In the first part of this series, a competitive shooter cleaned his brass exactly once, near the end, mostly to get the lube off. This one cleans twice and treats it as the frame the rest of the prep sits inside.
He is another longtime handloader on our team, and he loads a wider spread of cartridges than most people will ever own dies for, from .17 Fireball up through standard rifle and straight-wall pistol. That range is what shaped the bench. He does not have one process. He has three.
- Deprime on a single stage press
- Wet tumble in a rotary cleaner with stainless pins, rinse and dry
- Anneal
- Lube and full-length size, decap pin out, expander ball repositioned
- Trim, and turn necks if the batch calls for it
- Ultrasonic clean to remove lube and shavings, rinse and dry
- Bag until loading day
Case Prep: Fired Bottleneck Brass
Deprime on a single stage press
Before anything else, spent primers come out on a single stage with a decapping die. One die covers a wide span of calibers, so this is a fast pass through the whole batch rather than a caliber-by-caliber setup.
It looks like an extra handling step. It is actually the step that makes the next one worth doing. A primer pocket with a spent primer still in it cannot be cleaned. Open it first and the cleaning that follows reaches inside.
Wet tumble with stainless pins, then rinse and dry
Cases go into a rotary case cleaner with water, solution and stainless steel pins. The pins get where dry media does not: down inside the case, into the neck, and into the primer pocket that step one just opened up.
What comes out is clean brass rather than polished brass, and the difference matters to him more than shine does. The cost is real, though. Wet cleaning means a rinse and a dry cycle, and drying time is the single largest block of waiting in this entire process.
Anneal, usually every time
Necks work-harden a little with every firing, and a harder neck holds a bullet differently than a soft one. Annealing on every cycle rather than every third or fourth means neck hardness stops being a variable he has to track across a batch.
He uses an induction annealer for this. Note where it sits in the order: after cleaning, before sizing. The brass goes into the die annealed and clean, which is the condition he wants every case to share.
Lube and full-length size, with the expander ball moved
Cases get lubed and full-length sized. The decap pin comes out of the die, since the primers already came out in step one, and the expander ball gets set low, sitting under the neck and shoulder junction rather than up in the neck.
That position is the whole point. With the ball set low, the case is still held by the die when the expanding happens, instead of being expanded on the way out with nothing supporting it. Some cases in a batch get neck sized instead of full-length sized, with the ball set the same way.
In Part 1 of this series, the expander ball came out of the die entirely and a separate mandrel set neck tension. Here the ball stays in and gets repositioned so it works while the case is still supported.
Both handloaders are solving the same problem: a conventional expander ball can pull a neck off-center on the way out. One removed the cause. The other changed the conditions. Neither is wrong, and the second costs nothing extra to try tonight.
Trim, on whichever trimmer fits the case
He runs two. A re-powered Trim Pro-2 and a MatchMaster Precision Case Trimmer. The MatchMaster does the bulk of the work, but the Trim Pro-2 stays on the bench because the MatchMaster will not handle .17 caliber or very short cases like the 22 Hornet and the 221 Fireball.
This is what a wide cartridge range does to a bench. If everything you load is .30 caliber, one trimmer is plenty. Load .17 Fireball and 218 Bee alongside it and you keep the old tool.
Depending on the rifle a batch is destined for, or if neck thickness varies badly across the lot, he will also turn the necks with a case neck turner at this point. Not every batch gets it.
Ultrasonic clean, then rinse and dry again
The second cleaning. Cases go into an ultrasonic cleaner with cleaning solution to take off the case lube and flush out the brass shavings that trimming and neck turning left behind.
Notice that the two cleanings are not redundant, because they are removing different things. The first took off what firing put on the brass. The second takes off what his own prep put on the brass. Skipping either one leaves something on a case that should not be there when it gets loaded.
Bag it until loading day
Finished cases go into resealable bags and stay there until he sits down to load. Nobody else in this series does this, and it is the step most worth copying.
Brass that took two cleanings to get right does not sit open on a bench collecting dust. Bagging also draws a hard line between prep and loading, which means both can be batched. Prep a few hundred cases on one evening, load them on another, and neither session is waiting on a dryer.
Loading Bottleneck Cases
Prime on a bench priming tool
Priming happens on a dedicated bench-mounted tool, specifically an APS bench priming tool, which feeds primers from a strip rather than a tray. Same reasoning as Part 1: a separate tool gives you feel, and feel is what tells you a pocket has gone loose.
Dispense powder, to a precision that depends on the cartridge
Charges come from a ChargeMaster or the MatchMaster dispenser depending on what he is loading. The interesting part is the standard he holds each cartridge to.
For his small rifle cases, the .17 Fireball, 221 Fireball, 22 Hornet, 22 K-Hornet and 218 Bee, charges get dispensed to 0.02 grain, because at those capacities a fraction of a tenth genuinely moves the result. For .222 and larger, 0.1 grain accuracy is all he asks for.
A tenth of a grain is the same tenth of a grain in every cartridge. What changes is what fraction of the charge it represents. In a case running a charge in the low teens, a tenth is close to one percent of the load. In a case running forty-plus grains, the same tenth is a rounding error.
