Incipient Case Separation - Hornady

T

thallub

New member
This is a once fired Hornady .308 Win case re-loaded one time. Powder charge was 42 grains of IMR 3031 behind a 150 grain Sierra Game King bullet. Primer was WLR.

i fired five rounds through my Remington 700 rifle, picked up the cases and found this.



Tore down the remaining 15 rounds. Weighed all the primed cases. The case that nearly separated weighed 155 grains. The other 19 cases weighed from 162-172 grains.

Chunked all the cases into my junk brass barrel.
 
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Please reduce the size of your pictures. 2048 x 1536 pixels is way too big.
That's not incipient. That's separated.
The brass range picked up stuff? Was it fired out of that rifle?
 
The light weight of that case as compared to the others certainly suggests something is off with it. If you section it, the flaw will probably be apparent. In the past, Winchester has made .308 Win brass that light that worked fine, but it used their semi-balloon head design in order not to thin out the rest of the case too much. In recent measurements board member BobCat45 did, the micro-Vickers hardness of a number of new cases I sent him showed Hornady to be the softest. Federal has a reputation for softness, but it turned out actually to be in the middle of the range. It's just soft compared to Lake City.
 
The case that nearly separated weighed 155 grains. The other 19 cases weighed from 162-172 grains.
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I agree the 155gr case was odd in the mix but would add that the other 162 to 172gr weights are way to big of a swing as well . I've done a good bit of measuring case weights and case volumes over the years to include a test recently . I'm not sure I've ever had same headstamp cases having a 10gr variance , I mean not even close . When I see a 3gr difference it makes me take notice so a 10gr difference of the same headstamp , well would likely make me start a new thread about it lol .

If you have to time and or ability , I'd love to see a case volume test on those cases
 
I have a bulk lot of Winchester .308 Win brass I bought around 2005 that ran from 152.5 to 159.5. Setting them out on paper in columns by weight revealed 4 different tooling sets were clearly involved in making them (4 bell curve peaks). That's not quite as much as the Hornady spread, but it's getting close. So odd stuff happens. But that 17 grains spread from the broken case to the high end of the others; that really is pretty outrageous.
 
If you have to time and or ability , I'd love to see a case volume test on those cases
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Will do a water volume test on the cracked case (assuming it holds water), the 162 grain case and the 172 grain case with exact weighs for the cases.
 
I have a bulk lot of Winchester .308 Win brass I bought around 2005 that ran from 152.5 to 159.5. Setting them out on paper in columns by weight revealed 4 different tooling sets were clearly involved in making them (4 bell curve peaks).
Click to expand...

Were those sized and trimmed or at least trimmed when you weighed them or were they just pulled from the new to you box/bag ?

That brings up a good point for the OP . Were all those cases trimmed to the same length during case prep ? If not that can explain some of the variance .
 
Were all those cases trimmed to the same length during case prep ?
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Yes. BTW: Little trimming was needed.

Ran into a problem. A friend chunked a bucket of old cases in the 30 gallon barrel of brass junk. i can't find the Hornady cases.
 
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