Stix wrote:Im curious to know the order of "best to worst" in all the common brands of brass from factory ammo...from you guys who have experience...actually, from what you have experience with...
And maybe also little comments as to the "why's" that go with it...for example..."i dont like brand X because of huge inconsistincies/or split necks/or too hard...etc etc..
Win
R-P
Federal
ADI
Hornady
Norma
etc
etc
etc
I think it depends to some extent on the cartridges specifically, all cases are not the same throughout a range. They're not turned or machined, they're swaged from flat sheet. If you compared .308 brass from a dozen different manufacturers you could conceivably draw a valid conclusion on which is the best (according to your test criteria). If you compared a dozen different cartridges from a dozen different manufacturers I think you'd struggle to determine that one manufacturer makes the best brass regardless of cartridge.
I have very little brass from factory ammo that I bought, 50 Fed AE.44Mag and 100 S&B .38 Special - I was waiting on .44 brass and couldn't find any .38 brass at all at the time. My brother bought twenty rounds of Federal .243 but he has the brass, and I've been given quite a bit of various factory centrefire ammo that I haven't fired. I bought a few hundred Hornady cases in .204 from a fox shooter which I like, and I bought 450-odd "once-fired" .223Rem mixed, but some of it had been resized and some had been reprimed so I can't really consider it to be "once-fired", although it very likely was all factory ammo originally. I also have a lot of secondhand brass (I've bought or came with rifles) but I have no way of knowing if it was ever factory loaded or not.
I buy new brass whenever I see it on special (even when I don't have a firearm to use it yet) so I have a large variety of brass in many different chamberings - Norma, S&B, Winchester, Remington, Jagermann, Starline, ADI, OSA, Federal, PPU, and more, way too many to list. The only one that I really don't like is the Winchester stuff, but the once-fired Winchester seems to be good, so I think their new stuff leaves a lot to be desired in the annealing. Mil-spec chamberings are a pain due to the crimped primers, but that's cartridge specific rather than manufacturer - .223, .308 and 9mm are the main ones.
I know I bought new Norma brass in .204 and 8x57mm that has been fired, many, many times with no problems. I don't have any specific leanings, other than away from new Winchester, but I particularly like the Norma and Hornady stuff. But I don't like them two or three times as much as I like the cheaper stuff.