Your Thoughts on Annealing

[Iowa Fox]

This is just me and my thoughts for myself and not trying to push it on anybody. I've been pumping the reloading lever and annealing for the last few weeks. I'm retired so they're full days. I'm sick of annealing. When I was a young guy I remember one the old service rifle shooters telling me he never anneals and thinks its a waste of time. What he did is after his match's when he got home he would de-prime his brass and put it in boiling water with a few drops of dish washing soap for a few minutes. He told me he never lost a piece of brass to split necks and I remember he usually was a winning shooter. At the time I dismissed it as bunk from a old guy. Yes annealing certainly has its place when we reform brass such as the 17 AH the dasher and the rest and I will continue to anneal those cases as a few hundred are tolerable. For the big batches I'm done, they're going to get boiled. Also the Dillon is going to see more use with a mix of good dies.

 

[rardoin]

. The Norma brass is a bit weird because it fits tight in the shell holders (about 5% don't fit at all) so when the brass is heated an annealed it expands and 2 out of 3 times I have to tap it with a screw driver to get it to drop into the pan. A real pain in the a$$ and very time consuming.
Joe

I understand....one of the cases I anneal frequently is a 6.5 x55 Imp. The Lapua as well as RWS brass has a thicker rim than US brass and I had the same issue. I bought a a couple of shellholders of several brands to find one that was 'sloppy' enough allow hot cases to fall out into my cooling basket. I have timed my process and I can anneal 33-35 cases in 5 minutes....or about 9 seconds per case on program 83. When I had to knock the annealed case out of the holder it was MUCH slower than that.

 

[scottfc]

I understand....one of the cases I anneal frequently is a 6.5 x55 Imp. The Lapua as well as RWS brass has a thicker rim than US brass and I had the same issue. I bought a a couple of shellholders of several brands to find one that was 'sloppy' enough allow hot cases to fall out into my cooling basket. I have timed my process and I can anneal 33-35 cases in 5 minutes....or about 9 seconds per case on program 83. When I had to knock the annealed case out of the holder it was MUCH slower than that.

What do y'all recommend to do to the inside of the neck after annealing?

 

[rardoin]

What do y'all recommend to do to the inside of the neck after annealing?

I size the cases...a 0.002" less in neck diameter than my desired size and expand to the final size with a graphite lubricated expander.

 

[danny]

I started out annealing a few years ago using my drill, socket and torch. Then I decided to buy an Annealeeze, the price was right and it looked like it had potential. Well after doing 300 cases that got sent back to the shop. Then I decided to increase my budget and buy a Giraud annealer because a lot of guys I knew were using and swore by it. Well, that turned to have several major problems that no one wanted to admit to because Doug Giraud is a club member. I got rid of that one and got myself a home made Skip annealer. The design was excellent, but the motors I bought weren't very good and that gave rise to several issues. I still have it as a back up.

Then a friend of mine got an AMP annealer and sold me his Benchsource annealer. That was a well built machine that will probably be still working after I start pushing up daisies. However, changing calibers was a bit of a pain, two torches seemed overkill and having to feed one at the time got old fast. So I sold that off. I got myself an AMP because it was the "hot number". Annealing in the house without a torch had a good deal of appeal, alas it got to be painfully slow handling each case several times. To do 100 cases took me nearly 2 hours. To make matters worse my ES's and SDs remained unchanged. That wasn't a sustainable solution for me, so I sold that one off and bought myself an MRB annealer.

Well, I have to take my hat off to Mike, he made a few modifications to the Skip annealer design that I consider a quantum leap forward. He used heavy duty motors and a clever case ejection system that is brilliant. I believe that after a long journey I've finally arrived at my destination. Reliability, speed, consistency, easy to change calibers. It is very close to perfect. If it had a way to attach the propane tank to the annealer like the Giraurd does, and a handle to make moving the whole thing a one handed affair this would be the perfect annealer. It takes 17 minutes to anneal 100 cases. I've done 500 in one sitting without interruptions and hick-ups.

kindest regards,

Joe

What do you feel are the problems with the Giraud annealer?

Danny

 

[Joe R]

What do you feel are the problems with the Giraud annealer?

Danny

Mainly my issues dealt with the torch

1. The torch is a proprietary thing that seems to need cleaning too frequently for my liking. It would switch from pencil tip to loose flame and would ruin a few cases if I wasn't fast/alert enough.
   
2. The spring behind the sliding plate got stuck on me a few times.
3. The way the torch is mounted is not stable enough for me to be able to turn it on and off without moving it. So every time I used it is like starting at the beginning again.

The bottom line is IMO it wasn't as reliable as I desired, so lost confidence in it. It could be just me or the one that I got. I haven't heard any one else complain about it. It was a bit disappointing because I like Doug and he lives just 20 minutes away so when I had issues he was very accommodating to fix it.

Kindest regards,
Joe