Something for you guys to argue about LOL

[DHuffman]

Been very busy the last few days.

We've argued about annealing before. I was headed into the 7th firing on one set of match brass and the sixth on the the other and while both were still shooting well by the time i got done testing for and competing in the 600 yard Nationals it would have been 8 & 9 firings and i wasn't  comfortable with that.

I annealed both sets, roughly 430 pieces total yesterday afternoon and loaded all the 6x freshly annealed with a random load of 30.3g Varget and a 107 Nosler CC and put a firing on all of them this morning in my dedicated fireform barrel on my Borden.
This evening I loaded 30.5 g Varget and a 107 on all but 45 of the second set to be fired in the Borden FF barrel in the morning and the other 45 are loaded as 15 sighters and a 15 shot seating depth ladder and a 15 shot powder ladder to be seated at the range according to the outcome of the SD test.

Here's where the argument comes in, you guys that are still annealing every firing are missing out on the best accuracy your brass has to offer. The 2nd - 5th firing after annealing ?

While I'm hitting the hornets nest with a long stick I quit the home brew lanolin brass lube and went back to One Shot. The lanolin is as good as far as lube is concerned but it doesn't clean up as easy as One Shot and it builds up in the sizing die resulting in less consistent bump and required more die maintenance for me.

[gman47564]

the beauty of rolling your own... we all have our own processes ... no arguements here,,,, to each their own... i will keep annealing each firing and continue to use the home brew... it works for me... its a good idea to clean the inside of the dies out from time to time no matter what lube you use....i've said it before and i will say it again... we all have to find our own way at some point and do what works for ourselves....none of us has all the answers... we just have opinions...

[Ranger 188]

It's just like the barrel break-in or when or how to clean
your barrel, when to do this or that. If there was one right way, everyone would do it.
People asks for suggestions and YOU have to decide what works
or doesn't work for your application.
If there was only one way to do everything, we wouldn't need these forums.
Just do what works for you.
  

[DHuffman]

All that alcohol I bought for Lanolin dilutent really cleans brass nice on a microfiber towel eliminating the need for tumbling.

[rardoin]

No debate here.  I thought I was seeing the same and did not attribute it to the state of work hardening on the necks.  A fellow F-class shooter and multi Nat. Champ in F-TR (Peter Johns) anneals every 5th firing.  Peter has access to two LR testing spots in SC Texas and has the ability to load on site at one.  He tests everything...multiple times to make sure it is repeatable...and drops what does not matter and only performs steps necessary to shoot tiny groups at distance.  It is amazing the dogma he has proven to not make enough difference to matter at LR.  He shoots a .308/200-20x bullet/Varget or N150/F-TR bipod and has groups of 5 shots under 1" at 1000yds on occasion- I've seen the proof.  Peter's shooting skills are impressive; as a person I am humbled in his presence.  Heck, anyone who is nearly burned to death in a carrier fire and goes by the online handle of 'Medium Rare' has to be someone special .
.

[DHuffman]

Agreed Robin, all one has to do to accept change is........................................................

Accept change LOL ?

[autoxforfun]

Bryan Litz did some back to back tests that he reported in his book "Modern Advancements in Long Range Shooting - Vol II".  He used MV and SD to compare the difference between never Annealing, Annealing after every 5 shots and Annealing after every shot.  After a 10 shots on the three sets of brass the results were:

Never Anneal: MV=2812  SD=7.4
Every 5th:       MV=2807  SD=7.5
Every Time      MV=2811  SD=6.9

His premise is that Annealing was providing control of neck tension and variations in neck tension show up in MV/SD.  

So there is not a lot of evidence to say that you need to Anneal every time or at all.  I do it so that I don't need to keep track of how many time a piece of brass has been fired and prevent neck cracking.

[DHuffman]

If it weren't for the necks getting hard and brittle I'd go not at all.

I'd be curious to know how many pieces per set, how they were annealed etc.

The results look close enough I bet if the test were run multiple more times the order of placing would change around.

.6 fps is not a large victory for every time nor is it an ass whipping for every fifth cycle.

There's no SD / ES trophy handed out at any match I've ever been too and the position of the muzzle in it's whip is far more important than any velocity.

[DHuffman]

Here's a powder test I shot this morning on fresh annealed brass.

The tightest SD / ES is the biggest group with the most vertical. Grant thinks it was me and it is possible but if I induced it somehow it's pretty odd I can keep 14 shots across .5 g powder within 2" vertical and somehow I blew that one out the top.

