I really have no technical way to measure the hardness. I go by feel of how hard they are to trim, how hard they resize, how hard the necks expand through a mandrel and and how much pressure it takes to seat the bullets and so on. I had one case that collapse in the body because of how difficult it was for the necks to expand. I had several that you could tell expanding them that the necks were too hard to expand. Most expanded normal like always. But there were the 18 to 20% of them that were hard and made it difficult. I even got to the point of loading a few of them. You could tell on the pressure to seat the bullet were not all the same. There were that same percentage that would not seat like the rest. I ran them through a expanding mandrel to get my .002" tension on the necks as normal. Charged them with powder and seated the bullets. That percentage that had hardness issues I had to use triple the pressure to seat them. I also had to adjust the seating stem depth to get them down to the correct seating depth. There for my groups opened up over 0.5 moa across the board. I then pulled the bullets cause I knew I had issues with them. So I annealed a batch of them. Went back to my same loading procedure I use on this caliber and had zero issues as that with the neck tension and neck hardness. I have used ADG brass for 3 years and never had this happen. The lot of these I had were 800 pieces. So yeah, I was pretty disappointed in the ADG brass. Before that I used exclusively Lapua brass and still do on some rifles. I have used Peterson brass on 3 different rifles so far. Probably 500 rounds so far. It really really is quality brass. They are very very easy to prep right of of the box or bag if you get in bulk like I do. They just make it easy and a stream line process with very very tight dimension tolerances. The neck thickness all the way around really is just as consistent as Lapua. ADG brass on the necks will be from 0.0153" to 0.0171". Thats too much in my book. I have had it so bad I did have to turn some necks before on ADG. Have not had to on the Peterson yet. I never turned the necks on Lapua. That may not a big issue with 98% of reloaders but I'm a perfectionist on my rounds. I want to and have to know that they are all the same. So in the long run if I can run brass without any issues dimensionally or issues physically with the cases that will be the ones I use. So all this ranting about one lot of bad ADG brass you can tell I was very disappointed. I would say the say thing about Peterson, Lapua or whatever manufacturer caused me the grief, time and effort.
