i've acquire some 416 Rem brass with BeLL head stamp. I'm not at all familiar with this brass. Has anybody been using it or give me a clue as to what can be expected from it quality wise.
Thanks
Phil

Keep in mind that brass can vary from lot to lot, especially from the smaller manufacturers, so you will have to do your own tests to determine the usefullness of what you have. With that in mind, I used Bell 416 when I started out testing the 416 Rem. At the time, Remington brass was unavailable as my needs fell into a time dead zone where everyone was out of them and it would be 6 months or more before any new were made. I worked with what I had but I found that the Bell would show pressure indications long before the Remington brass, which I finally did obtain. Consequently, (and as one always has to do) I had to restrict the pressures to what the brass would handle. Compared to Rem brass, the Bell would start to extrude ejector marks a good 10KSI below Remington factory pressures and subsequent similar pressures that I loaded to in my own handloads. The top end loads from Rem factory loads and equal hand loads, in Rem brass, did not show any stresses from those higher pressures. Specifically, the Rem brass worked well at the factory pressure of 65KSI. The Bell started to show stress at 55KSI and had ejector marks that a blind man could see at 60KSI. Adjust your loads and expectations accordingly.

I don't have any way to measure pressures, but my empirical results in working with Remington and Bell brass are similar to what Mike describes. The Rem brass will accept much higher working pressures than the Bell stuff. I use my supply of Bell brass (also obtained when Rem was not available) only for reduced practice loads. I much appreciated Mike's advice on loading for th 416 when I was preparing for my last safari (in Zambia)--I used his NF 370 soft point to take a very nice buff with a huge boss.

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This is what my BeLL brass did just a few months ago in some very mild, five year old .458 Lott handloads:

Outside of cases:



Sectioned case:



Not good, to say the least!

What do you think caused that? Lack of annealing; improper alloy? Interesting that the splits are all parallel to the long axis and into the belt. What say you, AR experts?

tiggertate, I was baffled by this, so I asked for opinions. See this thread:

Weird Case Splitting in .458 Lott

Hard to figure exactly why this happened without some kind of metallurgical analysis, but some folks had some interesting theories.

I'm clueless but if I had to guess I would think it was the result of some sort of corrosion cell in the brass that pitted it deeply enough in each area to split under pressure. The contamination could have been in the alloy itself during it's production or sometime between manufacture of the case and the final loading by you.

I would guess that only because they split in what should be the strongest part of the case and they are from a batch that didn't split like this five years ago.

I've read about brass becoming bittle with age, especially reloaded brass but it always seems to manifest this in split necks, not webs. But I have seen one other incident of this type of failure in the web years ago. If I recall it was a lot of old surplus military ammo.

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