Quote:
ORIGINAL: Wayspr
Are their any advantages to getting nickel plated brass?
|
Other than it looks nice, not really by my estimation. Nickel brass is harder because of the nickel plating, but I've had the nickel flake of after several firings. It theoretically would be harder on your dies because nickel is a LOT harder than brass. It costs a lot more, and the necks get brittle faster and split easier, and I'm note sure if you can anneal nickel brass. The only advantage I can think of is that it might extract a little easier if your chamber is rough or dirty.
I'd stick with plain brass cases. I prefer Winchester brass for my bottleneck rifle cartridges, and Starline brass for straight-walled cases. If you want to spend a little more to buy really great brass (rather than going with nickel plated), check out Lapua and Norma brass. That's the good stuff.
But if you have a lot of brass from scavenging the range, you could always sort the brass by headstamp. Then take, say, the Win brass, deprime, clean, FL resize and trim the necks to an even length. Now that you know that they are all of consistant dimension, weight sort them to within +/- 2 to 3 grains. Just be sure to inspect each case for bulges, shiny bands, etc... that might show fatigue and possibly lead to head separation, split necks and such. This is the other advantage of buying new brass. You know that it's all virgin brass and you'll always know exactly how it's been loaded and cared for.
Mike
Mismatched Brass
