Winchester 223 Brass

[chkunz]

I have read some negative comments on 223 Winchester brass. My experience has been mostly positive so I thought I would post some information based on my experience for your information.

My application is for NRA XTC (200/300/600 yard) competition in an AR service rifle and an AR match rifle. I also shoot some NRA XTC 100 yard reduced course matches. So I shoot the heavier 223 match bullets in stiff but not near max loads.

I recently bought 3K pieces of new Winchester 223 brass from Powder Valley for 22 cents each including shipping. I have inspected and prepped 500 pieces for the first loading.

I culled seven pieces of brass out of the 500. Four pieces had necks ~0.1 inches too long. I decided not to try to trim that much and just culled them. Two pieces had "wrinkled " cases, probably cosmetic, but I did not want to worry about that so I culled them. One case had a bump on the case lip that I could have removed but I just culled it. Overall the brass looks good and case measurements look good and consistent enough for my application. A couple of the seven culled pieces also had rims that did not fit my shell holder.

I have not keep up with how many loadings I have gotten in previous experience with Winchester 223 brass but probably 5 or 6 then I started getting split necks. I am going to carefully record the number of loadings I get with this brass so I can complete the report.

I have found cull brass with Lapua but probably not as many as seven in 500. I will continue to use the Lapua brass in the 223 bolt action match rifle for mid range matches but for the price I really like the Winchester brass for the application that I use it for.

 

[ebb]

There is a difference in the newer Winchester brass and what we bought before the last big drought. I have some Winchester 284 brass that is the new stuff from Winchester loaded ammo and some of it has splits in the case above the base that goes up toward the neck 1/2 to 5/8s of an inch. I thought it might be the gun but borescope shows no flaw in the chamber. A friend out in the mid west says he has seen it frequently. I hope yours is good to go. The older Winchester brass has been good to me.

 

[Milo 2.0]

I'm with ebb, the old blue bag stuff was darn good, this orange bag stuff not so much.

 

[boltman13]

I have used Winchester 223 brass for HP with 69, 75, and 80 gr match bullets for years. I buy 100 cases at a time and keep them together in a MTM case holder. I find at 5-6 firings the primer pockets start to feel a little loose and so I trash them after one last loading. I have not bought any Win. brass for several years, so I don't know if the newer stuff has gone down in quality, but I hope not. I also shoot F-TR mid range with a bolt gun and have only used Nosler or Lapua brass with excellent results so far.

 

[chkunz]

There is a difference in the newer Winchester brass and what we bought before the last big drought. I have some Winchester 284 brass that is the new stuff from Winchester loaded ammo and some of it has splits in the case above the base that goes up toward the neck 1/2 to 5/8s of an inch. I thought it might be the gun but borescope shows no flaw in the chamber. A friend out in the mid west says he has seen it frequently. I hope yours is good to go. The older Winchester brass has been good to me.

There have been a lot of negative reports on Winchester brass like yours over the past few years. The price difference and availability influenced me to give the Winchester brass a try but with some reservation. So I thought I would give this batch a lot of scrutiny and report on the results. This is only one batch of brass and may or may not be representative of Winchester brass in general. I will know more after shooting it for awhile.

 

[velocette]

I use Winchester brass for my .223 and .308 gas guns, I use two dies to resize, one for the case / case shoulder, one to neck size. The cases are annealed after being fired three times. The shoulders for both are bumped back .001 ~ .002. I am past 6 reloadings with most of them and the primer pockets are beginning to loosen up a bit,
I'm estimating another two times around with them. An occasional split neck is the only problem I find.

 

[ebb]

I didn't want to believe that Winchester was having issues and like you I heard it for the last couple of years. The 284 cases have real safety issues and I am on a wait and see before I get anymore. I have a bucket of old range pick ups that is 5 or 6 years old and sorted through it and found over 100 223s for my next batch. I hope that they have fixed all the issues they had.

 

[FatBoy]

we had issues with the red/black bag 243win I over the old blue bag. Not nearly as consistent.

That said, I had to cull five Lapua 6.5x284 cases for slit necks right out of a sealed box. Made tossing a dozen win chases seem cheap...

 

[K22]

Every 100 piece bag of Win 223, 22 250 and 243 brass I ever purchased had defects consisting of cold shuts in the neck / shoulder areas and split necks making those cases un-reloadable. The amount range from about 3 to 8 cases per 100 bag lot. The last bag of Win brass I purchase was about 5 years ago.

I purchase Remington or more recently Hornady which has far less defective cases. In fact in the small sampling of Hornady cases I purchased (i.e. three bags of 50 each) I only found one defective case that could not be reloaded.

 

[chkunz]

we had issues with the red/black bag 243win I over the old blue bag. Not nearly as consistent.

That said, I had to cull five Lapua 6.5x284 cases for slit necks right out of a sealed box. Made tossing a dozen win chases seem cheap...

I have had to cull some Lapua 223 and 260 cases as well but I did not keep a record and am going from memory but probably less percentage wise than the Winchester. I does not hurt as bad to cull a 22 cent case as it does the pricey Lapua case and I do not spend as much time trying to find them on the firing line.

