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QUALITY CARTRIDGE BRASS 40-60W UNPRIMED 20/BAG
Read 1 Reviews - Average Rating: 4 stars
hard to find cases, needed mods to work
By Martin R.
on Jan 15, 2024
I was very happy to find this brass, in fact it was easier to find the brass than to find the dies for this cartridge. I build this cartridge for use in a Winchester Model 1885 Single Shot rifle. My approach to reloading old obsolete rounds, is to make sure the brass will go into the chamber and come back out again, prior to adding any components. These had to be full-length sized to do so, but also I discovered that the brass's rims were too thick for the groove area around the rifle's breech of the chamber. This is a headspace issue, the bolt could be closed by excessive force, and reopened with the same, but this is not right. To correct this, on a lathe, I made a mandrel and turned down the front surface of the case rim, that is, the surface facing forward in the gun. This was because, as you might expect, I did not want to mess up the nice headstamp and/or lessen the depth of the primer pocket. I have a number of pictures of the process of doing this turning, I had to do it on over 75 of these Qual Cart cases that I had bought from Grafs. I would be happy to share these pictures. At first I was shooting for a rim thickness of .055", whereas the rims started out around .065" to .070" thick. Later I decided (with testing) that .060" would work in the gun, but no thicker. To achieve this, each piece had to be measured and the amount needed to be removed noted (varied from .005" to .010"), then the cutter was used to locate the front surface of the rim, i.e. zero position, then the carriage was moved based on a dial indicator, the amount to be removed, then the cut was taken, then the case removed from the mandrel and remeasured. Fortunately I had access to a lathe to perform this modification. I think most people who would load this round, would be doing so for a lever action such as a model 1876 (for which this round was originally created) and I do not know anything about the possible headspacing (i.e. rim thickness, in a rimmed cartridge) for this model. Another comment would be, that in researching all this, I concluded that the proper name for this cartridge, and as marked on my 1885, is "40-60 Winchester" rather than 40-60 WCF as on the headstamp, so ideally the headstamp would read "40-60 Win" but this brass is rare so one can't be too picky about the headstamp I suppose. It is correctly designated in Grafs Rifle Brass section of the website.
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