Hey Guys,
Sorry for the delay here, but just got back from the SHOT show on Saturday evening.
To begin with, you can't tell anything by whether or not the brass comes in cardboard or blue plastic. The change came into effect at about the same time as the packaging change was made, but it wasn't keyed into being differentiated by box type one way or the other. Just a coincidence that it happened at the same time. As has already been stated, the new neck diameter is on the order of .0004" less than the old, bringing the neck thickness down by about thou, or a bit less in O.D.. Someone mentioned .0120"-.0125" per side, which is about right for the new stuff. Beyond that, I want to make clear that this was strictly a dimensional change; there was no change whatsoever to the case alloy or the percentages that went into the cartridge brass. I've seen the "analysis" posted somewhere on one of the forums, and the guy's flat out wrong. No change to the alloy, end of story.
As we've explained earlier, the neck diameter change was necessitated by the fact that some of our cases were running slightly over the dimension needed for our loaded ammo to pass a standard CIP neck gage. As a CIP member, producing ammo that will pass their gaging is mandatory, and not negotiable on our part. The same holds true for Norma, and any other CIP member. In other words, their brass is going to have very close to the same neck dimensions as ours, or they're heading for the same situation. Ours was running at the very high end of the spectrum, which meant that the occasional case would run slightly over spec, and fail the neck gaging. As a result, we tightened the specs to get the majority of the cases to run a bit closer to the middle of the allowable CIP neck thickness range.
Seems like I get a debate everytime I say this, but we didn't really change the dimensional specs in this case, we merely changed where we run the cases within the existing specs set by CIP. We handloaders were the ones to feel this most keenly, as it wasn't a problem for most of us to begin with. It gave a bit more material to play with for neck turning, and so long as we're measuring case necks and are aware of our chamber dimensions, life was good. This latest alteration allows those shooters restricted to factory ammo to buy the product, without our resorting to producing "handloader" cases and "loaded ammo" cases. That, I assure you, would be a goat-rope of epic proportions and would cause far more problems that the relatively minor adjustment we've made here.
