Reloading Steel Cased Ammo

[sqlbullet]

Apologies all around.  One of the challenges with forums is the inability to see nuance like you can in person.  Sorry if I was overly defensive.

All my friends call them "Old Nags"

Between myself and my  two close shooting friends we have 10 of them.

[gandog56]

Funny how you quoted my post, berated me over the colloquial use of Nagant to refer to a Mosin Nagant, and further critiqued my assumed amateur abilities with a diatribe about berdan vs boxer primed....

Yet failed to read and comprehend my post:

Steps will include hydraulic depriming, removing the anvil from the primer pocket, drilling a center flash hole, swaging in a copper coller so the primer pocket is the correct size for a large rifle primer, full-length sizing and then normal loading from there.

Yes, I know there is a difference between boxer and berdan primed ammo, and that my surplus Mosin Nagant 7.62X54R ammo will be berdan primed and will break decapping pins.  I knew this before I ever reloaded my first case low those many years past.

And I have already deprimed berdan brass using the hydraulic method with my Lyman M die. Easy as pie, by the way.  I have also swaged lots of different items just to see the process, but swaging a copper collar into a over-sized berdan pocket so it will fit a boxer large rifle primer will be a new experience.

I do appreciate your concern for my decapping pins, but the whole point of the exercise is to find out how enjoyable it is to convert berdan primed brass to boxer primed, not to search out boxer primed steel case 7.62X54R.

What? The pic of the "Sarge" is a joke, not a berating. I did explain I tried steel boxer cases once and it did not go well, and why it did not go well. The other comments were other people who may have NOT understood what we taking about. And removing the old Berdan primers hydraulically can be a mess. And swaging out the primer pockets seems to be a bad thing in a high pressure case, because I can't see where the places where the two holes were at as not being weak points for a possibly catastrophic blowout. You can get Tula pBerdan Primers now. Graf And Sons sells them in two large rifle sizes, 7.62X39 and 7.62X54R sizes. If you were absolutely bound and determined to do steel anyways, that is the way I would go, without altering the primer holes. And like I said, the cases are steel, and so are your dies, can't be good for one another.

All and all, just a little too much bother for me to go through, since I probably have way over 1000 brass cased boxer primed 7.62X54R and 7.62X39 cases each. Heck, I bought 600 virgin Lapua 7.62X54Rboxer primed cases I found online for $30/100 last year. And I have yet to go through all my OTHER boxer primed 7.62X54R to get to any of them yet.

Hope this was a bit more constructive and didn't hurt your feelings this time!

[The_Shadow]

The thing about steel cases is they usually are coated with a lacquer and can possibly damage your expensive dies! 

[gandog56]

I'm not sure how paint is supposed to harm steel dies, since steel is harder. And the lacquer almost came off when I threw the cases in the tumbler. If corncob takes it off, what is lacquer going to do with the steel dies?

Of course the lacquer gets taken off, the steel cases start to rust right quick.

[The_Shadow]

The lacquer can gum up the dies if the lube softens it or it rubs off.
Any damaged, rusted areas or burs may cause damage to the dies.
Another this is spring back after sizing, steel casings are vastly different than brass cases.

You can do what ever you want with yours but I'll pass on playing with the steel casings.

The aluminum cases seem to crack easily if being re-worked, I tried to size an aluminum 10mm case to 9x25, No Go they crack and split.  Annealing may help but I'm not interested in that procedure...

[sqlbullet]

Aluminum experiences memory fatigue that steel doesn't as well.

[gandog56]

The lacquer can gum up the dies if the lube softens it or it rubs off.
Any damaged, rusted areas or burs may cause damage to the dies.
Another this is spring back after sizing, steel casings are vastly different than brass cases.

You can do what ever you want with yours but I'll pass on playing with the steel casings.

The aluminum cases seem to crack easily if being re-worked, I tried to size an aluminum 10mm case to 9x25, No Go they crack and split.  Annealing may help but I'm not interested in that procedure...

Well gumming up the works is easily fixed, since I spray them out with carb cleaner every once in a while to clean out the old case lube and gunk. Then we come back to the steel on the cases probably not being good to your steel dies. This I do agree with you on. I also pointed out in my post that steel cases were NOT resizing correctly, that the projectiles were only very loosely held by the neck tension. On the other hand, I have reloaded several Blazer aluminum cases with absolutely no problems with cracking....at least in the 9mm cases I was trying. They fed and shot just fine. Think I will continue to reload them. I haven't bought any store bought 10mm for years, so I've never even seen an aluminum 10mm case. I would sure give it a try, though, due to my success with the 9mm.

Steel, eh...I'll still pass.