I shoot these ladders in this fashion because it tells me when two or more charge weights are stable to the same POI, it also tells me which charge regardless of SD & ES is the unstable charge that is transitioning from one quadrant to another as the B charge appears to be here!

[DHuffman]

Here is the seating test 30 minutes before that powder ladder above. In this case the lowest SD / ES  is P and is also the smallest group.
The second lowest SD / ES is Y and is the largest group.
R with the 3rd lowest SD / ES is the second smallest group by .250" and the B and G groups at just over 1.5" are the big groups with the biggest SD / ES

The Ys with good ES is moving on to the shift in POI and is unstable because of that despite it's ES
Same with the Bs in the picture in the previous post.

[autoxforfun]

If it weren't for the necks getting hard and brittle I'd go not at all.

I'd be curious to know how many pieces per set, how they were annealed etc.

The results look close enough I bet if the test were run multiple more times the order of placing would change around.

.6 fps is not a large victory for every time nor is it an ass whipping for every fifth cycle.

There's no SD / ES trophy handed out at any match I've ever been too and the position of the muzzle in it's whip is far more important than any velocity.

 I had to go back and look at Bryan's method.  He allocated 12 pieces of brass to each of the three groups.  They were then annealed if appropriate for the group and then resized after each cycle.  Two of the 12 rounds were fired prior to shooting the 10 that made up the basis for the measurements.   I believe that Bryan was trying to use a measurement that took as much human error out of the experiment....but clearly there is still room for that in this whole process.

Bryan's did observe that the case length increased the most for the always annealed brass, less for the every 5 and even less for the never annealed.  I would think this would make sense since the softer brass is easier to move around, which could indicate that this is causing the brass to become thinner is areas we may not want.  But other than that, Bryan wrote that "annealling didn't appear to affect anything else including: SD of muzzle velocity, average muzzle velocity or group sizes".

[DHuffman]

I'm not contradicting you personally Bob. I'm posing the question if it's important and the results to be taken seriously why the small sample? A half a foot per second across three different groups of ten each is inconclusive IMO and if that number is correct it's hardly worth the extra trimming for .6 fps more consistency.

Even more importantly I have proved to myself too many times to count that the lowest Chrono numbers do not automatically translate to the smallest group. The smallest group and / or the highest score win matches not Chrono numbers so I'm saying it's silly to use Chrono  numbers as the measuring stick.

Consistent bump, consistent seating force, controllable predictable spring back etc. these are the things that win matches and are the true benefits of any annealing program and the tighter Chrono numbers are a side effect of all that not vice versa.

I talked to one of the best 1000 yard shooters I know today who also placed 5th overall at the 600 yard Nationals last fall and that was his first ever 600 yard competition.

I'll be shooting with him at the 600 yard Nationals in less than two weeks. He told me today his brass will have 4 cycles at the Nationals. He said " at 4 cycles I can trust it"

+1 to 4-5 cycles is a good place to be and trimming is seldom and more likely not needed in an AI cartridge but going by Litz's findings that more frequent trimming is required with more frequent annealing I'd have to assume that case is going to seperate sooner as all the trimmed brass has to be flowing from somewhere.

People give too much credit to annealing. It's not some magic trick but more like changing the oil in your car, proper maintenance so to speak.

[autoxforfun]

No problem Dave....not taking any of this personally.....we're all trying to gain the best understanding we can.  I just put this out as a data point from someone pretty well respected in the industry.  I agree, it is not a large data set to base a final conclusion on but it is a data point none the less.  He is not arguing that the best SD is the answer but it was a measurement method to evaluate his results for the test he defined.   Bryan published a lot of test cases in his book to try to put some measurement to many of the things we do.  

Out challenge is to take all of the data and our experience and make some sense of it all......

[chazwood]

I'd have to say that I have always thought I had better accuracy from my second to fourth firing. I've never tested it it just seemed that way.

[DHuffman]

I'd have to say that I have always thought I had better accuracy from my second to fourth firing. I've never tested it it just seemed that way.

EXACTLY what I've been trying to say! My point is the guys annealing every cycle will never know because they wont go past the 1 cycle and see what the 2nd through the 4th are like. Even after 4 the accuracy is still there but you can feel the bump and seating pressure building and getting less consistent.

Somewhere along the way we all drank the KoolAid that to be a good reloader you HAVE to anneal every cycle and happily did it without testing to see how much / if it mattered compared to doing it every 5, 10 times or not at all.

Even though I think the information Bob provided in on Litz's testing is inconclusive because of the small sample and the fact he concentrated on SD/ES numbers and not accuracy it still indicated a trend that it hardly matters to SD/ES.