Neck Turning, should you do it?

[Matt Anthony]

I just was given 700 cartridge cases from a friend who gave up on finding a load for his 22-250, 200 Norma and 500 Winchester cases. The Winchester cases are new never fired and 50 of the Norma were once fired. I decided to check out the Norma fired cases and see if I could find anything wrong. Well, looking at the necks, it looked like he turned them as there were marks in the shoulder and the necks were extremely dirty and rough looking. I cleaned them and you could see the tool marks in the necks, very poor job of truing the necks. The necks were cut all the way around, which if you don't have a match chamber or a tight neck chamber, this operation is useless. He would of been better served to simply set up the neck turning tool to just take off the high spots on the circumference, to make the neck thickness even. This allows the neck to expand in the chamber so as to seal the chamber. To my surprise, these cases were a perfect fit for my Remington VLS I had blueprinted with a tight neck chamber so they won't go to waste.
Just remember if you have a standard rifle chamber, you can take the high spots off of your necks which will give you better accuracy, but stay away from cutting too much material from the neck. Bullet tension will suffer and the brass won't last long due to the increase in expansion when fired. In other words, there just isn't enough meat there!
Matt

[joem]

I don't bother doing that as my rifles are all military, not match cut chambers.

[Matt Anthony]

With your firearms, a military match chamber would help with accuracy, but the intended use was to hit a target 3 ft. by 6 ft.! I believe 100% of all military arms will in fact do that! The only exception was the 7.7 Arisaka I had rebarreled to 22-250. Before conversion, I tried to get that rifle to shoot, and I played with it for years. I finally slugged the barrel, and at .318 it was apparent that the .314 cast bullets would never work. The barrel itself was pristine, inside and out, it was just the inner diameter that deep sixed the barrel.
Aside from that, years ago I learned if a rifle refused to shoot after a short time of load development, slug the barrel first, then look to the chamber and the crowning before a re-barrel. Re-chambering and making sure the bolt is in line with the chamber, the lugs hitting equally and the bolt is within the dimension it's suppose to be. Loose or sloppy bolts in the action is absolutely a NO-NO and will rob you of your time trying to make it shoot. These are the things that should be looked at first, even before you start your load development. Having a gunsmith who knows what to look for will save you hundreds of dollars in wasted ammo trying to make it shoot!
Matt