Tip on Reloading Herter's .357 Magnum Brass

[frankski]

A few months ago I bought some Herter's .357 FMJ from Cabelas. I planned to shoot it and reload, repeat.

As an aside, the factory load shoots fine in the S&W 686+ 4" and 5" revolvers. In the Henry .357, a little sloppy.

Factoid: Herter's brand ammo is manufactured by other companies, in this case Sellier & Bellot in the Czech Republic.

When I deprimed, sized, reprimed (using Dillon 550b), I noticed maybe 1 out of 4 primers required more effort to seat, and some just jammed up. Looking more closely, I noticed the primer pocket has straight sides without the chamfer or rounding typical in most US brass. When being seated, primers and/or primer seating punch would occasionally catch on the sharp edge of the primer pocket and either shave a small piece of brass or jam. The small shaving would be left on the primer seating punch and either jam the next primer or leave a dent in it.

The fix was simple. I used a carbide reamer from my toolbox (meant for use in a drill) and simply gave each case a few twists by hand until the sharp leading edge of the brass was relieved. The amount of the chamfer is hardly visible without reading glasses, but it made the rest of the brass seat easily with no more jams or shaving.

All of the reloaded brass worked fine, as noted in an earlier post re: loading .357 for Leverguns.

[762xIan]

S&B primer pockets can be as bad as ones with military crimps.

Overall very good brass, but I used my primer pocket tools on them to get them squared away.