I just received a bag of 50 Winchester .375 H&H brass from Midway and being new to reloading I have a question. The brass mouth on about half of these are out of round, some pretty bad. Before I get started are these fixable or should I chuck the real bad ones?

They always come that way. For the really bad ones, you might want to used a tapered punch to straighten them out. I always run my new brass through a die to straighten out the necks before I load them anyway. They should be fine.- Sheister

You ALWAYS run new cases through a neck-sizing step, with an expander plug in the die, then trim all to the same OAL and chamfer the case mouths before the first loading!! All new bbrass will have some with out-of round mouths, and you never know that they are of identical lengths unless you "make them so", to quote Jon Luc Picard!

Elde is on the money for sure. I have often rounded the moths using a tapered punch.

Thanks for the information, I appreciate it. So I can use a regular tapered punch from my local hardware store?

Yep, or anything else of that general shape IE #2 phileps screwdriver, nail set, etc.
You don't need to make them perfect, just opened up enough to let the expander get a good start.

Thanks Tailgunner

Welcome to the wonderful world of Winchester "bulk brass"! This is why I have switched to Remington brass. My last purchase of WW brass was in .25-06, and I had to toss 11 out of 100 cases because the case mouths were so badly deformed I couldn't get an expander plug thru them! Thats an 11% scrape rate. Totally unacceptable. What the hell do they do at that factory, play fast pitch against a cement wall with this stuff before they package it? I purchased 200 Remington cases in .375 H&H last month, and all were nice and round with zero deformation. Now why can't Winchester do the same? I have had no problems with Remington brass, so I'll stick with what works. Bill T.

I agree with billt. In my experience brass quality would be Norma, Remington and lastly Winchester.

Jeff

I can't see where this is a knock on Winchester brass. I've seen Norma .416 Rigby brass in bulk that was just as bad from bulk packaging. You need to run them through a sizer anyway so it's not a problem.

I think Remington brass is the worst of the lot for quality control of the brass and consistency. I used to try to fire form 257 Ackley brass from Remington and always lost 30%. Changed to Winchester and don't loose any now. This also proves true in my 375 AI and 280 AI. All bulk brass had deformed case mouths. I have never seen one so bad as to have to be thrown away. I have had a batch of Remington 308 brass with a neck .050 shorter that speck. Returned the whole batch of 500. Needed more consistent brass for silhouette shooting.

Gee lb404, was that 500rds of Remington brass returned the ones you gave me? I also note that you didn't loose as much brass with the 257 Ackley by using Winchester but you did loose more rifles!.... .....DJ

too cute!!!!!!

Its common for brass to be out of round, cost of packaging to prevent would be to costly, it needs to be full length sized anything so its not a big deal. I've had both good luck Rem, Win and Norma also, but did have a bad box of Norma brass, necks split, Norma confirmed it was a bad batch of brass and replaced them.