Annealing Brass

I've never annealed any rifle brass. Been reloading 30-06 brass for over 30 years, and have some that's just about that old. It's never been annealed.

Cartridge brass is made from a special copper alloy, and is made to be stretched. The product actually starts off as brass sheet (flat) and gets punched extruded to form the cartridge.

For casual shooters, the annealing step is worthless. If you get a cracked (split) case mouth, which is where it normally appears, toss it. The slight cost of a tossed piece of brass is nothing compared to the cost of all of that fuel.

And, if you pay attention to the notes inder the video, you'll see that plenty of people have correctly pointed out that the brass is being OVERHEATED. Virtually just a slight touch with the flame, preferably directly from the top of the case, rather than from the side like in the video, will give the fastest and most concentric annealing. The slowness with which the metal is cooled is almost as important as the heating.

Having said that, any brass which is annealed will DISTORT due to irregularities in the grain structure of the metal, inherent in the manufacturing process. I don't know about you, but I don't want distorted brass in my gun. Sure, you can straighten out the distortion by running it through a neck sizing only die, but why bother?

Skip this step, and just toss any split cases.

I'm guessing that the guy doing this in the video has only 100 cases to his name, and is on a mission to reload them 100 times each. I'd rather have a thousand cases, and reload them 10X each.
 
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Interestingly he is annealing brass correctly. Brass, like most copper alloys, is annealed (returned to a soft condition) by heating and rapidly cooling. Slow cooling brass actually hardens it.

I'm not sure how much benefit an annealling process like this gives since it is horribly inconsistant, but it should expand the life of an individual piece of brass.
 
Most useful for converting brass to another caliber, where the neck or shoulder is being worked a lot, either up or down. I don't shoot anything with rare enough brass to worry about annealing, at least not yet.
 
In theory, annealing can relief work hardening stress in any bottleneck cases, as a result of firing, sizing and expanding. I've never done it for that reason.

However, if you make wildcat cases by severely swaging a case (such as .308 x 1.5" from .308 Win or .300 Savage), annealing is necessary if you want to get more than one load out of the case. I do it exactly the way this fellow did, with one exception: if I put as many cases in the pan as close to one another as this dude did, I'd knock them all over domino style when I tipped the first one.

Also, I've found that after annealing maybe a dozen cases or so, it is a good idea to change the water in the pan.
 
That is the proper way to anneal brass on a home basis. I do it now only to 460 Weatherby cases because they are worth about 5 bucks a copy. I have a tool that rotates brass past two propane burners then drops them into water, but I haven't used it in a long time because most standard brass lasts so long. I have also annealed by holding brass neck down in a melting pot set at 800 degree's then droping them in water, but some residual solder always sticks to the neck and is tough to remove.
 
GOOD READ HERE

BTW, my slow cool comment came from being in the REVERE Copper mill in New Bedford, MA where I watched them anneal rolled copper plates. There's no water cooling there. They let the copper plates cool down on their own, which takes a LONG time.
 
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Annealing is a must for most significant case resizing. Not much of an issue beyond that. Never seen the need to anneal original factory brass.
 
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