SmallCaliberCentral

I bought 2 new bags of WW 204 Ruger brass lot #2XC90 for my upcoming PD shoot in South Dakota. My normal brass preperation includes runing the new brass into the expander ball to round out the necks. Never had I needed to resize the necks on new brass in the fourty years I have been reloading.

When I reloaded that lot of brass there seemed to be a large variance in neck tension. I took some rounds and tried to push the bullet into my reloading bench. The bullets in some rounds pushed back into the case. Those rounds I unloaded and resized the necks to get them to hold the bullet tight.

Last week we went to South Dakota on the PD shoot. The second day I used that lot of ammo in my Savage 12 VLP Rifle. I fired 26 rounds that had nice rounded primers and no signs of any pressure. The 27th round blew a primer, the bolt opened very hard,the case was pushed out with a cleaning rod, and the extracture blew out as far out as it could. The extracter I put back in place and found no damage to the rifle.

The only explanation for this is that I missed a loose bullet with not enough neck tension. The bullet slid into the case on loading into the chamber. This caused a very dangerous pressure spike on ignition.

When I got home I pulled the bullets from this lot and alot of them came out with little effert. This did not show up when I tried to push in the bullets eariler.

From now on I will neck size all new brass.

Grayfox

Glad to hear you were not injured and that your rifle is still working. I have been fortunate and have never had the neck tension so minimal that a bullet has fallen into the casing neck. I do not follow your procedure with new brass though.

My new brass prep procedure has ALWAYS included running the brass through a neck sizing die as bare minimum and the only blown primers I have had have been due to my own stupidity when I tried a load that was WAAAAY too hot. In my defense, there wasn't any load data around when I first started reloading for the. 204 Ruger. I had casings loaded with charges that incremented by .2 of a grain of powder and only one casing at each charge weight. I was chronographing the loads and had hit a velocity plateau on the two previous shots. I should have quit right there, but pushed the envelope too far and wound up blowing the primer. I was able to get the extractor ball, spring, and extractor back in place and it still fired normally. I did, however, order a new spring and extractor ball and installed those when they arrived.

i remember reading someplace, can't remember where, cause i have a little CRS disease, that all new brass should be fl resized before reloading. a hint when resizing WW brass for the .204, use graphite to lube the inside of the cases before resizing. i had a lot of problems with WW new brass.
see my earlier post, my brass seems to be too soft. i got a lot of good info from this post on this web site, but i will never use WW new brass again!
just my experiance.