I believe what
@paulT is asking is how
long can the brass sit after annealing before resizing, not how quickly it can be resized after annealing. I've gotten distracted by other things while doing brass preps plenty of times and thus inadvertantly allowed annealed brass sit in the food storage container for weeks, or even months before continuing with the re-sizing process with no ill effects whatsoever.
As
@Shooter13 noted, annealed brass doesn't become harder over time simply sitting in a container. The
work hardening process actually requires that
work be done on the brass to increase the hardness. Until that happens, it will remain in whatever state of annealing it last happened to be in. The springback that is worth consideration occurs pretty much instantly when a case is withdrawn from a sizing die, or a mandrel is withdrawn from a case neck. Because the annealing state of the brass doesn't change over time without work being done on the brass, as long as the brass was properly annealed before some indeterminate waiting period, the springback will remain the same once the sizing process resumes. Likewise, the annealing status and dimensional aspects of resized and fully processed brass doesn't change just by sitting in the container. It is ready to be reloaded when we need to take it out and use it.
