Posted by Anthony Hall on Nov 16, 2011; 9:35am
URL: http://oldforum.flyshooter.com.au/Case-Prep-tp4996793p4997195.html

Hi Deane,

Great question, and one I am sure lots of people will be interested in what others do...

There is a lot to it and I am sure everyone does things a bit different, but the basics of what I do are

I always start with new brass, (ie I never use old range brass or other peoples fired rounds)

Then there are 2 parts of it for me.... First is a once only initial full preparation.  From there on in it is cleaning, sorting preparing and reloading each time.
Initial preparation
1) The first thing I do is neck turn.  Not beacuse I have to (ie my 6br and .308 are no turn chambers) but beacuse it improves concentricity and uniformity of neck tension.  To do this I measure a sample of the cases I have and set the trimmer to just touch (not cut) the shortest I find.  I then trim all the cases to this length.  It usually takes very little off them, but at least I know they are all the same. I then measure wall thickness and set the the neck turner to take the least off that I can to just cut all the necks.  Some it cuts all the way around and some it leaves a very small sections not touched.... I expand the necks using an expander mandrel matched to the neck turner I am going to use....I set the tool to turn to a depth until the blade just touches the shoulder (that's one reason for trimming to an exact length as the neck turn tool is controlled by the length). I guess there could be a whole article written on this, the techniques and tools.... but don't be scared.... it is not rocket science.

2) I then gently debur the flash hole.  To do this I use a hand tool set to just touch the flash hole inside the case to remove any burs from manufacture.
3) On calibers with large primers, I then uniform the primer pockets, but on 6BR I follow the popular opinion that one should touch the flash hole and primer pockets as little as possible for best results.
4)I then debur and champher the case necks.
5) I weight sort all the cases and discard (or keep for muck around shoots) any that weigh outside the range of the rest of them.... I find that in 100 cases, there will only be 2-3 max cases that get chucked in this process.
6) I then work out neck tension (0.002" for me), neck size approx1/2 -2/3's of the neck using redding bushing dies,  load and fireform them from here...

I do not worry about concentricity until after they are fireformed.  I never repeat the neck turning or flash hole debur for the life of those cases.

Someone else might chime in here and continue with what they do after each firing.

Cheers

Anthony

2) The next thing I do