dstoenner
Silver $$ Contributor
When I saw that Hornandy was going to make 260 REM ammo, I knew that brass was probably not far behind. When I got into 260 for F-Class, I bought some Remington made brass and 100 Lapua. I found the Lapua to be just great as always but Remington started having case and neck splits after a couple of loadings. Then came the great shortage of 2008 onward. I managed to get another 100 Lapua but 260 was scarce. I did get some Nosler which has been in between Lapua and Remington brass.
Finally I found some Hornady. I ordered 2 packages of 50 and they were from the same lot when I received them. I did all of my normal brass prep but this time I paid attention to how the group of 100 acted. The following are my observations for what they are worth.
1) Primer pocket reaming. All finished off to a nice uniform pocket with no extra low spots like Remington had shown. This was just like both batches of Lapua and Nosler, no extra low spots.
2) Then I wanted to neck turn them so I took all 100 and first expanded the necks to .264 to get any bulges in the brass to the outside of the neck. Then I set my neck turner to where at one point I wasn't taking any brass off and then went to .0005 tighter. They then cleaned up most of the necks to about 50% or so. I would rather have a little thicker necks than thin necks that were perfectly uniform. Out of the 100, I had one case that did not touch the cutter and one case whose neck that was 1000% turned.
3) Now I did a full case resize with a Redding .010 shell holder in place and a .286 busing for the neck. This gave me a .260 inside neck, implying my neck was now .013.
At this point I put them in my case cleaner to get all the oil and lubricant off of them.
4) Now I checked for case length and found they needed to be trimmed. It wasn't much. One case I did measure .005 longer than my trim length but at least the necks are now square. Only 2 cases did not touch the trimmer being short.
5) Now came the acid test. I sorted the lot of 100 by weight. I have attached pictures for you to look at. The case weight extremes went from 155.1 to 161.4 grains. It also showed two nodes of cases weights. My guess is that they had 2 machines running with the output mixed?? Using my rule of 2 gn variance for a given batch I was able to get a set of 69 from 156.5 to 158.7 and 27 from 159.0 to 161.1 That left 4 culls. Lapua had 4 culls for one lot of 100 and 2 for the other. The difference was that the Lapua was all within 1.5 gns for the entire rest of the batches.
Now the proof will be in loading up some and testing them. That maybe some time in the future before I can report on that part of the test.
I did a sample test for runout on 5 cases and all 5 were .001 or less TIR. I have hopes these will be as good or better than Nosler and maybe as good as Lapua. They beat Remington hands down at virtually the same price as Remington.
David
Finally I found some Hornady. I ordered 2 packages of 50 and they were from the same lot when I received them. I did all of my normal brass prep but this time I paid attention to how the group of 100 acted. The following are my observations for what they are worth.
1) Primer pocket reaming. All finished off to a nice uniform pocket with no extra low spots like Remington had shown. This was just like both batches of Lapua and Nosler, no extra low spots.
2) Then I wanted to neck turn them so I took all 100 and first expanded the necks to .264 to get any bulges in the brass to the outside of the neck. Then I set my neck turner to where at one point I wasn't taking any brass off and then went to .0005 tighter. They then cleaned up most of the necks to about 50% or so. I would rather have a little thicker necks than thin necks that were perfectly uniform. Out of the 100, I had one case that did not touch the cutter and one case whose neck that was 1000% turned.
3) Now I did a full case resize with a Redding .010 shell holder in place and a .286 busing for the neck. This gave me a .260 inside neck, implying my neck was now .013.
At this point I put them in my case cleaner to get all the oil and lubricant off of them.
4) Now I checked for case length and found they needed to be trimmed. It wasn't much. One case I did measure .005 longer than my trim length but at least the necks are now square. Only 2 cases did not touch the trimmer being short.
5) Now came the acid test. I sorted the lot of 100 by weight. I have attached pictures for you to look at. The case weight extremes went from 155.1 to 161.4 grains. It also showed two nodes of cases weights. My guess is that they had 2 machines running with the output mixed?? Using my rule of 2 gn variance for a given batch I was able to get a set of 69 from 156.5 to 158.7 and 27 from 159.0 to 161.1 That left 4 culls. Lapua had 4 culls for one lot of 100 and 2 for the other. The difference was that the Lapua was all within 1.5 gns for the entire rest of the batches.
Now the proof will be in loading up some and testing them. That maybe some time in the future before I can report on that part of the test.
I did a sample test for runout on 5 cases and all 5 were .001 or less TIR. I have hopes these will be as good or better than Nosler and maybe as good as Lapua. They beat Remington hands down at virtually the same price as Remington.
David
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