Case Head Separation Incident Anyone ? ? ?

[browningautorifle]

We're drifting here. He asked about case head separation not out of battery firing. I doubt you all will even notice a separated case until you have a stoppage. It fires the same. I wouldn't use suspect cases and wish for it however. That's just not good for the chamber life.

[gandog56]

I have had two case head separations in my No.4 Mk.1 Lee Ehfield. Both happened in different batches of reloads, but both just happened to be S&B brass. No other brand of brass has failed in this rifle. Neither time was any part of the rifle damaged. I didn't even know it happened until the next cartridge would not feed.

Been tossing out the S&B's after I fire them ever since. Fortunately, I didn't have that many of them.

[us019255]

Recently I had a couple of case head separations with 4 times reloaded LC 7.62 x 51 in a FAL. The FAL is properly headspaced. The brass was purchased as 1x military from a reputable major mail order arms seller.

This caused me to feel for a ring at the head. On about 4% of cases, either as received or after a few reloads I found a ring. Discarded the ringed cases. Apparently, the original military full auto? firing had badly stretched some cases.

I then also bought an RCBS "x" die to limit case growth. Have not reloaded enough times to see if this really works. My experience hints that FAL's tend to be harder on cases than Garands. My theory is that the tipping bolt design allows more stretch, but would not argue with anyone who says differently.

[jmoore]

us019255, its not so much the tipping design as the Rear tipping design that may add a few thousandths of case stretch per firing.

Also, full auto, per se, won't work the brass more as the mechanics of lock up, firing, extraction, and ejection are identical to semi-auto operation. It just happens more often per pull of trigger. Of course, it may have been fired out of a weapon of completely different design (and chamber specs.) as compared to what you are using now. If you already knew that, sorry, some folk haven't quite grasped it all, yet.