Borescope on brass

[Doug Coulter]

A cute trick I found while looking at flash hole uniformity. Clamp your Teslong borescope in the vice looking up (no mirror) so you can quickly look inside brass.
And it's not always a pretty sight. I discovered that I hadn't rinsed and dried mine after testing wet tumbling well enough - After a short tumble and rinse (since the outside looked good), I vibe tumbled with my usual walnut shells to ensure dry-ness. Except not. And some of that media stuck in there, and the remaining liquid was still somewhat corrosive....
Since the entire point of this was to get the brass uniform, and do the experiment of making it uniformly shiny inside, as if new - this was a relatively important and shocking find. Some of this stuff was NASTY, and would have utterly invalidated any test of combustion uniformity.
Here's a pic of the lashup (ignore the mess in the background! Creative Chaos, or just chaos).

Taken with low res webcam but you should be able to guess what I'm up to here.

What this does is make it easy - it's in focus, and with a finger near the end of the brass, you can avoid scraping the camera with it as you put it on there, the top of the vise sets the distance to the subject.

Like I said, NASTY. You can imagine what bad results this would have if I just reloaded it. Since I'm not going near full power, it probably would have been safe enough, just terribly inaccurate.

Look at the walnut and corrosion...that's a big nope.

Most of them looked like this...the others would have been fliers at best. Could have left it tumbling longer for more shiny, though.

[Doug Coulter]

As an aside, there is of course a difference between brass brands. I've often used winchester by preference, it being hard, usually good, and uniform. With the Swede being a bit odd in today's world, I've gotten what I could when I could, so I have an older run of win, some Norma, and some Privi Partisan.

That latter sucks.. bad QC in everything from the base diameter, groove diameter and here's the inside. Don't buy!.
Every piece had this strange flash hole pattern as well - as if they knew there were gonna be burrs, and then just put in a flat punch and smashed them.

The particular two batches of Winchester bought a couple years ago I show above - there were a few bad flashholes, which is what I meant to check, but the rest was all good. The Norma was essentially all perfect inside. All 3 brands did have a couple grains weight spread across them, roughly in the same quality order as above.
The Norma was the softest brass, at least before I got to doing my own annealing, then the others fell in line.

Name says it all - PU

[Doug Coulter]

After looking at a bunch more of these inside, and remembering that the trash can is a reloader's best friend (and safety tool), I decided to ditch the win brass and the PPU, it's just not worth it.
I ordered Lapua from Midway, and will keep the Norma, which was essentially also perfect - we'll see, they're the same (high) price.

I had two batches of winchester, bought within a week of one another, and one of those was what got me hurt. Rather than try to figure out which is which...trashcan.
That Privi Partisan...well, they got the cheap worked out. Looks like they knew they were going to have a big burr on the flash hole and just inserted another punch down from the top to smash it flat.
Trying to uniform that just makes a mess and raises more burrs. On top, the control of the extractor groove diameter is all over the place. Yes, I know that swedes have a couple mils larger groove than say, .308 and I do have the right shellholders, but that's just ridiculous that a big % won't fit. So...trash. I have some more pics, but I'll have to go over to the shop to get them...it's gross. I may not live a hell of a lot longer, but that's no way to go - safety first.
Some of these might have been fine for "shoot once and throw away" hunting where benchrest accuracy isn't required. But I don't do that.
Some pics.

Norma

Privi

One of the better winchesters

win after only 2 firings

I'm not dissing winchester as a whole. I've used a LOT of their brass, especially in .223 and .308 and gotten great, even record setting results. But it sure looks like they had a real bad day at the office here, and I guess it pays to check everything...everything.

That funny bulge around the outside of the base reminds me of some tricks they use in match .22lr ammo, but inside out so to speak. I have no idea what's up with that.

[Donovan Ready]

I'm sure you watch Ian on Forgotten Weapons. He reviewed some choice on ammo for a Lewis gun recently that I found interesting.

All the reloader channels just love Norma brass, and I've heard no mention of Winchester having problems before. What was your loading?

[Doug Coulter]

I've been using a couple of loadings which I think are on the OK side. EG for original swede, not these stronger ones with tighter chambers I built.
One load is 39 gr varget with a 120 gr sierra 25 mils off the lands.
The other is 17 gr 4227 and a cast bullet. CCI large rifle primer in both.

I bought 2 50 count bags of this win a long time ago, and one set seems thinner and lighter than the other, I suspect that was one of the "bad" ones. I'd have to go through them and see if they sort out by weight. I did notice while neck turning them that all the win didn't cut all the way around - they were actually the thinnest of the 3 types. I'll get some more data and report.
My guess is that these more odd ones only get run once in awhile, I probably got two batches from years apart, and someone not as good at setup made one of those. I've normally had zero issues with the brand.

Yes, the normas look great inside and out. I just got a box of pricey lapua delivered and they look even nicer if that's possible. Next good day I'm not on some doctor errand I'm going to prep a few up and try them.

Life, especially in my case, is too short - the crap brass is going to hit the trashcan.