.223 rem & 5.56 reloading question

Sometimes i re-load unsorted brass. Last batch included Winchester, Remington and numerous lots of LC cases. Fired five groups of five unsorted rounds each through my Remington 700 at 125 yards. Average group size was just over 1 1/4 inch. My carefully crafted and sorted accuracy loads average 3/4 inch at 125 yards.

i've used nearly every brand of brass available including the expensive stuff that IMO ain't worth the money. Best brass i've found is one lot of 5.56mm M193 head stamped TW 67.
 
A few years back, I was trying out several Resizing die types (std, Nk, Collet, Bushing) to see what gave me best accuracy in my 223. At the end of my testing, as I was putting things away, I realized that I had a big sack of mixed headstamp brass, and I wondered how the accuracy of the ‘chosen’ load in mongrel brass compared to accuracy in the sorted cases. So I loaded up the mixed brass and shot them a bunch. At the conclusion of that non-scientific test, I found that the mixed headstamp brass shot quite well, though not as well as the single headstamp brass. For hunting purposes, I don’t think you could tell the difference. There were a few more flyers with the mixed brass. And maybe the fact that the mixed brass had been shot and reloaded more than the single headstamp brass had would explain away some of the slightly worse accuracy.

After all of that Resizing and shooting, because someone may be wondering what conclusion I finally came to, I decided to Partial FL Resize (reset the case shoulder to best fit the rifle chamber). One thing I did not test at the time was to resize with a Redding Body Die and then size the case neck with the Lee Collet Die. I suspect that might be the absolute best way for zero runout and max accuracy, and I think Unclenick does it that way.
 
^^^That's an important point. Most people think errors always open a group up in general, but some sources of error can actually just produce intermittent fliers and the rest of the group looks just as tight as ever, misleading the shooter to believe he is making uncalled errors when he is not. That's what happens when a barrel first reaches the point it is shot out. It can happen with unsorted cast bullets when and occasional casting inclusion unbalances the odd particular bullet. It can happen in cases where an unusually uneven level of neck wall runout will occasionally be produced. I had a batch of Winchester .308 brass in which just one out of 1000 had total indicated neck wall runout of 0.008". The next highest was just over 0.004". That's enough to toss a bullet half a moa off the intended POI.
 
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