Case length ..... when is it too short ?

[Ccrider]

Old story, but...short version late summer 2011...first year with the dasher. Prepping 100 brass for the season. I spaced out and trimmed the brass WAY short, but, all the same length. Not enough time to buy new brass, fire form ,trim, re fireform before the nats. Won the 1K nats.

As long as they are all the same, and not MORON short, you're good!!

The end,
Tod

Curious. How short was your short brass?

 

[ricco1949]

I have a couple hundred 20 VTs that are .010-.020 shorter than normal in my personal inventory. By products of days when I was using a mini-chop saw to cut off 5.56 cases instead of current Dillion 1500 trimmer. They're used exclusively for PDn.

I just shoot them at the end of the day so my standard length cases don't have to ride over the neck fouling of the short ones.

I've never experienced any additional cleaning necessary or firing abnormalities.

 

[4xforfun]

Curious. How short was your short brass?

I would need to look at my records, but thinking 1.5000000000000....maybe even shorter. It was at this point in life I learned to measure twice, cut once!!

 

[Ccrider]

I would need to look at my records, but thinking 1.5000000000000....maybe even shorter. It was at this point in life I learned to measure twice, cut once!!

That’s really short. If I remember correctly, Peterson brass was around 1.532. When I hydroformed dasher, the brass was coming out at around 1.533. I thought that was short. What was your chamber and trim to length?

 

[jelenko]

measure twice, cut once!!

I'm still working on that

 

[Paddyd]

It's the poor man's hillbilly way of reducing surface area and thus neck tension. LOL
Shoot it a few times and you'll be needing to trim it anyway.

 

[timeout]

Just my experience, I purchased 50 new Nosler 308win cases 15yrs ago, that measured 1.095, I loaded them the same as my LAPUA 308win cases at 2.005 same powder same bullets same everything, the shorter neck lengths ran a 100fps slower vs the correct trim length of my LAPUA brass, after reading this thread I pulled the Nosler brass back out of storage, remeasured them yep nothing changed even after once firing them, same measurements, I guess I'll experiment with them and see how many shots it takes for them to reach 2.005 OAL YMMV

The 100 fps difference is likely due to different internal case capacity between Nosler and Lapua, not the .010" shorter necks.