Case Annealing

Dave,

Are you sayin you're rolling the hot case on the dry side of the foil? Hmm, pretty cool. Does the foil sweat after a while and give you just a little bit of moisture to help move the heat? Or is that not really needed?

I roll mine on a sponge that sits in a saucer with a puddle of water around it and I keep the necks so they are over the edge of the sponge, that way no water spatters in as it sizzles. For the annealing I've built a programmable gizmo that's controlled by a microprocessor for doing mine so I guess yes, I qualify for the parallasis by analysis award!
 
If you want a fair amount of neck tension then you definitely can ruin cases by overheating. Overheating will make the brass dead soft and you will not be able to obtain much neck tension regardless of what size neck bushing you use during sizing. I have known too many folks that have been there and done that and then wonder why they can't get any neck tension even when using bushings .005-.006" under finished loaded round neck diameter. If you don't want much neck tension then have at it. I don't think you will ever have to anneal again. It's my understanding once you get it too hot and dead soft it will not get hard again no matter how much you work it.
 
Joel,

I don't understand how so many guys so far in this thread, are of this opinion about the brass never getting hard again after overheating. I've never seen that happen. In fact, I'd almost say that the times where I've gotten the brass the hottest, you know, where the brass was so hot it began to scale. When I did that, yes, it was really soft at first, but I thought it hardened up faster than it did with what I'm going to call a proper annealing temp, which is still higher than some folks here advocate. It hardened so fast in fact that I would have to change my case prep sequence from, anneal, resize, expand, load to resize, anneal, expand, load. If I did the resize / expand after the anneal, I had more neck tension than I wanted.

As I sit here and think of why my situation might be different, it's probably because I run more neck clearance than anybody I know. I work the brass about a mile all the time and perhaps that has something to do with it. Years ago I did some tests on brass and learned a lot about what to expect with various methods of annealing. But I never saw this. Boy, if I can get these necks so soft that they never get hard again, I might be get'n my cut'n torch out this weekend. Especially if I could convince the shoulders to stay that way. :D
 
I wish my brass would stay soft at the neck and shoulder forever!!!!!!!!!!
 
In the Honaday annealing kit you have paste that melts at 475 applied .25 down on the body. They think that is about right to get the neck annealed and I hope that they tested it before putting it on the market.
 
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