Looking to see if anybody besides me has issues with their stuff. My nephew brought me a 1000 rounds of 357 Mag brass for reloading. Some of it was once fired Hornady ammo. The brass is .040 short....and that's a lot. I've thought about cutting it down to 38 Special length but then you'd have 38 Special loads in 357 marked brass. Not a fan of doing something like that. A couple of years back I bought out the remnants of a gunshop primarily because the deal included a bunch of 444 Marlin Hornady ammo. That brass was also so short it ended up in the trash. The die set I got in the deal is a Hornady rifle reloading die set. The bullet seat die has a sliding sleeve in it that guides the bullet straight into the case. That's great if all you load is a jacketed bullet but the die will not accept or load a plated bullet or a lead bullet due to the slightly larger diameter. It will only take a .429 bullet but not a .430 of any kind which in some cases, like a Winchester 44 caliber bullet, can be a jacketed bullet.

Seems like everything I touch with the Hornady name on it is screwed up one way or another. Am I the only one having issues with their stuff or has somebody else experienced the craziness too?

Yes many have seen the Hornady 357 mag brass being shorter...  Sad!  It may be to load the bullets with slightly longer nose profiles and still be a 357 cartridge.

Pretty much anything they load with a ftx bullet will have shorter brass to keep oal within spec. At least that's what I've seen in rimmed cases.

not just Hornandy, I have issues with the Speer small primer .45acp brass. WTF!

Yeah, I had a ton of 45acp brass given to me that had the small primers and large primers. I was about to trash the small primer brass when I thought a test might show me something. So I loaded some up and then ran a bullet impact test using the same bullet and powder load. It all went to the same place at 25 yds so I just loaded them up. But it can certainly play with the head on what primers to use. And then you have the NT brass, non-toxic primers , that have a much larger flash hole. You'd think that would make a huge difference. It didn't in my testing.

What I like about having some brass with the small primers, is when we experience primer shortages, we could utilize the ones we have primers available for...

Absolutely, it's been a few years now, but will for sure happen again. Several years back, my local reloading shop was limiting us to 200 per sale, if available at all : (

Quote from: The_Shadow on February 09 2020 08:08:19 AM MST
What I like about having some brass with the small primers, is when we experience primer shortages, we could utilize the ones we have primers available for...

that's the reason I haven't thrown them out.

For sure, whenever I drive by my my reloading shop, I always pick up primers...if I need them or not  😀

Quote from: Kenk on February 09 2020 03:33:26 PM MST
For sure, whenever I drive by my my reloading shop, I always pick up primers...if I need them or not  😀

Me too 

Good grief, I'm beginning to think you can't buy anything anymore that the bean counters haven't found a way to screw it up. My nephew bought a case of 223 Speer nickel 223. I had him pick up his brass as I could use it for my 6x 45. I got to sizing it today and guess what? The crap is short .015, shorter than the 1.750 trim length. That's before sizing the brass to 6x 45. Looks like I'm going to have some short, one way, hunting brass. Too bad as otherwise it looks to be pretty good brass, all 1000 rounds of it. Think I'll load a couple of hundred rounds just in case I have issues with it. It won't take long to rip apart and save the components. I guess this is one way to get gun control, just make the ammo crap and not usable for reloading. After that it's real simple to close up the ammo companies. Then they won't care if want to own a machine gun- you won't be able to shoot it due to no ammo.