The thread on SS cleaning made me think about it again.

How many reload cycles do people here generally put their 45 acp brass through before it goes into the trash can? Any good rules of thumb for this round other than loose primer pockets?

I've got a lot of once-fired brass and I usually just shoot and reload the same batch for a while. It would pain me to toss out good brass but I don't want to go cheap either, for obvious reasons.

The 45ACP is a low pressure round

I haven't worn out any brass for mine yet

I lose mine way before it is worn out.

For a while I used to shoot .45 ACP every weekend of the year almost (say 45 times a year).

I had brass which I started with and used every weekend and it was still usable two years later. Lost a lot, some splits, but since cases just weren't available, they had to do.

Got to admit they looked pretty shabby at the end - couldn't read the headstamps and very scratched (these were nickeled), with brass showing through.

6-8 times before you get vertical splits. More if anneal but that is a pain to do without softening the base of the case.

I have some with many ejector marks on them. I just keep reloading them and they work.

Again, I use it just for fun shooting so I guess unless I see something major like a split or if the primer slips in with no effort, I'll just keep using it.

If the headstamps become unreadable I may toss it then. Thanks for the answers.

I shot IPSC for five or six years in the late eighties to mid nineties. I started out with a regular series 70 Colt. Got caught up in the arms race after a while and this buddy of mine and I both bought a Para P-14s. This friend and I split a Dillon SDB, and for some reason threw all the spent primers into a metal 3lb coffee can. We shot about every other weekend. We had 200 cases apiece. After four years, we had shot that mixed WW and Rem brass and reloaded it so many times we had about worn the head stamp off. Lost two or three cases. We shot the coffee can full.

You'd have to shoot a lot, and hot loads, to actually wear 45 acp brass out.

quote:

We shot the coffee can full.

When I moved this last summer I took a coffee can full of spent primers to the scrap yard along with a 5 gal pail of spent shotgun primers.

And that doesn't count all the ones that were thrown away when scrap prices were so low they were not worth saving.

Short semi auto pistol brass are tough to wear out. revolver brass wears out a lot faster

I used to shoot IPSC also, I started with 200 ww-super cases, same amount in Fiocchi, and only ever lost, or blew out some at the web due to very high temps and overloading problems with my progressive press.
I still have a lot of those cases, you cannot read the headstamp, the rims are profoundly rounded and wider than standard, but the primer pockets are still firm. I never wore out, or split a case, other than the above blowout problem.
My Springfield did batter the case heads pretty badly, but not enough to throw them away, some I remember I had to run a bit of emery around the rims to get them to fit the shellholder.

Cheers.

With target loads, the brass will tell you, like this one.

You will lose most of them before they wear out.

quote:

You will lose most of them before they wear out

I shoot at public ranges. Even when I try and pick up every piece I always leave with fewer. At the lease on the grass I leave with a lot less.

45 acp is one of those cartridges that you would have to try hard to wear out the brass. It's a low pressure round. with normal power loads, you will loose it before you wear it out. Just shoot it until you get a crack and throw it away.

What is the concern? Are you going to try to track how many times a given case has been fired and then throw out perfectly good cases after X firings?
Brass fails as shown in picture above and you throw it away. I have never had a failed pistol case cause any damage to the gun (but the bullet from such a case will open up the group). If you want to track case failures, start shooting .38 Spl and .357 Mag--I get about 2-3 case failures out of every 200 rounds or so fired. For .45? I can't remember the last case that failed during firing.
I am still shooting a lot of WCC 44 and 45 I started loading back around 1973 and it is still going strong.
You picked the ONE cartridge that case life is NOT an issue.

I've lost more brass to mangled case mouths than anything else.