Part 1 scaled charge precision to how far away the target was. This bench scales it to how much powder is in the case. Both are the same underlying instinct: spend the extra time only where it changes something.
Seat on a turret or the Summit
Bullets get seated on either a turret press or the Summit, using Gold Medal or MatchMaster seater dies.
Typically no crimp
For bottleneck rifle he generally does not crimp. Neck tension is doing the job of holding the bullet, and a crimp adds another operation that can vary case to case. Semi-autos, tube magazines and hard-recoiling loads are where that calculation changes.
Starting With New Brass
Brand-new bottleneck brass gets a much shorter routine, because most of what the full prep does has not become necessary yet.
Neck size with a raised expander ball
The opposite setting from the one he uses on fired brass. New cases have not been fireformed to a chamber, so there is far less to correct.
Trim with a 3-way cutter
A Trim Pro 3-Way Cutter trims, chamfers and deburrs in a single pass, which collapses three operations into one. Worth noting that the 3-way is not made for .17 and .20 caliber, so his smallest cases still get handled separately.
Or chamfer and deburr on a case prep center
If a 3-way cutter is not available for that caliber, chamfering and deburring happen on a Trim Mate case prep center instead. Same result, two operations rather than one.
Load
From the second firing onward, that batch joins the full case prep process above and stays on it for the rest of its life.
He does not consider bottleneck brass good until it has been fired once, and he would rather buy once-fired cases than new ones, provided they came out of a decent chamber.
The logic is that a new case has not yet been formed to anything. The first firing blows it out to match a chamber, and only after that does it have consistent dimensions to size from. It is a minority position and plenty of handloaders will disagree, which is exactly why it is in here.
Straight-Wall Pistol
The third track, run primarily on a Pro 2000 and occasionally a 4x4. What stands out is how much he deliberately does not do on the progressive.
Deprime on the single stage
Same decapping die, same reason as the rifle brass. Get the pockets open before anything gets cleaned.
Wet clean in the rotary with pins, rinse and dry
Identical to the rifle process. Pistol brass tends to be dirtier than rifle brass, and there is usually a great deal more of it.
Prime on the single stage
Also off the progressive.
Then load on the progressive, four operations only
Case mouth flare and expanding, powder drop, bullet seat, crimp. That is the whole job the progressive is asked to do, using pistol dies.
Depriming and priming were both pulled forward onto the single stage, which leaves the progressive doing four repeatable operations and nothing that benefits from feel. It is a real position on what progressives are for, and the opposite of the usual instinct to put every operation on the press that can hold one.
He also keeps a Green Machine and a Star press around and runs straight-wall pistol on them now and then, mostly to confirm they still work and have not seized up. Not a recommendation, just a thing that happens on a bench with decades of tooling on it.
What Is Worth Stealing Here
Deprime before you clean. This is the smallest change in the whole article and the one with the clearest payoff. A closed primer pocket cannot be cleaned by any method. Punching primers out first turns pocket cleaning into something that happens for free.
The two cleanings are doing different jobs. First one removes what firing deposited. Second one removes what prep deposited, meaning lube and shavings. Framed that way, cleaning twice stops sounding excessive and starts sounding like bookkeeping.
Match the standard to the cartridge, not to habit. Holding a 22 Hornet to 0.02 grain and a .308 to 0.1 is not inconsistency. It is the recognition that the same absolute error means very different things in cases of different capacity.
Bag your prepped brass. It protects work you have already paid for, and it lets you batch prep and loading as separate sessions instead of one long evening waiting on a dryer.
Decide what the progressive is for. Pulling depriming and priming off the press is a deliberate limit, not a compromise. The operations that reward feel go somewhere they can get it, and the press does the repetitive four.
See It Done on the Bench
Setup, adjustment and technique are easier to watch than to read. The RCBS channel walks through the presses, trimmers and dispensers in this article one tool at a time, plus new gear as it lands.
Gear in this process
- Rotary Case Cleaner — wet tumbling with stainless pins
- Ultrasonic Case Cleaner 2 — second cleaning, lube and shavings
- Ultrasonic/Rotary Case Cleaning Solution — used in both cleaners
- Rifle Dies — decapping, full-length and neck sizing
- Case Lube — sizing
- Trim Pro-2 Manual Case Trimmer Kit — .17 cal and short cases
- MatchMaster Precision Case Trimmer — everything else
- Trim Pro 3-Way Cutter — new brass, trim and chamfer and deburr in one pass
- Case Neck Turner — when neck thickness varies
- Brass Boss — current case prep station
- Bench Priming Tools — priming off the press
- Powder Dispensers & Scales — ChargeMaster family
- MatchMaster Powder Dispenser — the tight-tolerance charges
- Turret Presses — seating
- Summit Single Stage Reloading Press — seating
- MatchMaster Seater Die — seating
- Progressive Presses — straight-wall pistol
- Pistol Dies — flare, seat and crimp
This article describes one handloader's workflow, not load data. Whatever process you borrow from, start from published data for your cartridge, component combination and firearm, and work up carefully.
More How-To Guides
From case prep to crimping, the RCBS Reloading Hub has you covered at every step of the process.
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