.45acp aluminum cases

C

caligula

New member
A buddy of mine just gave me a can of used .45 ACP brass. The mix included a big batch of aluminum shells. I have no experience with aluminum cases and I thought it a good idea to seek out experienced insights. Anyone out there have any savvy on this?
 
Separate out the aluminum and discard.
Regular brass (yellow) or Nickel plated should be reloadable. Some people will separate out small primer 45 ACP, Blazer (brass), USA, Aguila, etc and save those for hard times.
 
Aluminum shells

Thanks, Guys! Not the first time I almost shot myself in the foot with a bad idea. Will discard and pray for better times -
 
Make a few drawer pulls and recycle the rest. Most Al cases are Berdan primed anyway and Al is not elastic like brass. Doesn't resize properly.
Mind you, Al cased CCI Blazer ammo isn't horrible stuff. Tried some Blazer .38 Special long ago(before there was such a thing as Blazer Brass). Wasn't as accurate out my revolver(my old Smith 19, I think.) but every round went bang.
 
Neither aluminum nor steel should be reloaded. It can be and folks have done it, but often to their regret. On another board a fellow showed close-up photos of a ring of little pits around the chamber of his 45 Auto 1911 barrel. They turned out to be gas cut pits, same as you see on some old rifle bolt faces where they are caused by leaky primers. In this case, though, the steel cases he had been reloading had developed small cracks just forward of the head that had let the little gas jets out to blast the pits into the chamber. Aluminum will do the same thing. Neither is as malleable as brass, and resizing fatiques them quickly, causing the cracks.
 
Just for the hell of it I once loaded some aluminum case boxer primed .38 Spl. just once, it worked fine. hdbiker
 
Yes. Same with steel. On a progressive, if you missed sorting one out, you feel extra resistance sizing a steel case, but it's OK to shoot again—once, as you said. The fellow with the pit scoring had reloaded his several times, thinking he had discovered a cheaper reloading approach.

The trick is figuring out how many times it is safe, and that will depend on how big your chamber is and how small your die is. So it can vary by the gun and the resizing die dimensions. I should also mention that aluminum always has an oxide layer once exposed to air, and the oxide is abrasive, so I would expect die life to be compromised by a steady diet of aluminum, too.
 
So, it's okay to reload aluminum cases once? I'll have to start picking up all the .45 cases I see that are Aluminum now.

I've often thought that it would be nice to buy able to buy aluminum cases brand new, already sized, and ready to be loaded on the bench. The weight savings is nice for the revolver calibers and .45 ACP.

Steel case I see no reason to reload.
 
Again, thanks for all the input, guys. I decapped the batch and put 'em in a jar at the back of the cabinet. If I ever run into a herd of their brothers and sisters I'll think up a great experiment of some kind.
 
I was at a gun show pre-Covid and there was a guy trying to sell 500 steel cases of 9mm to folks that reload. He said steel is not hard to reload, but I had never known anyone to load it.
 
Again, you can reload them once, but they are hard on your carbide sizing die.

Here's what happens when you reload them more than once. Those marks in the chamber are pits. There is one at about 5:30 which is right at the edge of the feed throat that cuts through it and lets you see the depth of the pit. The shadow in the image stops you from seeing that they go all the way around the inside of the chamber.

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