Allen

 

[Buffalobob]

First off, I am not a competition shooter. I am just a hunter who does it as a form of practice. I am way too sloppy to ever spend enough time prepping my ammo and doing all the stuff the serious shooters do.

The two dies I would recommend for the lazy sloppy person are

1. Lee Neck die. You really have to try hard to screw things up using it.
2. Forester or Redding competition seater die,

If you can get those then you will need a "body" die from some manufacturer.

As far as the Nosler brass, there are people who claim it is good in other calibers and that only the 308 is bad, but IIRC they don't shoot 1K competition where any member of the public can see the scores.

As far as good brass, the sorted Win brass ( 75 pieces out of 330 pieces) is about as good as the Norma and neither is as good as the RWS. However, you can never find any RWS to buy because it is all bought up. I do not shoot Lapua in competition but there are people who do and it is supposedly very, very good.

One reason my kids beat me at F-class is that I let them use the RWS brass (that's my story and I'm sticking to it)

http://www.longrangehunting.com/forums/f36/why-she-smiling-quantico-f-class-32416/

http://www.longrangehunting.com/forums/f36/good-plan-gone-bad-33051/


As far as culling pieces of brass, that bring up a funny story. I began doing that by using a waterproof Sharpie to mark every case that gave me a bad score during one match so I could see if it gave me a bad score the next time I shot it. At the next match my daughter was shooting that batch of brass and had a bad flier and looked at the piece of brass and saw it was marked up. She made them call down to the pits and ask why some of the rounds were marked up and so I told them that it might be a piece of bad brass. She got really mad that I would bring "suspicious" brass to a match. Needless to say, I quit marking the brass and just threw it away after that.

 

[woods]

I purchased the brass direct from Nosler, the numbers on the inside of the box are 113011301198, and EF27B1-1.

I'll do a better search, but when this thread opens up, if you look at the bottom of the page for similar threads they all seem to be 2007 or older. Maybe Nosler HAD issues, and they have delt with them?

I can't see how the one poster, who I think is a gunsmith, had such negative replies from Nosler as I have nothing but good experiences with their sales and tech staff. Could be a deeper issue than poor customer relations, if you know what I mean.

Not trying to start a feud with any other posters experiences, I suspect they are true. Just want to share my experience, as one bad post shouldn't dictate how others spend their hard earned money.

Someone earlier posted the Nosler is Norma brass.... not currently.... I believe it is "worked" ww brass.

Allen

http://www.longrangehunting.com/forums/f28/nosler-300-win-mag-brass-very-unimpressed-33899/

Nope, current. I still haven't got around to returning the REPLACEMENT box, but I will. It varied from .009" to .017". That is on the replacement box after the first box which had some BAD CASE HEADS!

 

[hemiallen]

That is pretty inconsistent neck thickness'. Have you turned the cases to look foir runout?

I have a ball setup, like a commercial setup and a .001" dial indicator. I just finished running some of the heavier sorted batch and half have .002 or less neck OD runout, the other half had .003 to .006 runout. I will run these through the size die tomorrow and see if they true up.

A few of the fired Wby 150 partition brass I shot have .001-.002 runout, and a few are .004-.005 runout. The new ammo is .005 to .007 runout..... maybe why the gun didn't group as well as I had hoped. I would have expected the Wby ammo to have less runout than my measurments.

Allen