Pick up a double handful, shake it in your hands, and toss into storage bins. Why not just pour it in? Because that way you can’t listen. Each caliber of brass will have a distinct frequency of “clink” or “chirp” to it. A cracked case will have a different, higher-pitch chirp. When you hear that, split the double handful, one to each hand, and shake each separately. One will chirp higher than the other. (Unless, of course, there were two cracked cases, and you have one in each hand.) Dump the non-chirping handful into the storage bin. Divide the other handful and repeat. Do this until you have winnowed out the cracked case, toss it into the scrap bucket and continue.
Why do this? Because it is faster than visually inspecting each one as you go to load it.
What bins to use? I’ve found that plastic storage bins, commonly found at big-box stores, work just fine. The size meant to store shoes will hold a useful amount of brass (and loaded ammo, once it gets that far in the process). Bigger bins will hold more, but there gets to be a limit of how much brass you want to have in a bin. Once you get more than a handful of them, label the bins so you don’t have to pop each of them open to find out what is inside.
An afternoon spent sorting, cleaning, inspecting and storing brass can leave you with a couple of thousand empties in bins, ready to reload. A weekend, if you have that much brass, can have enough brass on the shelves to load for many months.
CARTRIDGE CLASSES
Not all cartridges are made the same. They differ almost as much as the people who load and shoot them. We can divide them into several classes and sub-divide them again.
High-pressure/Low-pressure
The first sort we have to make is between high-pressure cartridges and low-pressure cartridges. The top one in pressure today is the newest of the lot (big surprise there, eh?): the .327 Federal Magnum. It has a pressure ceiling of 45,000 psi, more than the .44 Magnum, .38 Super or the 9mm+P. Of course, helping it do so safely is its size. In any revolver, it is going to have very thick cylinder walls, and the small case head means less surface area for the case to thrust against the breech. Despite being a “mere” .32, the .327 can match the performance of a 9mm+P load. Definitely not your grandmother’s mild .32 pistol for home defense.
If properly loaded, the level of brass and media has an actual wave shape inside the tumbler.
At the other extreme is the .45 Colt, all 14,000 psi of it, less even than the .38 S&W. (Not to be confused with the .38 S&W Special, please.) That it operates at such a low pressure should come as no surprise, since it was designed at the very dawn of big-bore centerfire handgun cartridges. What is surprising to some is how much horsepower you can get out of it, if you’re willing to put up with the recoil. It is possible to get a 250 grain hard-cast bullet up to almost 1,000 fps, and still be well under the pressure limit.
In-between we have all manner of cartridges, with .38 Special and .38 Special+P at 17K and 20K psi respectively, but both just behind the lowly .380, at 21K. Curiously, there is a band, and a gap. The band is cartridges with pressures from 15K to 21K or so. Then, we have a very few in the gap between 21k and 35K.
The gap cartridges are the 25 ACP (which I do not cover in this book, it is just too much bother even for me to load), the .38 ACP and the Ruger-only loads of the .45 Colt.
Then, at 35K, we have a slew of cartridges that run from there to 37.5K, and finally, our big one, the .454 Casull at 50K.
Revolver/pistol
The obvious sort, revolver vs. pistol cartridges, is not as clear-cut as you’d think. The 9mm and .45 ACP, along with the .38 Super, have all been chambered in revolvers. And, the .38 Special and .357 Magnum have been chambered in pistols, the Special for Bullseye shooting, half a century ago, and the .357 In the Coonan, from the mid-1990s and again today. The .32 S&W Long is a special case, due to its having been for a long time the centerfire international competition cartridge. The bureaucrats who run the Olympics seem intent on getting gunpowder out of “sport” and they are pushing towards an all-airgun format. But for a long time, .32 wadcutter guns were the norm for international centerfire competition.
While some cartridges are more commonly seen with jacketed bullets only, they can all be loaded with lead bullets, so we really can’t sort them that way. We can, however, sort according to how accommodating they are to length and bullet shape.
A revolver can take a loaded round up to the length of the cylinder, and of any shape. We used to load 230 grain wadcutter bullets in .38 or .357 cases, for bowling pin shooting. (No, that is not a typo – 230 grains.) We loaded them as long as possible, using whatever crimp groove allowed the assembly to stay under cylinder length. Pistols, on the other hand, since they have to rudely shove the cartridge up a feed ramp of some kind, are a lot less forgiving of bullet shape and length. It has to be within a range (which can vary from pistol model to model) and the shape allowed depends on the pistol design and skill of your gunsmith. That many gunsmiths were able to get the 1911 to feed bullets that otherwise were thought un-feedable is a testament more to their skills than anything.
One temptation in the field of reloading is to make a cartridge do something it wasn’t intended to do. I still recall a reloading article of some 35 years ago, using 4756 to boost performance of the .38 Special. Now, the Special can be a softy, delivering average performance, but the intent was to make it a pocket magnum. Then, as now, my take is simple: you want a magnum, go get a magnum. Don’t try to grossly exceed the performance of a cartridge just because you can. You will end up paying for it, somehow, if only in decreased service life of your firearm.
Ease of reloading
There is one more division, and that is ease of reloading. Some cartridges are easier to reload than others. A pair of really easy ones to load are the .45 ACP and the .38 Special. The .45 is so short, the cases do not wobble much on your shell plate or shell holder. As a result, you can work your press pretty quickly, knowing the cases won’t catch on the edge of a die and crumple from the impact. The Special wobbles a bit, but not a lot, and both of them run at such low pressures that resizing is a dream.
On the other end, we have cartridges like the .32 Auto, which is so small just holding things is tough. Between placing teensy cases onto the shellplate or shell holder and perching tiny bullets on top of case mouths, the .32 is an effort. Another .32, the .327, is so long that wobble is in effect magnified as you lift the ram, and you have to have a smooth and steady hand to get speed loading it.
One that might not seem tough but can pose problems is the 9mm Parabellum. In the hottest loads, the case is so filled with powder that any untoward vibration spills some. The problem isn’t in lost
