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Sometimes thriftiness doesn't pay. As a dedicated "recycler" of abandoned brass, I pride myself on saving money and even making an effort to make it look nice in my reloads. However, I recently ran across some very pretty once fired brass on the range that made me pay in time and aggravation. Apparently all that glitters is NOT gold! The brass in question was factory fired and looked really nice, first in 9mm, where it had such small flash holes it bent the decapping pin AND ROD in my RCBS Universal Decap Die. RCBS replaced the complete rod with pin under warranty, and amazingly had the new one in my mailbox 4 days after my email request. (They are outstanding!)
So, today, I installed my new rod into my Decap die and started knocking some primers out of some .223 range brass. It was working great and then I noticed some particularly shiny brass that had a suspicious head stamp: 1K 21. It sounded familiar, being the head stamp on the 9mm brass that killed my previous decap pin and rod. So, recalling that years ago, I had encountered some IMG brass in .223 that also had small flash holes and RCBS had generously sent me some small Decap pins for my RCBS .223 Neck Sizing Die, I cleverly thought I would outsmart this 1K 21 .223 brass by using the small decapping pin neck sizing die to punch out the primers, and then full length size after liquid tumbling. Here is the result:
Yes, that is the small Decap pin stuck in the flash hole of the 1K 21 .223 case.
So I managed to avoid this:
But now will have to cut off the case to extract the captured decapping pin to recover my .223 shell holder.
The moral of the story is only attempt to process 1k 21 brass at your peril, if you are using RCBS equipment. Maybe a Lee universal decap die could handle this brass, but the 1K 21 beat my RCBS Rockchucker, Universal Decap Die, and small decapping pin neck sizer die team.
Sorry for the long rant, but hoping to help someone else going through a similar experience, and sorry I didn't get the brand name of the ammo that spawned Satan's brass.
So, today, I installed my new rod into my Decap die and started knocking some primers out of some .223 range brass. It was working great and then I noticed some particularly shiny brass that had a suspicious head stamp: 1K 21. It sounded familiar, being the head stamp on the 9mm brass that killed my previous decap pin and rod. So, recalling that years ago, I had encountered some IMG brass in .223 that also had small flash holes and RCBS had generously sent me some small Decap pins for my RCBS .223 Neck Sizing Die, I cleverly thought I would outsmart this 1K 21 .223 brass by using the small decapping pin neck sizing die to punch out the primers, and then full length size after liquid tumbling. Here is the result:
Yes, that is the small Decap pin stuck in the flash hole of the 1K 21 .223 case.
So I managed to avoid this:
But now will have to cut off the case to extract the captured decapping pin to recover my .223 shell holder.
The moral of the story is only attempt to process 1k 21 brass at your peril, if you are using RCBS equipment. Maybe a Lee universal decap die could handle this brass, but the 1K 21 beat my RCBS Rockchucker, Universal Decap Die, and small decapping pin neck sizer die team.
Sorry for the long rant, but hoping to help someone else going through a similar experience, and sorry I didn't get the brand name of the ammo that spawned Satan's brass.