Oops...

Do you know what happens when you start the tumbler in the evening and forget about it until the next day? The brass comes out really shiny!
Here's the result of about 16 to 18 hours. Some of this brass is recent production, but the .30-06 is Korean war surplus with 50 years of tarnish. It looks nice but I don't think I'll make a habit of such long tumble cycles.


Before and After:

RightTool(tm) for the job

A revelation struck me while putting together a Midway order. I started to order 200 rounds of .30-06 brass when I remembered there are several coffee cans full of MilSurp brass in the garage that I can't use because of the primer pocket. These 200 pieces of brass represented about 70% of the cost of the RightTool(tm) to solve that problem! I canceled the order.

A friend and I made the trek to North Scottsdale today.. I asked for demo of the tool and asked a couple questions. I even brought a couple rounds of the offending brass. Unfortunately the demo was set up for small rifle primers rather than the .30-06 and really didn't teach me anything, nor did most of the questions. However the final question was good enough to seal the sale "If it doesn't work for me, can I bring it back?" She said "yes" and the RightTool followed me home

Back at the SandCastle, I read the manual which is only two 4x6" pages. It didn't take long. A couple measurements, $3 at Ace hardware, a couple minutes with the drill and the unit was mounted to the loading bench.

The first six pieces of brass were swaged and mounted in the press. The primers seated easily! WOO HOO!!! The RightTool works!

The picture here shows the RightTool mounted on the reloading bench. The empty brass immediate left of the blue unit is my carefully hoarded 50 pieces of usable .30-06 brass. It is commercial stuff scrounged from the range. The surrounding three coffee cans of brass and white bin show the quantity of MilSurp brass that was previously unusable. (The white plastic container contains 100 pieces of processed brass, swaged, sized and ready to reload. Bottom left is the 11 test rounds loaded and ready to try. These have the same loads as previously loaded (47.1 gr IMR4895/150 gr Hornady RN/BT). These will be tested before loading more.

Prepping the MilSurp brass adds a lot of time to the reloading process but this is a one time investment. Those crimped primers take a lot of effort to punch out. I ran the depriming pin well down into the die so it would punch out the primer without resizing the brass thus reducing the arm effort. Then a trip through the swager and then back through the resizing die to actually resize the brass. This is a one-by-one process, not part of the progressive reloading process.

Tradin' Brass

I flew across town to trade brass with a fellow shooter. He had some .223 and needed 9MM Luger. I'm in the opposite condition - fat on 9MM and thin on .223. In reality I could have bought the brass for less than the cost of the gas for the trip - but making the trip was a reward in itself.

Turns out he is a postal worker. With an MP5. And now a suppressor. He needed the brass to load some subsonic rounds.
(Insert your own "going postal" joke here).

Score!

As anyone that's been shopping for ammo knows, the shelves are bare. In the reloading world, primers lately seem to be made of unobtainium. Here at the SandCastle, small rifle primers are the rarest commodity. So imagine my surprise at reading a THR post that says "I've got 600 I can't even give them away!".

Well heck, that's exactly what I need! We traded a few emails and found he lives within 25 miles of the SandCastle. This is almost too perfect. As it turns out I needed to visit nearby anyway, so a deal was struck.

This replenishes my stocks of small rifle primers to the point I won't hesitate to shoot what I have.

Score!