 

[hikfromstik]

So is the Winchester mil spec 5.56 " NATO " ammo better quality brass than the bagged brass or is it the same? If it's the same I don't mind culling a couple out of 100 , but not more than 3

 

[DirtySteve]

I hit the jack pot on blue bag 308 brass the other day. Getting ready to move and packing my reloading room. Opened a foot locker and was digging around. "Oh wow some new brass. wow another one. huh, another one. The excitement wearing off eight bags later I realize I may have a hoarding problem. I used to buy a bag every time I went into my buddy's gun shop. Looks like I will be set for a while.

 

[flatlander]

I've been fire-forming some blue-bag WW 7-08 brass in a new 7-08 Improved 30* rifle lately. The stash of this brass was purchased back around 2007 IIRC, when I used the new improved reamer on a Krieger contoured 7mm AR10 blank. I wasn't all that pleased with the resulting rifle, and as a result, there were 400pcs of the brass bought for that project still in the loading room available to fire form in the trued M700/Krieger bbl. I've been expanding the necks with a 30 cal mandrel, then neck-sizing them to leave a false shoulder for proper fire formed cases. Was chronographing some S168MKs & H100V last weekend, and had a case fail with a split at the shoulder - only one I've seen do that, in either the new bolt rifle or the AR10. Was looking over the fired cases back in the loading room (I'd been freezing my butt off at the range, and didn't take more than a cursory glance at the failed case there), and got quite a surprise when I noticed the headstamp - it was stamped "Hornady 6.5x55mm". Ok, yes, I've got a couple of 6.5x55 AI barrels, but I've never bought any Hornady 6.5x55 brass, and besides, this was brass I'd just dumped out of a freshly opened blue bag of WW7-08.

6.5x55 brass is supposed to be .020" longer than 7-08, so length alone wouldn't have appeared out of the ordinary. But I'd have thought I'd have noticed the extra body taper of the 6.5x55 vs 7-08. At this point, since the failed case partially formed, it's not possible to measure the case length to find out what its original length was. Whatever - I'm having a hard time figuring out how a new piece of Hornady brass got mixed in with a bag full of Winchester.

 

[chop house]

I'm with ebb, the old blue bag stuff was darn good, this orange bag stuff not so much.

I just got through sorting a 'new' bag of 100, 22-250. The yield was only 64% !!!
mangled flash holes and wrinkled or crimped shoulders being the most prevalent flaws. i had already started processing before i noticed the first one, so onward i went...

Now the good news. I took the scrap to my local cabela's, and they replaced the 36 unusable pieces with two boxes of nice looking hornady at no cost. They also checked lot codes, and put a note on the scrap bag to obstensibly purge stock.

Winchester brass.... Boo!
Local Cabela's.... Yea!

now, on the other hand i have some winchester supreme .308 from back in the day that is pretty nice.

 

[jepp2]

About a year ago I bought a quantity of Winchester 204 Ruger brass (red and black bags). As I started processing it, I noticed that some of the brass wasn't properly formed. The shoulder had the hemisphere shape like when you fireform and Ackley with too light a load. It was a different color also. The shoulder datum to case head was at least 0.010" shorter than the others. And even after firing, the shoulder still wasn't properly formed and hadn't moved forward any. So I contacted Winchester, they sent me a shipping label and I sent them the bad brass. I received a check for reimbursement. In the picture below, the brass on the left was the "bad" brass, brass on the right was the acceptable brass.

 

[KevinThomas]

Hey guys,

If you run into any defective Lapua cases, or ever get shorted on a box, we'd really appreciate hearing about it. Can't fix things like this if we're not aware of them. All I'd ask is a photo of the problem if it's a visible defect (splits or divots, that type of thing) and the lot number of the product. On our cases, that can be found on the lower right hand corner of the white stripe running across the top of the box. It will start with "P0"-and a string of numbers following. Just drop me a line at kthomas@capstonepg.com, and we'll get it taken care of for you.

Thanks,

 

[Rsadams]

Last bag of recent win brass in .308 got taken back almost every piece was in pretty bad shape , they looked like they had been run across a concrete floor , some so short it was unbelievable.. dinged mouths can be ran through a sizing die which I will do anyway before loading but I can't make cases longer.. just wasn't worth it to me....Some of the cases had magic marker marks on them like rejects.... They looked like they had been shoveled off a concrete floor and bagged up...

 

[Texas10]

If you're buying brass at a big box store, be sure it has an unmolested original factory seal. I bought a box of Norma 6mmBR brass from a local big box store, and upon inspection it became obvious that this was a box of culls from a larger purchase. Every one had a defect of some sort. The buyer apparently returned culls in an original box and it was simply placed back on the shelf for some unsuspecting buyer (me) to purchase. Live and learn.

 

[vonb]

I have always been a fan of Winchester .308 brass. Primer pockets seem to stay tight forever and the brass just lasts. It's not Lapua but it's decent domestic brass. However, Winchester .223 brass is on the low end of the totem pole. I have found it to have looser primer pockets than Remington or LC. I will not purchase Winchester .223 brass in the future.

 

[Beruisis]

do you gents anneal your WW 223 brass?
I just bought 300 rds for my AR target shooting, thought I'd anneal.
Looking for opinions or past experiences.
Thanks.