Listening to PRS and F-class shooters on Youtube (Erik Cortina, Winning in the Wind Keith, etc) talk about reloading, they all seem to load up their new brass and fire it all before doing any load development. I have some new Starline brass and want to know is that a necessary step or if I can use the first firing to experiment with powder charge and/or seating depth. I am trying to develop loads for two Weatherby Vanguards (one is a Camilla 20-inch, the other a man’s gun 24-inch with suppressor) both in 7m-08. I have Varget, Federal Gold 210M primers, and 140gr Accubonds. The ultimate goal is to get under 1 MOA with the Accubonds to hunt out to 400 yards and shoot milk jugs out to 600 or so. Thanks anyone who can tell me how important it is, or isn’t, for a hunter to make sure they have once-fired brass before doing load development on it.
Even among elite competitors, most of them that I know do not do this.
Many shoot the virgin brass with little or no case prep. I’m in that camp. The most I ever do is run an expander mandrel in the neck to make sure it didn’t get dinged during shipping.
Others will full length size the virgin brass to make it as similar to what it’ll be on subsequent firings.
I have done both. Virgin brass I typically resize and check everything before I load it but new brass usually doesn’t need much prep. The only time I refire brass to my rifle is if I load brass that someone else gave me. I had about 200 hornady casings that were fired by someone else so before I load any precision or hunting ammo with those I will fire them in my rifle to fit my chamber.
That’s good news. My hunch is that I will have to do some tweaking of the load when I switch to this new Starline brass from my Hornady (4x fired) brass.
No. If the brass is of pretty good quality, only thing you really are looking at is uniformity of the neck (round). Some may have a flatter side (dent) and you just run them back through the sizer to uniform. Only other thing is some brass comes with the inside of the neck chamfered so the bullet seats without shaving off copper; some do not (Winchester), might be the only other thing I look for in new brass, but generally it is load and shoot on quality stuff like Lapua, etc.
good luck.
You get consistency with properly prepared brass that has been fired. Performance, including POI(point of impact), will be different with new brass vs fired brass…
I ran into a problem only using the expander mandrel with mid-priced brass. Used the expander mandrel and loaded rounds up but found the shoulder lengths were too long and wouldn’t load in the rifle.
I never had that problem with Peterson’s brass.
You’ll be making " once fired" brass if your working up loads . Once load development is done pay attention to what the virgin brass does vs the once fired.
Keep good records analyze data … and consider if your shooting for minute of mule deer or minute of gnats ass fclass?
You’ll figure it out.