Winchester necks

[Fatman]

One of my buddies was just telling me he had gotten some .223 Lapua brass that was on the crappy side of things. When I had my .22BR I was always impressed with the Lapua brass, but the cost!!

[WHISTLEPIG]

I have been working with 1650 or so WW cases for a couple of years. All fully prepped including neck turning. I have been annealing after the second firing just to be safe (I sort of like to do it. The colors are so beautiful.) and have had no split necks. I just finished loading a little over 1000 cases and not one split neck. Go figure.
Pete

[giterdone]

Whistlepig...I would think that the reason some people are getting split necks with winchester brass is because of uneven neck thickness. By first outside neck turning the cases I believe split necks will be something that would be vastly minimized. Annealing the necks after a season of use (because of work hardening) is a good idea. Any sooner than that IMHO is a waste of time and effort. Speaking of effort I finally finished outside neck turning my winchester brass after uniforming the primer pockets, deburring the flash holes, trimming to length and inside/outside chamfering the mouths. Someone who hunt varmints probably would not want to go thru all this work as they have a bigger target to work with. But if a person wants to shoot smaller things like ground squirrels at long range for example, then he needs small groups (consistently) and unless his brass is fully prepped (including sorting by weight) he will not get as high a percentage of long range kills. Of course a person must have a accurate rifle to begin with and the shooting/reloading skills to take advantage of it.